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Engineers to help find Homer's IthacaDid you know that we don't knower where Odysseus' homeland actually is? Read on:
A geological engineering company said Monday it has agreed to help in an archaeological project to find the island of Ithaca, homeland of Homer's legendary hero Odysseus. It has long been thought that the island of Ithaki in the Ionian Sea was the island Homer used as a setting for the epic poem "The Odyssey," in which the king Odysseus makes a perilous 10-year journey home from the Trojan War.
It's interesting what is being done here. However, do you think that this will provide any real benefit to the world or to learning, or is it more just to solve a mystery that we don't currently have an answer for?
This reminds me of MV's post on AI-Jane about a Baltic Homer. There appears to be a growing fascination with revising Greek history and even removing it from the Peloponnese entirely! I don't know why people want to mess around with history, but they do and all they are good for is confusing folks. 😛
I just finished reading the Odyssey and was wondering why so many go after this story as truth (or at least partially) It was obviously mythical.
Well actually there's some fact inside all that fiction. There is evidence that a city once existed where Troy was supposed to be; many of the cities from the Iliad and Odyssey are real; and perhaps at least some of the events of the stories were based on real events. I think the mystery lies in finding out what is true and what is not.
You have to remember that Homer wrote the Iliad and Odyssey at least 400 years after the events occurred. Troy was already a distant legend in Homer's day and his epic poems were the recitations of oral tradition. Homer retold a story for us and put it in rhyme so that it could be preserved for posterity. Remember Homer was blind and could not possibly have described the things he mentioned from personal experience. He was a minstrel who sang the poems that most already knew in some form or another. Homer and Hesiod provide us with most of the core of Greek mythology, but there were other contributors as well such as Aesop, Euripides, Sophocles, and Aristophanes.
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