Traveling to Ithaca

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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. HOMER'S ITHACA Tennyson's "Ulysses" 2 (1842) indicates Ithaca's potential for ambiguity by conflating the mythological and modern Ithaca. As the Greek hero prepares to leave home on a final voyage, he deems the inhabitants of Ithaca "a savage race" and patronizingly praises his son's efforts to "[s]ubdue them to the useful and the good". Ithaca was a protectorate of Britain at the time of the poem's composition, and Ulysses's words anachronistically portray the homeland of the ancient hero as a peripheral outpost of British hegemony. 3 Distinguishing adventure from imperialism, Tennyson's Ulysses fancies himself an explorer of the "untravell'd world", not a bureaucratic administrator of a ruled world. Instead of wearying of adventure, the Odyssey's hero longs to return to the home he rules. To him Ithaca symbolizes a centripetal goal of civilization not encountered in the far-flung lands that he visits. 4 As the hero wanders centrifugally through unknown seas, his fleet provides him with a cocoon of Hellenic culture. 5 In the hero's telling (Books 9-12 ), his hosts and antagonists lack the characteristics of Greek culture, and therefore human nature. 6 As postcolonial studies have shown, this dichotomy of 144 Jonathan S. Burgess Greek civilization and non-Greek barbarity reflects Greek colonization of the western Mediterranean at the time of the epic's composition. 7 Though mystified by a mythological narrative, colonial discourse is most apparent in Odysseus's description of "Goat Island" lying off the land of the Cyclopes, where he imagines the development of its natural resources through "colonial eyes". 8 Though the Odyssey narrates Odysseus's reclamation of wife and rule, there are apparent fissures in the epic's ideology of rule, property, and matrimony. The home to which the hero returns turns out to be ambiguously defined in time and space. Ithaca is not the Ithaca that Odysseus left twenty years earlier. His son and wife believe he is dead, and the suitors of Penelope naturally expect her to remarry. Although Athena supports their slaughter, she has difficulty in explaining its ethical validity. The consequence is the destruction of a whole generation - this after Odyssey has lost a previous generation under his command at sea. The surviving relatives of the suitors rise up in revolt, and only the intervention of Zeus and Athena prevents further bloodshed. By employing violence to restore an idealized Ithaca of the past, Odysseus essentially acts like an invader or colonist of his own homeland. 9 The hero's temporal impropriety is also spatially inappropriate. The majority of the destroyed fleet and slaughtered suitors come from the region surrounding Ithaca. Only 12 out of 108 suitors are from Ithaca; the rest are members of the ruling class in other islands of the region. 10 Though many readers have the impression that rule over Ithaca is at issue in the Odyssey, the political consequences of potential remarriage for Penelope are unclear. When a suitor openly wishes that Telemachus not become a ruler on Ithaca, Telemachus concedes that there are other "kings" inhabiting the island, though affirming his desire to keep at least his father's home and slaves. 11 At one point Penelope announces she will move into the house of her new husband, who apparently would not possess Odysseus's palace or become king of Ithaca. 12 Control over Ithaca may not have been that important, on the evidence of the Iliad's "catalogue of ships" .13 For the region of the Ionian Islands a certain Meges commands forty ships, from the island Dulichion (of uncertain location) and the Echinades (small islands near the mainland), while Odysseus commands just 12 ships, from Ithaca, Zakynthos, Samos, and an area on the mainland. 14 The passage indicates that Odysseus manages little military power though he has a leadership role over some territory outside of Ithaca. Even this extent of hegemony dissolves during his absence, for Ithaca is prey to unwanted suitors from throughout the region. The lack of historical evidence for prehistory analogous to the heroic age or for Homer's time prevents us from gauging the reality underlying the Odyssey. 15 The Homeric poem seems to provide an external, mythologized perspective on uncertain and shifting power relations in the area. Traveling to Ithaca 145 OTHER ANCIENT PERSPECTIVES ON ITHACA Questions about the stability of Ithaca are also raised in other ancient stories about Odysseus. 16 The Telegony of the Epic Cycle, which like Tennyson's "Ulysses" portrays Odysseus traveling after his return, is a prominent example.17 Although the actual poem is lost, an ancient summary tells us that after the slaughter of the suitors Odysseus undertakes two journeys to the mainland. 