Was Homer’s Ithaca an Island? – Antigone

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An open forum for Classics

Antigone

– An Open Forum for Classics

James Diggle and John Underhill

I: INTRODUCTION

James Diggle

It is now more than twenty years since Robert Bittlestone put to us his hypothesis about the location of Homer’s Ithaca, the homeland of Odysseus. Robert realised that Ithaca cannot be the modern island of Ithaki, as most people have supposed. He argued the case in the book entitled Odysseus Unbound, which he wrote with our help.

Odysseus Unbound: The Search for Homer’s Ithaca (Cambridge UP, 2005).

The theory set out in the book was well received: "There seems to be no doubt at all that Paliki was once a separate island from the rest of Kefalonia" (Mary Beard); "Bittlestone’s theory is fundamentally simple… and it is almost certainly correct" (Peter Green); "This book is a gem… Reading the Odyssey is unlikely ever to be the same again" (Gregory Nagy).

Let us begin with Odysseus’ own description of Ithaca:

ναιετάω δ᾽ Ἰθάκην εὐδείελον· ἐν δ᾽ ὄρος αὐτῆι

Νήριτον εἰνοσίφυλλον, ἀριπρεπές· ἀμφὶ δὲ νῆσοι

πολλαὶ ναιετάουσι μάλα σχεδὸν ἀλλήληισιν,

Δουλίχιόν τε Σάμη τε καὶ ὑλήεσσα Ζάκυνθος·

αὐτὴ δὲ χθαμάλη πανυπερτάτη εἰν ἁλὶ κεῖται

πρὸς ζόφον, αἳ δέ τ᾽ ἄνευθε πρὸς ἠῶ τ᾽ ἠέλιόν τε.

Od. 9.21–6[1]For discussion of some of the linguistic details in this passage see Odysseus Unbound, 520.

Odysseus is describing Ithaca to Alcinous, the ruler of Scherie, the island of the Phaeacians, which is usually assumed to be the modern Corfu. I shall give this, and the other passages which I shall quote, in the translation which I gave in the book:

Bright Ithaca is my home: it has a mountain,

Leaf-quivering Neriton, far visible.

Around are many islands, close to each other,

Doulichion and Same and wooded Zacynthos.

Ithaca itself lies low, furthest to sea

Towards dusk; the rest, apart, face dawn and sun.

Odysseus weeping at the court of Alcinous, Francesco Hayez, 1814–16 (National Museum of Capodimonte, Naples, Italy).

This description gives us three important pieces of information, three clues to the location of Ithaca. First, it associates Ithaca with three islands, Doulichion and Same and Zacynthos. Second, it tells us that Ithaca lies to the west of these islands. Third, it tells us that Ithaca is low-lying, in other words that it is not mountainous.

The Ionian islands today.

Can we identify any of these islands? Zacynthos is easy. Everyone accepts that Homer’s Zacynthos is the same as the island that has that name today, the island that lies south of Cephalonia. What about Same or, as Homer sometimes calls it, Samos? Scholars in antiquity identified Same/Samos with the island of Cephalonia, on which there is today, and has been since early times, a town called Sami. This leaves us with two islands still to locate, Doulichion and Ithaca. But we appear to have only one island left. If Ithaki is Ithaca, then where is Doulichion?

What of the other two clues? Is Ithaki furthest west of these islands? No, it is furthest east. Is it low-lying? No, it is mountainous, with cliffs plunging sheer into the sea.

Mountainous Ithaki.

Robert Bittlestone came up with a brilliant solution to this dilemma. He suggested that Ithaca is the western peninsula of Cephalonia, which is today called Paliki after its ancient capital city Paleis. In doing so, he was reawakening (as he later discovered) a theory first proposed by a local historian Gerasimos Volterras in 1903.[2]See Odysseus Unbound,77–8, 552.

View looking south west towards Lixouri over low-lying Paliki.

Paliki is the westernmost part of this group of islands. And it is low-lying, in relation to both Ithaki and even more to its immediate neighbour Cephalonia. On Cephalonia, Mount Ainos rises to a height of 1,640 metres. The highest ground on Paliki rises to no more than 517 metres. So, if we identify Ithaca with Paliki, this frees the island of Ithaki to be identified with Doulichion. It may seem arbitrary or cavalier to switch the names. But there is plenty of evidence that Ithaki was once called Doulichion.[3]The evidence that the island now called Ithaki continued to have the alternative name Doulichion (or Doulichia) until quite recent times is presented in Odysseus Unbound, Chapter 21. See further n.12 below.

Detail from a map of the Ionian islands by Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, 1768. Ithaca is labelled as "forte et Dulichium" ("perhaps also Dulichium").

Appealing as this solution was, there appeared to be one obstacle standing in its way. Paliki is not an island: it is a peninsula that is connected to the main body of Cephalonia by a narrow land bridge, 6km long and 2km wide, centred on the Thinia Valley.

Robert devised a way of removing this obstacle. He read an account of the landscape of Cephalonia by the Greek geographer Strabo, who, around the beginning of the 1st century AD, wrote a very long work covering the geography of the whole of the then known...