Classics

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Narratives about Ithaca from antiquity and post-antiquity offer various representations of the island. Homer's Odyssey,
besides recounting Odysseus's return to Ithaca, provides an ambiguous
ethnography of lthaca. Although the epic celebrates the hero's defeat of
Penelope's suitors, it hints that the island's economic and political power
in its region is less than expected. Other ancient tales about Odysseus
depict Ithaca as vulnerable, and some legends seemingly co-opt the hero
by narrating his departure from Ithaca forever. Modern visitors to Ithaca,
encouraged by imperialist or Orientalist ideology, portray Ithaca as failing
to measure up to the Homeric Ithaca of their classical education. The
Odyssey thus not only expresses anxiety about the status of Ithaca in
antiquity but itself becomes a contested object of cultural ownership in
the modern world.

My argument is that the Homeric story of Odysseus’ wanderings at sea, the apologos of Odysseus, is traditional. The Odyssey’s account would naturally vary in scale, arrangement, and complexity from preceding and/or contemporaneous versions. But we should assume what ancient audiences would expect, that the basic material in the Homeric wanderings is traditional. Homerists have resisted this view. There are multiple theories that claim radical Homeric invention for the apologos, whether by plagiarism (e. g., of Argonautic myth), inversion (fantastic for real-world travel), or collection (of folktales or sailors’ yarns). The poetics of the apologos may be distinctive, but it is hard to believe that it filled
an empty slot with random material. I would side with Italo Calvino’s judgment that the journey of Odysseus was ‘the most archaic stratum’ of the epic.

This paper explores the epics Odyssey and Telegony from the perspective of spatial theory. The polarity of land and sea is of great significance in Odyssean narratives. The Odyssey features its hero’s account of his wanderings at sea, striving to return to Ithaca, an island in the sea. The Homeric poem indicates that Ithaca has various politico-economic connections to the mainland, and some of Odysseus’
lying tales feature Thesprotia on the mainland. Tiresias imposes a geographically obscure “inland” journey on Odysseus, and his prediction of death “from the sea” for Odysseus centers on the spatial binary of land / sea. In the Telegony the hero journeys to both Elis and Thesprotia, before returning to Ithaca, where death arrives “from the sea”. Afterwards his corpse is removed to Circe’s island, which in the Odyssey is far out in the sea, though Aeaea may in the Telegony already be localized at the cape Monte Circeo in Italy.

The topic is the burial of the corpse of Odysseus at Aeaea in the Telegony. I argue that in the Cyclic epic the corpse is buried at an Aeaea localized in Italy. The prophecy of Tiresias in Odyssey 11 may allude to some version of the Telegonus story, but the Home-ric epic largely discounts such epichoric legends about Odysseus. Correspondences and differences between the Odyssey and the Telegony result from independent self-positioning within traditional Odyssean myth.