Odysseus is back on his eternal journey to Ithaca – and he’s sailing towards your cinema screen. Ralph Fiennes is playing Odysseus in The Return, released last week. And Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, starring Matt Damon as the cleverest of the Greeks at Troy, should be out next year.
I criss-crossed the Mediterranean for three years, in the wake of Odysseus, for a book – and I’m convinced The Odyssey is true. OK, the monsters, like man-eating Scylla and the one-eyed Cyclops, might not have existed. And you’d have to be a Zeus-fearing type to believe in the gods toying with Odysseus’s fate on Mount Olympus.
But the catastrophic storms that tossed Odysseus back and forth across the Med are certainly true. Just look at poor Mike Lynch, the tech billionaire tragically drowned with his daughter, friends and crew last summer, thanks to a monstrous waterspout. That was off the coast of Sicily, just a few miles from the legendary site of Charybdis – the deadly whirlpool Odysseus steered his ship away from.
I was battered by a Homeric storm, too, off the coast of Sicily near Ustica, the island of Aeolus, ruler of the winds. Aeolus gave Odysseus a sealed bag of winds. Odysseus’s stupid crew opened the bag, releasing the winds and blasting them away from Ithaca towards Sicily – just as the winds did to me at Ustica. So many of the places are exactly as Homer described them in The Iliad and The Odyssey. And they still have the same names. Ithaca is still called Ithaca.
Homer says the island’s two headlands ‘keep back the great waves raised by heavy winds without, but within the benched ships lie unmoored when they have reached the point of anchorage’. And so it was when I sailed into Vathy, Ithaca’s capital. Out at sea, the water was tossed up into white-crested breakers. Just as we turned into the main bay of Ithaca, the brisk westerly wind dropped.
A book has just come out, saying that the Bronze Age palace on Ithaca, only discovered 30 years ago, fits the description of Odysseus’s palace. In The Archaeological Evidence for the Palace of Odysseus on Ithaca, Professor Thanasis J. Papadopoulos convincingly refutes claims that the neighbouring islands of Lefkas and Kefalonia are Homeric Ithaca.
To believe in The Odyssey, you have to believe in The Iliad – and the Trojan War. When I got to Troy on Turkey’s western coast, I was convinced a war had taken place there, between a Greek tribe and a non-Greek tribe. Of the nine cities laid on top of each other in a vast archaeological sandwich, there are remnants of burnt earth and burnt weapons at around the time – 1200 BC – the Trojan War was supposed to have taken place. The mighty, sloping walls of Troy, as described by Homer, are still there.
There are remnants of burnt earth and burnt weapons at around the time – 1200 BC – the Trojan War was supposed to have taken place
And the supposed site of Troy was at a critical point on Mediterranean trade routes. The city commanded the entrance to what was then the most important waterway in the world, leading through the Dardanelles up the Bosphorus into the Black Sea. Homer’s battle scenes, too, are so realistic that they must have a kernel of truth. ‘The Iliad must have happened,’ Boris Johnson told me between my Mediterranean voyages. ‘That description of the Trojans attacking like birds is so chilling, it must be true.’
Boris was referring to the beginning of Book Three of The Iliad, where Homer described how the Trojans ‘advanced with cries and clamour, a clamour like birds, cranes in the sky, flying from the winter’s storm and unending rain, flowing towards the streams of the ocean, bringing the clamour of death and destruction to Pygmy tribes, bringing evil and strife at the break of day.’
And, if there was a war involving Greeks, then they had to make their return – or nostos (as in nostalgia – ‘pain in returning’). And there are plenty of stories of other disastrous nostoi from the Trojan War. Five and a half lines – and a few critical references – survive of a lost epic called the Nostoi – the returns, i.e. returns of the Greeks from Troy.
Like The Odyssey, the Nostoi tells of the trials and tribulations of various returning Greeks: Diomedes and Nestor, who get back home without incident; Menelaus, caught in a storm, loses much of his fleet and is delayed in Egypt for several years; Agamemnon is killed by Clytemnestra, his wife. The only one left to make it home and live into happy old age is Odysseus.
I’m not the first person to try to nail down Odysseus’s real-life route and work out who Homer really was. A group of ancient activists, the Euhemerists, thought the Greek myths were true. They’re named after Euhemerus, the 4th century BC Greek from Sicily who maintained you could strip the magic from the myths and produce historical fact. I’m proud to be a Euhemerist. Here’s hoping Ralph Fiennes and Matt Damon are so convincing that they’ll create a few more of us.
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