18 In Thesprotia Odysseus settles for a time, marrying the queen, fathering a child, and leading the Thesprotians in battle. After Odysseus returns to Ithaca, his son by Circe sails to Ithaca and unwittingly kills his own father. 19 The poem ends with Telegonus taking Penelope and Telemachus to Circe's island, where Telegonus marries Penelope and Telemachus, Circe. This remarkable story certainly challenges the normative ideology of the Odyssey, where wife, property, and rule are seemingly recovered with finality. The wife long sought in the Odyssey is here replaced by another wife. The home that Odysseus struggled so hard to recover is abandoned; Penelope and Telemachus are removed from the island, leaving the mortal realm. Before slaying Odysseus, Telegonus intrusively plunders the economic resources of Ithaca. In addition, the sudden arrival of the bastard son Telegonus and the removal of the legitimate son Telemachus disrupt the patriarchal lineage of Ithaca's ruling family. Other tales of Odysseus's post-return adventures portray an Ithaca that was subject to other powers in the region. For example, Apollodorus reports a story in which Odysseus is forced into exile after the slaughter of the suitors, the majority of whom are not Ithacan, as noted above. The judicial decision is made by Neoptolemus, a king of northwest Greece who wants to get Odysseus out of the way so that he can gain wider control over the region. 20 As in the Telegony, Odysseus travels to the mainland, where he starts up a new life with a new wife- and never returns to Ithaca. The rejection of a lasting return and rule by Odysseus in such non-Homeric stories seems shocking to us, but Homer's ambivalence about Ithaca's power may reflect them. Besieged by the suitors, invaded by Telegonus, abandoned by its royal family, or prey to hegemonic plotting, Ithaca suffers in Homer and in other tales about Odysseus. The Odyssey and Telegony are poetic reflections of real Ithaca's general interconnectivity with other islands and the mainland. 21 The two epics variously depict potential for alliances and conflicts in the region, with Ithaca's role smaller than its Odyssean status might suggest. Throughout history the island would remain on the periphery of more important power centers, east and west. In time, the area came under the control of Romans, Byzantine Greeks, Turks, Normans, Venetians, Russians, the French, and the British, before joining the modern Greek state in the mid-nineteenth century. The island's cultural continuity as well as political and economic strength was often challenged; at one point in the early modern period the island was depopulated. 146 Jonathan S. Burgess MODERN ITHACA Modern visitors to Ithaca, whether foreign officials or amateur classicists, provide ethnographical portraits of the island. 22 Ithaca's economy is often documented with a recurring concern over its apparent decline. It is generally agreed that modern Ithaca engages in agriculture, pastoralism, fishing, and some exportation of goods. But visitors frequently note the drastic reduction of natural resources, either by over-exploitation (timber) or neglect (agriculture). 23 In the early fifteenth century, Cristofaro Buondelmonti simply described the island as rough and useless. 24 Surveying Ithaca's modern history, the French general Guillaume de Vaudoncourt laments Venetian and Ottoman monopoly or the repression of the economy of the Ionian Islands. Ithaca in his day is "not deemed fertile" .25 In the numerous accounts written during British possession of the Ionian Islands, the weakness of Ithaca's economy is attributed to the monoculture of currants for export and the lure of jobs on foreign ships. Such were the concerns of William Gell, the antiquarian and illustrator who visited Ithaca at the beginning of the nineteenth century. 26 Shortly afterward the travel writer Henry Holland noted the limitations of the island for agriculture: "the general aspect must be confessed to be one of ruggedness and asperity, warranting the expression of Cicero, that Ulysses loved his country, 'non quia larga, sed quia sua'" ("not because it is large, but because it is his 27 . are some remar k s by Edward G1ffard . own ") . Even more negative who, passing by Ithaca in a boat, judges the island to be "the most barren spot 28 we ever beheld." Nevertheless, Holland confirms that currants were a successful export, along with small amounts of oil and wine. 29 Grain sufficed, he claims, to feed the inhabitants for only a quarter of the year; the rest was imported with the profits of exports. Not long afterward the German visitor Christian Muller claims that the lthacans, despite being "addicted" to the sea and thus distracted from cultivation of their own land, produced enough grain for their needs. But otherwise he saw only the cultivation of export goods such as currants wine, and oil; there was no livestock and little game. 30 Publishing in ｴｨｾ＠ same year, the British officer Tertius Kendrick states that the Ithacans import much grain though the fertility of the soil produced good olive oil, wine, and fruit. According to this source, the inhabitants gave equal attention to both marine and agricultural activity. 