Wasn’t Homer’s narrative virtuosity accompanied by a very shaky grasp of geography, even by the standards of his time and place? (See Knox’s introduction to the Fagles translation of The Odyssey).

Brian

Bittlestone’s theory is just one more of many speculations!He is like Schliemann, a very good publicist: an expert “marketer”. He knows his “costumers” well, and he listens to them carefully, and he responds to what he belives they neeed in order to convice them. Professor Diggle doesn’t know that all problems of exegesis actually derive from the fact that the exact meaning of Homer has not been grasped.

See: http://www.odysseus-ithaca.net

In conclusion, as for the “mystery” of the real location of Ithaca raised by different researchers, this can be explained by paraphrasing the thesis on Feuerbach (“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”), which could be applied to the Ithaca question in the following way: researchers have hitherto located Ithaca in various geographical locations; the point is to determine and locate it on the geographical location that completely corresponds to Homer’s description. This is the only measure. This is where all previous and future theses about Ithaca either stand or fall (assuming, of course, that Homer’s description of Ithaca in the Odyssey is truthful).

What is the author of book “Odysseus’s Ithaca: The Discovery” has done.

I explained the simple meaning of Homers’s words, his primitive but correct orientation, conected the relevant episodes and the main story in the Odyssey and have located Ithaca- homeland of Odysseus towards the poet’s description on the one of the most enchanting and interesting places on earth.
The home of this ancient mythological hero, one of the best known figures of human history, has finally beeen located.

Author: Berislav Brcković

ODYSSEUS’S ITHACA
: The Discovery

Author: Brckovic, Berislav

Review Date: JUNE 02, 2008
Publisher:BookSurge (63 pp.)
Price (paperback): $23.50
Publication Date: October 18, 2007
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-419-67585-0
Category: AUTHORS
Classification: NONFICTION

A Croatian lawyer offers a meticulously researched and exhaustively detailed identification of the present-day whereabouts of Homer’s ancient Ithaca.

The location of Odysseus’s homeland, as described in the Odyssey, has long been a matter of debate for philologists, archaeologists and Homeric scholars. One easy conclusion to the argument is that the island currently known as Ithaca, located in the Ionian Sea just off the northeast coast of Cephallonia, was the mythological hero’s home. However, this island, known by locals as Thiaki, does not share topographical details with the Ithaca described in the Odyssey; while the island in the myth is low-lying and far to the west, Thiaki is mountainous and sits to the east of a larger land mass. Burrowing deep into the text of the Odyssey and creating a somewhat tedious inventory of Ithacan characteristics, Brckovic provides a convincing case that Erisos, the northern peninsula of the island of Cephallonia, is indeed the Ithaca to which Odysseus returned at the conclusion of the epic poem. The author assumes that Homer, despite mythologizing his Greek hero and his adventures, meant to reference an authentic landscape as one of the central settings of his narrative. Building off that assumption, Brckovic cites more than 100 lines of the poem that precisely describe the general environs of Erisos. Not satisfied with a concise argument, the author spends the second half of the book identifying exact locations in and around Erisos that inspired a dozen or so important locales mentioned in the Odyssey, including the Harbour of Phorcys, Raven’s Rock, the Hamlet of Laertes and the Hill of Nion. A generous use of color photographs and maps both current and historical support the thesis presented in this slim but thorough volume.

A convincing, compelling argument compromised by a density of details.

Copyright 2005 Kirkus Reviews

Dear Barb Mac Lennan,

You said: “I want to thank everyone for their replies. I will need to read Odysseus’ Ithaca”.

Yet nothing… Please, do it! Thanks.

Best,
Berislav Brckovic