Milan Kundera has said that Homer’s Odyssey was the first novel. I’m not so sure — the verse kind of gets in the way — but it’s certainly the earliest surviving great travel book.
Ever since the 5th century BC, Odyssey obsessives have been trawling the Mediterranean in their hero’s footsteps to track down the real Cyclops or the real Scylla and Charybdis. Herodotus and Thucydides identified the Land of the Lotus Eaters with a spot in Libya. In the 4th century BC, Euhemerus, a Greek Sicilian, maintained that, beneath all the monsters and the myths, there lay pure historical fact. The romantics who go in search of the real Odysseus — and the real Homer — are called ‘euhemerists’ as a result.
Daniel Mendelsohn, a writer and classics teacher at Bard College in upstate New York, is the latest euhemerist to follow in Odysseus’s wake. The difference is that Mendelsohn brings along his father Jay (a retired 81-year-old computer science professor and grumpy Woody Allen type) on his cruise around Homer’s Mediterranean.
Jay takes to onboard life and the evenings overlooking the wine-dark sea — or the grape-dark sea, as Nicky Haslam told me the Med looked like this summer. All goes well until the Corinth canal is closed, and so the Mendelsohns never get to Ithaca, which is bloody annoying — not least because Odysseus managed to make it home 3,000 years before the Corinth canal was constructed. Ithaca is a tiny, unspoilt, utterly bewitching island — still much as it was in the time of Odysseus — and ever since the 8th century BC, getting to Ithaca has had a powerful, symbolic meaning: of coming home, of completion, of a satisfactory end.
In both real and symbolic senses, the Mendelsohns, and An
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