31 In a publication of 1835 the antiquarian and topographer William Leake observes good production of grain and wine, and also goats and oxen (but not pigs). 32 Around the time of British cession of the islands, the geologist David Ansted reports that agriculture still concentrated on export crops, with all necessities except oil imported. Fishing and sponge-diving remained profitable, however. 33 Inconsistencies between these accounts can be ascribed to incomplete or subjective observation, but on the whole they suggest the disadvantages of an island at the periphery of expansionist powers. Traveling to Ithaca 14 7 How do these modern reports compare with the Homeric portrayal of mythological Ithaca? Some passages in the Odyssey portray Ithaca as rich in resources. The disguised Odysseus flatteringly tells Penelope that under her rule Ithaca must be plentiful in grains, fruit, livestock, and fish. 34 Various other passages indicate that Ithaca is plentiful with its grain and vines, and Odysseus's father Laertes presides over a large and fertile orchard. If the island's terrain is too rough for horses, it is nonetheless good for livestock, and possesses all sorts of trees and watering places as well. 35 The swineherd Eumaeus, the cowman Philoetius, and the goatherd Melanthius preside over herds of livestock. Hints at economic and political interconnectivity between Ithaca, other islands, and the mainland also occasionally arise. The cowherd Philoetius brings livestock to Ithaca by boat and recalls that Odysseus had placed him in charge of cattle among "Kephallenians", apparently people outside of Ithaca. 36 The swineherd Eumaeus boasts that Odysseus possessed dozens of herds on the mainland, tended by foreigners as well as his own slaves, 37 and the lthacan Noemon keeps horses in Elison the mainland. 38 These passages are rare and vague, however, and wealth is associated with Odysseus in particular. Exaggeration of the island's economic potential is probably consequential to the featuring of a mythological king in the Odyssey's story. DEPICTIONS OF ITHACA'S PEOPLE As an epic about a monarch contending with rival aristocrats upon his return, the Odyssey does not have a lot to say about the inhabitants of Ithaca. 39 Modern travelers tend to overlook Ithaca's actual inhabitants, whether displaying an imperialist concern for the island's economic activity, as noted above, or an academic interest in Homeric locations on the island. 40 The German industrialist turned archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who excavated the prehistoric remains at mythological Troy and Mycenae, claimed that the lthacan landscape "breathes Homer", with the result that "[w]e are thus transplanted, by sudden leap over thirty centuries, to the most brilliant period of Greek chivalry and song, without any intermediate stage". 41 It is a testament to the popularity of this trope that Schliemann here plagiaristically mimics the comment made decades earlier by William Mure. 42 Inhabitants have often seemed invisible to visitors of modern Greece obsessed with antiquity. Christopher Wordsworth (nephew of the poet William) claimed that the desolation of modern Athens "leaves the . h Ant1qmty . . "43 spectator a 1one wit . When natives of Ithaca are remarked upon, it is as representatives not of a Homeric past but rather of an exotic or even (because of past Turkish domination) Oriental culture. 44 Travel writing about Greece typically expresses surprise and disgust at a perceived disconnect between the reality of its modern culture and a national image of its glorious past. Huxley remarks of travelers to Troy: "eager to compare their Homeric texts with Traveling to Ithaca 148 Jonathan S. Burgess the topography, [they] were confronted by scenes of squalor far removed from epic sublimity." 45 At Ithaca, Kendrick in 1822 scathingly denigrated the "almost Hottentot customs of the peasantry" .46 This deplorable attitude is reminiscent of similar remarks by Tennyson's Ulysses about the "rugged people" of Ithaca's "savage race". In this discourse, modern Greece is disassociated from an ancient heritage appropriated by Western culture to serve as the foundation of European civilization. 