Roman floor mosaic at Villa Romana del Casale in Piazza Armerina, Sicily depicting the cyclops Polyphemus, Odysseus and his companions.
Well, people are apparently talking a lot about the Odyssey right now, so I can only presume there’s a large-scale live reading going on somewhere. The poem which, if you’ve not heard it sung, is about returning home from a long work trip only to find a ridiculous number of houseguests overstaying, even though your other half has put on a dressing gown, turned the downstairs lights off while making ostentatious yawns and arm stretches and lifted the needle firmly off the record player. Tiredness means that 'Grown Up Words' ensue.
Approximately.
Redrawing (after Piet de Jong) of the Lyre Player Fresco from the Palace of Nestor at Pylos.
But how can you (checks notes) *replicate* the experience? Probably best not to: the road is full of unexpected diversions and delays, the vessel definitely isn’t as comfortable as one of our traditional handcrafted Mediterranean gulets, and the dining-on-raw-mutton-in-a-sealed-cave experience, while definitely local, which we like, really doesn’t meet our standards in terms of food preparation or wine pairing. It’s one of our firmest promises to guests on our archaeological tours that you won’t have to whirl and fire-hone a large wooden stake to deal with an aggressive waiter giving you the unpleasant one centre-eye. As for the other misadventures, we promise no Lotus Eaters, though you may enjoy the food so much you manage to forget the rest of the world for a bit.
So how can we help a traveller 'Odyssey' these days? Well, in the general sense, every one of our trips is an odyssey: a journey into parts of the ancient world full of wonder, some of which you never knew existed. Naturally, you’ll have tales to tell about extraordinary things seen, places that felt magical and things that were eaten, and unlike Odysseus, you won’t have to embellish anything or be turned into a pig on the way.
The Mask of Agamemnon, an ancient Mycenaean gold funeral mask, in the Athens Archaeological Museum.
The other way is to look among the legacy of archaeological marvels for things that evoke the world of Homer – his own world - in which the stories were set. Most of the details about Homer, whether there was even a person of the name or several, and their dates and origins are up for debate, so we can take a fairly broad period for that, especially when we count the influence. As for the 'where', well his dialect is mixed, but there’s a bias towards eastern Greek there. So, you could begin with the world of Ionia in Turkey and the Cyclades or Dodecanese islands in Greece. And for all of them, there’s a gulet trip to take you over the wine-faced sea. You might make your way along the coast of Asia Minor through the great cities of Ionia like Miletus, whose colonising ventures into distant regions surely form a major foundation of the Homeric myth. Or you could thread your way through the islands, some with beautiful harbour towns not dissimilar to those of the Greek Bronze Age or Archaic period that wouldn’t seem too strange to Homer, or to empty coves and bays empty of people and far from civilisation, the sort of Place where an Ithacan adventurer’s crew might have seen fit to forage in and find what was around…
A detailed cross-section model and mural of the ancient Bronze Age Uluburun shipwreck at the Museum of Underwater Archaeology in Bodrum. By Dosseman - Own work, commons.wikimedia.org
Again, it’s important to remember that Homer’s dates and background are still up for debate, but if you want a world that you can with some legitimacy call a bit more ‘Homeric’, let us take you to the Bronze Age and to the formative Greece of the Iron age through to the Archaic periods. At Bodrum’s superb nautical archaeology museum, itself near the site of a Wonder of the Ancient World, you’ll find shipwrecks from the Bronze Age world, most famously those from Uluburun dated around 1325BC and Cape Gelidonya ca 1200BC, filled with eclectic cargoes marking the great ‘international age’ of the Late Bronze through masses of widely traded ‘oxhide’ ingots along with vases of Mycenaean and Canaanite origins, and some of the higher status fine objects that Homer tends to provide lingering descriptions of as they are passed between great chiefs or remembered as booty taken in some heroic raid.
The prehistoric archaeological site of Akrotiri on Santorini.
On Santorini, you’ll find the superbly preserved site of Akrotiri with two storey houses and evocative wall paintings, held there and in Athens’ National Museum (which we also visit) which are so often used to illustrate the Homeric world, most perfectly the flotilla fresco showing an island scene in almost psychedelic style, filled with animals to be hunted and a harbour town of the kind you may well see tomorrow. As for the ships plying and rowed as if in some great regatta in the foreground, well you’d be forgiven for seeing them as a backdrop painting in some palace of a Homeric chieftain. Pass through the Cyclades and see the colossal kouros-statues on Naxos, loftily standing in museums or half-quarried and abandoned and, either way, you can take away a metaphor for a hero’s pursuit of glory.
