A Travel Guide to Homer

On the Trail of Odysseus Through Turkey and the Mediterranean

John Freely

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781780761978
• eBook ISBN: 9780857734945
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism

In October 1945 at the age of 19, John Freely passed the southernmost tip of Crete on his way home from the war in China, just as Odysseus did on his homeward voyage from the battle of Troy. He has been bewitched by Homer and the lands of Homer's epics ever since. As the culmination of a life spent exploring both these lands and the stories by, and connected to, Homer, Freely has created a captivating traveller's guide to Homer's lost world and to his epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, investigating where such places as the Land of the Lotus Eaters are and what it was about the landscapes of Greece and Turkey that so inspired Homer - the greatest classical epic poet. With unparalleled knowledge and passion, John Freely guides the traveller through all of those places linked to Homer that can be identified and brings Homer and his world vividly to life, revealing how the Homeric epics continue to echo through the ages in literature, art, legend and folklore.

1

The Homeric World

Greek literature begins with Homer’s two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, whose enormous literary influence still endures today, nearly 3,000 years after they were composed.

The Iliad is set in the plain of Troy, a great fortress city on the Asian side of the Dardanelles (Hellespont) near its Aegean end. The Dardanelles, together with the Sea of Marmara (Propontis) and the Bosphorus, forms the historic strait between the Aegean and the Black Sea (Pontus) that separates Europe and Asia in what is now north-western Turkey. The European side of the strait has since antiquity been called Thrace. The other side is known in Turkish as Anatolia, which in times past was generally called Asia Minor. The word ‘anatolia’ means ‘east’ in Greek, more literally ‘the land of sunrise’. The name ‘Asia’ may have had the same meaning as this in both the Indo-European and Semitic families of languages, while ‘Europe’ may have meant ‘sunset’ or the ‘land of darkness’. The distinction would have been evident to the first Greek mariners making their way through the Hellespont from the Aegean, with Asia to the East and Europe to the West, the waters of the strait clearly dividing the ‘land of sunrise’ from the ‘land of darkness’.

The background of the story told in the Iliad can be summarized thus: Paris, also called Alexandros, son of King Priam of Troy, is a guest of the Greek warlord Menelaus at Sparta. Paris seduces Helen, wife of Menelaus, who returns with him to Troy. Menelaus appeals for help to his brother Agamemnon, King of Mycenae in the Argolid, who calls on warlords throughout the Greek world to join him in an expedition against Troy, their fleet assembling at Aulis in Boeotia before making their way to the Hellespont. The Greeks attack Troy but are unable to take it and put the city under siege, sacking several places in the Troad, the huge peninsula south of the Hellespont.

The Iliad begins during the final year of the siege, which lasted for ten years, going on to describe a period of fifty-two days, ending before the capture and sack of Troy by the Greeks. The story of the actual capture of the city and its aftermath is told partly in episodes of the Odyssey, and partly in the latter poems of the post-Homeric Epic Cycle, the first of which tell of what happened before the beginning of the Iliad.

The Greeks after Homer’s time considered the Trojan War to be one of the early episodes in the history of the Hellenes, as they called themselves thenceforth, referring to their country as Hellas. (The word ‘Greek’ comes from the Roman ‘Graeci’, stemming from a tribe in Epirus.) It was the opinion of Thucydides that the Greeks first acted together as a people in the Trojan War. As he writes in Book I of his History of the Peloponnesian War:

We have no record of any action taken by Hellas as a whole before the Trojan War. Indeed my view is that at this time the whole country was not even called ‘Hellas’ … it took a long time before the name ousted all the other names. The best evidence for this can be found in Homer, who, though he was born much later than the time of the Trojan War, nowhere uses the name ‘Hellenic’ for the whole force. Instead he keeps this name for the followers of Achilles who came from Phthi...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Note from the Author
• Maps and Plans
• 1 The Homeric World
• 2 The Catalogues of Ships and Trojans
• 3 The Anger of Achilles
• 4 Mixed Multitudes and the Great Migration
• 5 Troy After the Fall
• 6 The Rediscovery of Ancient Troy
• 7 Troy and the Troad
• 8 The Heroes Return
• 9 Leaving Calypso’s Isle
• 10 Across the Wine-dark Aegean
• 11 A World of Wonders
• 12 The Witch’s Palace
• 13 Dialogue with Death
• 14 Siren Land
• 15 Return to Ithaca
• 16 Revenge and Reunion
• 17 The Odyssey Continues
• Source Notes
• Bibliography
• Illustrations (Plate Section)