47 Educated visitors to Greece often evince an assumption of ownership of ancient Greek language and literature. One frequently finds comments concerning the difference of pronunciation between modern Greek and ancient Greek. 48 Holland describes Ithacan schoolchildren reciting aloud from the Greek New Testament thusly: "It was amusing to hear sounds familiar to the ear from the Greek of Homer and Thucydides, shouted out by ragged striplings" .49 The Irish traveler Edward Dodwell specifies how a Greek schoolmaster on the mainland across from the Ionian Islands failed to pronounce ancient Greek in accordance with modern scholarship, adding ironically that the teacher "treated with the utmost contempt my barbarous and prosodiacal manner of pronunciation" .50 Amusement as insidious discrimination is also apparent in an anecdote about Gladstone that has been deemed a "delicious comedy ... [that] was part and parcel of the Anglo-Hellenic encounter". 51 When the Lord High Commissioner Extraordinary of the Ionian Islands delivered a speech in the region composed in ancient Greek, an islander reportedly commented: "I do not know what it was all about, for you see I know no English." 52 Outsiders to Ionia have also been fond of claiming that modern Greeks are ignorant of Odysseus and/or Homer's Odyssey. Dodwell reports that an individual "presented to me as a ... most learned man" was not able to recite Homer upon request, for "he had never read the works of the poet, and did not understand the ancient language" .53 The antiquarian and topographer William Leake claims that " [e]very peasant is acquainted with the name of Odysseus, though few know much of his story, and probably not six persons in the island have ever read Homer" .54 Lawrence Durrell retails at length an anecdote about a Greek neighbor on the Ionian Island of Corfu who is astounded by an "extraordinary" story in a book that his son had brought back from school. When the father helps his son with his homework he "suddenly found himself reading the story of Ulysses for the first time". The Greek had heard of Homer but not of the hero. Stunned when Durrell lets on that he knows the tale, the native is delighted to hear that Odysseus had visited his own island. 55 Durrell styled himself a philhellene, but here he relishes his role as the authentic inheritor of the ancient past of Greece while mocking the perceived lack of modern Greek cultural knowledge. The author goes so far as to claim patronizingly that the Odyssey, though "a bore", well depicts the character of modern Greeks: "The loquacity, the shy cunning, the mendacity, the generosity, the cowardice and bravery, the almost comical inability of self-analysis." 56 Paradoxically, he conceives of the Odyssey as representative of modern Greek culture but not part of it. 149 Schliemann provides another striking example of the trope. Visiting a locale in Ithaca that he supposes to be the site of Laertes's farm, he takes out his copy of the Odyssey and begins to read the Homeric description of it. A crowd of local inhabitants gathers, and Schliemann proceeds to read out a couple hundred verses, "translating it word for word into their dialect". Schliemann delights in their enthusiastic response, believing that this is the first time they had heard "the melodious words ring out in the language of their forefathers of three thousand years ago". 57 Married to a Greek wife, Schliemann was keen to discover in the modern Greek world reflections of the greatness of Homer. But he assumes these Homeric reflections will be vestigial. In his account it is his mediating linguistic and performative services that are required to awaken a dim, apparently ethnically embedded, passion for Homer among modern lthacans. Such statements suggest unease among visitors to Ithaca about the inheritance of Homer's Odysseus by modern Greeks. Ithaca's vulnerability, especially under Venetian rule, may have made continuity of population and culture impossible, but by geography and language the modern inhabitants of Ithaca are rightful possessors of Homer's Ithaca. Yet European visitors have been anxious to employ various strategies to distance natives from this inheritance. One suspects that Ithacans down through the ages have actually been proud of Odysseus and the Odyssey. A countering ownership of Homer is well expressed by an anecdote about a monk of Ithacan origin who reportedly remarked, much to the pique of his interlocutor Lord Charlemont, "you must 58 not suppose that any but a native Greek can possibly understand Homer." THE PARADOX OF ITHACA In this study I have explored the ideological assumptions underlying