The ancient, unfinished stone statue known as the Kouros of Flerio, on Naxos.
We can’t speak of the Bronze Age heroic world without thinking of the Mycenaeans and Minoans, their palaces and the wonders of their art. We can take in the palaces and sites assigned in legend to Odysseus’ fellow kings, from Tiryns - where, in fact, the cyclopses make an appearance in building walls so huge and massy that they give us the term ‘cyclopean’ and Mycenae, where the Lion Gate, shaft graves and Treasury of Atreus (their marvellous contents like the ‘Mask of Agamemnon’ now in Athens) easily give the impression of a place ruled by heroic warrior kings, through to the Sparta of Menelaus and Helen and finally, and very much directly, to the Odyssean world at Pylos.
The ancient Cyclopean stone walls of Tiryns, looking out toward a surrounding valley.
Here, of course, Telemachus sought the aid of old Nestor in a palace where, in poem and archaeology, the god Poseidon is not far off. When you reach the ‘throne room’, surrounded by spaces we know to have been brightly painted, filled with richly made objects and lit by shafts of sun through lightwells, we can imagine ourselves both in Homeric Pylos and Homeric Phaecia, where a throng might wait for a grand performance and the return of a herald
… leading their skilful bard, whom the Muse loved more than other men, though she gave him both good and evil: she robbed him of his sight, but gifted him the power of sweet song. Pontonous, the herald, placed a silver-embossed chair in the midst of them all, with its back against a high pillar, and hung the ringing lyre on a peg above his head, and showed him how to find it with his hands. And he set a handsome table by his side, with a basket of bread, and a cup of wine to drink if he was so minded. Then they all stretched out their hands to the fine feast spread before them.
There are some places you feel you can touch the poem, and this is one of them.
The Ship of Odysseus and Scylla from the Sperlonga sculptures at the National Archaeological Museum of Sperlonga, Italy. By Cbergoffen - Own work, commons.wikimedia.org
And, to finish, we remember that the Odyssey is never one straight narrative: there are tales within tales, and the knowledge that these events will also be sung. As so often, Homer was right. The Odyssey is not over: it continues as long as it moves. You can see this with us in Sicily, the Trinacria of the poem, reached through the perilous strait past Scylla and Charybdis. Sicilians in the ancient world rarely forgot when they’d featured in one of the great tales, and so it is with the Odyssey.
The cyclops Polyphemus, with Odysseus and his companions preparing to blind the cyclops's closed eye, at the National Archaeological Museum of Sperlonga, Italy. By Carole Raddato commons.wikimedia.org
You’ll find the dread Polyphemus depicted more than once (and more than once with three eyes, but for that you’ll have to come and hear the story told by the great mosaic of him in the vast stone-carpeted halls of the late Roman villa at Piazza Armerina. Likewise, you’ll find Scylla immortalised in refined arts, most perfectly in the so-called Eupolemos Treasure from Morgantina, dating to the third century BC. The Treasure as a whole never fails to produce gasps; it’s truly one of the most remarkable collections of masterworks from the ancient world you’ll ever see.
Centrepiece of a 'Medallion' bowl showing Scylla raising a stone to cast into the sea, her body bound by a scaly sea monster and three baying dogs. Museo Archeologico Regionale, Aidone, Sicily. By Folegandros - Own work, commons.wikimedia.org
Among the pieces were three ‘medallion bowls’ in silver and gold. One of these, now with only the medallion from the centre remaining, shows golden-haired Scylla wrought by the finest hands raising up a great stone to cast into the sea, her body bound by a scaly sea monster and her seaweed skirts flaring up to let loose three baying dogs to sink their teeth into unfortunate fish. As the icing on this particular cake, one has to remember it’s a wine bowl and that Scylla comes paired with the whirlpool Charybdis and the dangerous straits of Messina they represent. To reach the image of Scylla, you had to swirl the wine, whirlpool style and drain one danger away to find another. It’s an absolutely lovely thing, and a grand imagining of the Odyssean tales.
We invite you to come and see it in person and like the original owner recall a trip to see the extraordinary (though a rather nicer extraordinary, and with us as an Athena to speed you on your way smoothly!) and the amazing with a smile.
You can visit many of the sites of The Odyssey on our Tours in Greece and Sicily.
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