stories of travel to Ithaca, beginning with Odysseus's mythological return and ending with consideration of visitation in the modern world. Ithaca is an ambiguous place in both the ancient and modern world, subject not only to larger forces but also to willful and often contradictory representations. The longlost Odysseus is a belated traveler to Ithaca who employs guile and violence to re-create the homeland of his memory. The Odyssey in general provides an external perspective on the island, one that is ambivalent about whether Ithaca is suitably prosperous and powerful for a major hero. Other ancient narratives offer less than flattering portrayals of Ithaca's role in the region, and sometimes they went out of their way to remove the hero from Ithaca. Though modern travel accounts necessarily reflect a very different political and economic world, they also present complex and challenging portrayals of Ithaca. Notable is a temporally bifurcated discourse that at once celebrates the island's Homeric heritage but appropriates it from the island's current inhabitants. One is reminded of the paradoxical nature of Tennyson's "Ulysses", which portrays the island and its inhabitants, in apparent reflection of modern 9 Ithaca's status, as an unworthy homeland for the iconic traveler of myth. 5 150 Jonathan S. Burgess Traveling to Ithaca NOTES 1. The epic as a whole is a travel tale of returning home, and Odysseus's firstperson narrative of his adventures at sea within the Odyssey seems to anticipate modern travel writing. See Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, Introduction, The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Hulme and Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1-13 (at p. 2). 2. Alfred Tennyson, "Ulysses" [1842] <http://www.bartleby.com/246/375.htmb (18 December 2014). Further references are to this edition. 3. See Matthew Rowlinson, "The Ideological Moment of Tennyson's 'Ulysses"', Victorian Poetry, 30, no. 3/4 (1992): 265-76 (at pp. 268 ff.). Rowlinson notes that "Ulysses", written in 1833, anticipates the imperialism that would come to be celebrated by Victorians later in the nineteenth century (pp. 269-70, et passim). See also David Adams, Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 28-31; and Martin McKinsey, Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination: Yeats, Cavafy, Walcott (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010), pp. 36-47. On the independence movement of the Ionian Islands, see Robert Holland and Diana Markides The British and the Hellenes: Struggles for Mastery in the Eastern Mediterrdnean 1850-1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp.13-80. William Ewart Gladstone, a Homeric scholar as well as British politician, opposed independence. 4. For the centripetaVcentrifugal duality of the return of Odysseus, see William B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero [1954] (New York: Spring Publications, 1992), p. 89; and John Peradotto, Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in the Odyssey (Princeton: Princeton yniversity Press, 1990), p. 119. The concept originates in episode 17, "Ithaca", m James Joyce, Ulysses [1922] (New York: Vintage, 1961), pp. 666-737. 5. Jessica Higgins, From Fleet to Foot: An Analysis of Odysseus's Pedestrian Journeys in the Odyssey, dissertation (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2015), pp. 9-14. 6. For a structuralist analysis of polarity in the wanderings of Odysseus, see Pierre VIdal-Naquet, "Land and Sacrifice in the Odyssey: A Study of Religious and Mythical Meanings", in Seth L. Schein, ed., Reading the Odyssey: Selected Interpretive Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 33-54; and Fran<;:ois Hartog, Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece [1996], trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp.15-40. 7. For skepticism about an analogy between ancient Greek colonization, modern colonialism, and imperialism, see Irad Malkin, "Postcolonial Concepts and Ancient Greek Colonization", Modern Language Quarterly, 65, no. 3 (2004): 341-64 (at p. 344); and Franco de Angelis, "Colonies and Colonization", in George Boys-Stones, Barbara Graziosi, and Phiroze Vasunia, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 48-64. 8. See Jonathan Burgess, "'If Peopled and Cultured': Bartram's Travels and the Odyssey", in Gabriel R. Ricci, ed., Travel, Discovery, Transformation (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2014), pp. 19-44. Notable analyses include ｄ｡ｶｩｾ＠ ｾﾷ＠ Hoegberg, Colonial Dramas, dissertation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1989), pp.1-32; Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive. Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), pp. 23-34. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 151 My reference to "colonial eyes" alludes to the concept of "imperial eyes" of Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992). "Goat Island" has no name in the Odyssey but is conventionally so called by Homerists because of its abundance of goats. See Michael N. Nagler, "Odysseus: The Proem and the Problem", Classical Antiquity 9 (1990): 335-56; Carol Dougherty, The Raft of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer's Odyssey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 161-76; and Mark Buchan, The Limits of Heroism: Homer and the Ethics of Reading (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004 ), pp. 133-80,206-36. See the Odyssey 16.247-51, 1.245-8, 1.394-6,21.346-7. 1.386ff. The Greek word of "king", basileus, seems often in the Odyssey to refer to aristocrats, not necessarily holders of monarchal rule. Odyssey 19.577. It is unclear how Homeric marriage reflects historical practice; see Moses I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (New York: Viking Press, 1954) (pp. 49, 98, 130, et passim); Anthony Snodgrass, "An Historical Homeric Society?" Journal of Hellenic Studies, 94 (1974): 114-25 (at pp. 116-21); and Raymond Westbrook, "Penelope's Dowry and Odysseus' Kingship", part of "Women and Property in Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean Societies", Center for Hellenic Studies (2005) <http://chs.harvard.edu/wa/pageR?tn=Article Wrapper&bdc=12&mn=1219> (15 August 2014). See the Iliad 2.631££., which lists the Greek leaders who sailed to Troy and their troops. See Vassilis P. Petrakis, "History versus the Homeric Iliad: A View from the Ionian Islands", Classical World, 99, no. 4 (2006): 371-96. Samos is perhaps the modern island of Kephellenia, near Ithaca. The hero leads the "Kephellenians", but this seems to be a tribal designation. Archaeological evidence provides some information; see Christina Souyoudzoglou-Haywood, The Ionian Islands in the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age 3000800 BC (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999); and Helen Waterhouse, "From Ithaca to the Odyssey", The Annual of the British School at Athens, 91 (1996): 301-17. Irad Malkin portrays Ithaca as central to region's interconnectivity in the early first-century millennium BCE (The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998], pp. 94-155). See Apollodorus, Epitome 7.34-40 for a summary of such stories. The standard translation is James George Frazer, ed. and trans., Apollodorus: The Library, Volume 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921). For the historical and geographical context, see Malkin, Returns of Odysseus, pp. 120-55. See Malcolm Davies, The Greek Epic Cycle, 2nd ed. (London: Bristol, 2001) for an introductory survey of the Epic Cycle. The Telegony is probably later than the Odyssey but with pre-Homeric content; see Jonathan Burgess, The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp.153-4. Besides the economic passages above, see the Odyssey 16.424-7 and 24.377-8 for Ithaca-mainland connections. The disguised Odysseus claims that "Odysseus" visits Thesprotia on the mainland (14.314-5, 19.269££.). In the underworld episode of the Odyssey (Book 11) Teiresias tells Odysseus he will have to go on an inland journey of unspecified geography. 152 Jonathan S. Burgess 19. A son of Odysseus and Circe is not mentioned in the Odyssey. Teiresias predicts in Book 11 that death will come to Odysseus away from the sea, or "from the sea": the Greek is ambiguous, and so the prophecy may allude to the type of story told in the Telegony. 20. See Apollodorus, Epitome, 7.40. Neoptolemus is the sone of Achilles. 21. For Mediterranean interconnectivity, see Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, who write that the Odyssey is deemed "the creator of the Mediterranean", an "Odyssean Mediterranean" (The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History [London: Blackwell, 2000], pp. 43, 532). 22. For such material, see John Macolm Wagstaff, The Contribution of Early Travel Narratives to the Historical Geography of Greece: A Lecture Delivered at New College, Oxford, on 6th May, 2003 (Oxford: Leopard's Head, 2004 ); George Huxley, Homer and the Travellers: A Lecture on Some Antiquarian and Topographical Books in the Gennadius Library of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (Athens: G. Huxley, 1988); Maria Paschalidi, Constructing Ionian Identities: The Ionian Islands in British Official Discourses; 1815-1864, dissertation (London: University College London, 2009); and Jim Potts, The Ionian Islands and Epirus: A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 2.3. On deforestation of the Mediterranean, see Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, pp. 328-38, 604-5. 24. Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Liber Insularum Archipelagi [1420], ed. G. R. Ludovicus de Sinner (Leipzig and Berlin: G. Reimer, 1824), p. 57. 25. Guillaume de Vaudoncourt, Memoirs on the Ionian Islands, Considered in a Commercial, Political, and Military Point of View, etc., trans. William Walton (London: Baldwin, Cradoc, and Joy, 1816), p. 397. See pp. 419-43 for a detailed economic analysis of the region's economy, with Corfu and Kephellenia as examples; see pp. 397-8 for sparse comments on Ithaca. ｾＶＮ＠ William Gell, The Geography and Antiquities of Ithaca (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807), pp. 8-9, 25-33, 104-5. It is relevant to my discussion that in his dedication to King George III, Gell states that Ithaca's king "may not be entirely uninteresting to a Monarch, who ... has extended the influence of Britain to every quarter of the globe." ｾＷＮ＠ Hemy Holland, Travels in the Ionian Islands, Albania, Thessaly, Macedonia, &c. during the Years 1812 and 1813 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1815), p. 51. ｾＸＮ＠ Edward Giffard, A Short Visit to the Ionian Islands, Athens, and the Morea (London: John Murray, 1837), p. 46, with further wry comments at pp. 46-8. ｾＹＮ＠ Holland, Travels, p. 52. \0. Christian Muller, Journey through Greece and the Ionian Islands in June, July, and August, 1821 (London: Sir Richard Phillips, 1822), pp. 47-8. 11. Tertius T. C. Kendrick, The Ionian Islands. Manners and Customs; Sketches of the Ancient History; with Anecdotes of the Septinsulars (London: James Haldane, 1822), p. 75. 12. William Martin Leake, Travels in Northern Greece, vol. 3 (London: J. Rodwell, 1835), p. 31. Leake also writes, "its modern state resembles that of the time of Homer; but the mountains are no longer shaded with woods, and this may be the reason why the rain and the dew are not so plentiful as the poet represents, and why the island no longer abounds in hogs fattening upon acorns" (p. 31-2). Traveling to Ithaca 153 33. David Thomas Ansted, The Ionian Islands in the Year 1863 (London: W. H. Allen, 1863), pp. 254-6. 34. The Odyssey 9.108-14. 35. Odyssey 13.242 ff, 24.205 ff, 4.605-8. 36. Odyssey 20.186-8,209-20. 37. Odyssey 14.96 ff. 38. Odyssey 4.634 ff. 39. See Johannes Haubold, Homer's People: Epic Poetry and Social Formation. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Slaves are relatively prominent in the Odyssey; see William G. Thalmann, The Swineherd and the Bow: Representations of Class in the Odyssey (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 40. For the exploration of Homeric Ithaca, see Gell, Geography and Antiquities; Christopher Wordsworth, Greece: Pictorial, Descriptive, and Historical, 5th ed. [1844] (London: John Murray, 1868); Heimich Schliemann, Ithaka, der Peloponnes und Troja: Archi:iologische Forschungen [1869] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Rennell Rodd, Homer's Ithaca, a Vindication of Tradition (London: Edward Arnold, 1927); and John Victor Luce, Celebrating Homer's Landscapes: Troy and Ithaca Revisited (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). These authors reject misguided attempts to locate Homeric Ithaca burgess/rop/pages/ithaca. elsewhere; see <http://homes.chass. ｵｴｯｲｮＮ｣｡Ｏｾｪ＠ htmb (15 August 2014). 41. Schliemann, Ithaka. See Erich Lessing, The Voyages of Ulysses: A Photographic Interpretation of Homer's Classic (Freiburg: Herder, 1965), pp. 40-1, for the quoted translation of the passage. 42. William Mure,Journal of a Tour in Greece and the Ionian Islands, with Remarks on the Recent History - Present State - and Classical Antiquities of Those Countries, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1842), p. 38. 43. Christopher Wordsworth, Athens and Attica: Journal of a Residence There, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1837), p. 52. 44. Paschalidi notes that ancient Ithaca is considered Homeric yet modern Ithaca Oriental (Constructing Ionian Identities, p. 355). Edward W. Said traces Orientalism to ancient Greece; Homer's Iliad expresses an East/West polarity, and the threat of the Persian Empire inspired a more specific form of Orientalism in the Classical period (Orientialism [1978] [New York: Vintage, 1979], pp. 21, 56-7). See also Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989). Ancient G.reek literature is now seen as consequential as near eastern literature; see Martm L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Barbara Graziosi and Emily Greenwood note that evidence of oral composition in Homeric poems leads many now to associate them with world folk literature, not the western canon (Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007], pp. 3-4, 121). . 45. Huxley, Homer and the Travellers, pp. 5-6. 46. Kendrick, The Ionian Islands, p. viii. For similar examples about loman Islands, see John Dunn Gardner, The Ionian Islands in Relation to Greece, with Suggestions for Advancing Our Trade with the Turkish Countries of the Adriatic, and the Danube, 2nd ed. (London: James Ridgway, 1859), p. 3; and 154 Jonathan S. Burgess Henry Whyte-Jervis, The Ionian Islands during the Present Century (London: Chapman and Hall, 1863), p. 95. 47. See Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking-glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 48. Huxley describes "a certain kind of scholarly visitor who educated in the schools of Europe, declined to acknowledge that the Greeks knew how to pronounce their own language". For Huxley, the fault a "problem of communication" (Homer and the Travellers, p. 6). 49. Holland, Travels, p. 54. 50. Edward Dodwell, A Classical and Topographical Tour of Greece, during the Years 1801,1805, and 1806, vol.1 (London: Rodwell and Martin, 1819),p. 90. 51. ｈｯｬｾｮ､＠ and Markides, British and Hellenes, p. 30. 52. Qtd. Ill Holland and Markides, British and Hellenes, p. 30. 53. Dodwell, Classical and Topographical Tour, p. 89. 54. Leake, Travels, p. 26. Holland notes the use of Odysseus as a personal name in modern Greece (Travels, p. 54). 55. Lawrence Durrell, Prospera's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the (London: Faber and Faber' 1952) , pp . 64-5 . Sch ena, · h 1Island of Corfu [1945] . t e and of the PhaeClans, has been commonly linked with Corfu since antiquity. 56. Durrell, Prospera's Cell, p. 59. 57. Schliemann, in Lessing, Voyages, p. 46. 58. Huxley, Homer and the Travellers, pp. 6-7. 59. I thank Dimitri Nakassis and the Jackman Humanities Institute's working group on travel hterature for discussion of the Durrell passage in the spring. I am grateful to Maya Chakravorty for research supported by an University of ｾｯｲｮ＠ Undergraduate. ｾｸ｣･ｬｮ＠ Award, and for funding provided by the Social Science and Humamtles Research Council of Canada. 11 Representations of the Near East in Travel Writing and Conjectural History during the Late Eighteenth Century Pamela M. Barber A CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN GENRES In his account of his journey to Scotland in 1773, Samuel Johnson describes "a nation, of which the commerce is hourly extending and the wealth increasing",1 and he adds that "[t]here was perhaps never any change of national manners so quick, so great, and so general, as that which has operated in the Highlands" .2 Philosophers and historians in Edinburgh and Glasgow were surrounded with evidence that social structures change in relation to economic circumstances. Concurrently, travelers' descriptions of distant cultures presented them with evidence that significant differences existed in the structures of societies around the globe. In an attempt to explain both cultural change at home and cultural difference at a distance, thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment developed a stadial theory, in which they suggested that all societies typically progress through similar stages of economic development. They proposed that the social and political structures of a society correspond to its economic organization and that different cultures in the same economic stage share certain characteristics. 3 Historical writing, in its traditional form of chronological narrative concerning statesmen and significant political events, was a valued reference in late-eighteenth-century cultural interpretation. Little historical information was available, however, relating to the distant societies being described by travelers. Writers of the period turned to the speculative stadial narrative of history in their attempts to interpret remote cultures. A new subgenre of historical writing emerged, which came to be referred to as conjectural history due to its approach based on premises about general commonalities in human behavior and the circumstances of particular societies. The defining notions of stadial theory were shaped by political developments of the time in Europe. Emerging ideas regarding individual rights, private property, and limits to both religious authority and the powers of monarchy are reflected in the writing of the late eighteenth century. British society was rapidly changing, as newly affluent segments of society in urban centers of manufacturing and commerce posed a challenge to the privilege of landed aristocracy. Issues accompanying the expansion of empire, such as the administration of widespread regions, were of increasing concern.