January 10, 2007
Homeric Detective Work
This is pretty interesting. An amateur historian claims to have located the original Ithica, home of King Odysseus, off the west coast of Greece:
Scholars have argued for centuries over the whereabouts of Ithaca, the lost kingdom of the hero of the Trojan war. But Robert Bittlestone, a management consultant from Kingston-on-Thames, Surrey, and two professors of classics and geology have suggested the location is not the Greek island of Ithaki, but Paliki — a peninsula of Kefalonia. If true, it would be the greatest classical discovery since Heinrich Schliemann found the site of Troy in Turkey in the 1870s, and would establish Odysseus as a figure from history as opposed to a figment of Homer's imagination.In Homer's epic poem, it takes Odysseus 10 years to return home after the war.
Ithaca is described as low-lying and furthest to the west of the group of islands off western Greece.
Modern Ithaki, cited by proud islanders as the home of Odysseus, is the most easterly of the island group.
Bittlestone claims to have evidence that demonstrates the modern peninsula of Paliki was once an island in its own right but that the channel between it and Kefalonia filled in owing to seismic activity (i.e., one or more earthquake-induced landslides). In its earlier form, the island would have closely matched Homer's description of Ithaca.
I love this sort of thing. People are too ready to dismiss Homer's Iliad and Odyssey as pure myth, their characters as nothing more than fictions, archetypes or allegorical figures. (I suppose this is because they conclude that anybody singing of gods and goddesses meddling in human affairs must necessarily be making up not only the divine intervention but the earthly affairs themselves. See also Old Testament mythology.) But theories like this one (and others that I have seen) suggest more that the original stories were not so much invented as embellished and that the underlying framework on which they were built might very well have been true.
UPDATE: By the bye, as I try never to miss an opportunity to plug one of Robert Graves' historical novels, might I here recommend his Homer's Daughter? In it, Graves takes up the theory that not only was The Odyssey written by a different author than The Iliad, but it was in fact written by a woman. Graves invents that female author - Princess Nausicaa - and places her not on the west coast of Greece but on Sicily. Whether you buy into the theory or not, it is very entertaining reading.
UPDATE DEUX: Following up on the Colossus's comments, I see that I was unclear about something. When I said, "making up not only the divine intervention," I didn't mean to suggest I thought the intervention itself to be ficticious. What I meant to say is that we channel our real interactions with the Divine into images that we can comprehend, which images themselves must by definition be ficticious simply because we don't have the capacity to truly understand what we're dealing with. (Whether God in fact decided to get involved in a 12th Century B.C. trade war between Troy and the rising Greek city states, or whether the Olympians were really devils as advocated (I believe) by the Medieval Church, I leave to other, deeper thinkers.)
Posted by Robert at January 10, 2007 09:49 AM | TrackBackI am coming to the conclusion that the God(s) did and do interact with man. That there's nothing at all fictional about the mythical.
Not to get all weird and Carlos Castaneda or anything, but I think the rational mind has made certain choices to see certain things, and not to see others.
It has something to do with what I call the rational and pre-rational minds. We live in a world constrained by reason, but it is actually just a high and narrow tower attached to a great edifice. In that edifice are gods and goddesses, banquet halls and armories, churches and altars to all manner of strange things.
We just prefer not to remember these things. We can visit these places from time to time, but we do not -- or cannot, or choose not -- to live in these other places.
Or, if you prefer a more prosaic view, we can, by immersing ourselves in the ancient texts and ways of thoughts, get quite a different perspective on things, and those perspectives have a strange internal logic of their own.
http://www.go0gle.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=ithaki,+greece&ie=UTF8&z=11&ll=38.248427,20.488129&spn=0.251827,0.688019&t=k&om=1
Looking at it from satellite, one has no trouble envisioning the channel. Replace the zero in google above, as the Lllama spam filter rejects the site name.
Excellent points, Robbo. I myself am of no firm opinion on what exactly the Greek/Roman pantheon were. I think that in some respects the iconography of the ancient world is borrowed and appropriated by the Church; one can see parallels between the stories of Osiris and Christ, or between Dionysus and Christ. Certainly, as it insinuated itself into European culture, the church borrowed things, and built on structures that were already there in both a figurative and literal sense -- it is easier to convert pagans if you can explain your religion in terms of things they already know.
For instance, the primary church to Mary in Rome (Santa Maria Maggiore) is built on the site of an ancient temple to Juno. The transition from worshipping Juno to venerating Mary makes sense if you think of a prayerful supplicant asking for intercession -- a pagan asks Juno, in the role of mother of the gods, to bless her child; a Christian asks Mary, in the role of Mother of Christ, to intercede for her child. To the worshipper, the familar is replaced with the familiar, though the theological implications are naturally far different.
I'm not prepared to denounce all ancient worshippers of Juno as devil worshippers; I think they strove to understand the world as best they could, and came up with a mother goddess who would/could look after children. Is Juno completely fictional? Do prayers addressed to Juno now end up at Mary's doorstep? I don't know. I doubt that the Church fathers would be able to make the symbolic substitution of Mary for Juno (or for Diana, or, in certain cases, for Venus) or Christ for Apollo, if the old goddess/god were completely malevolent.
But given the duality of the old gods/goddesses, I think it would be dangerous to worship the Old Ones. The pagan world may not have been completely evil, but certainly there is a cruelty in it that far exceeds the worst imagined excesses of Christianity.
And I think if one offers a prayer to Apollo or Mars, one is likely asking for trouble. My current view is that all prayers are heard; all the spiritual mail gets read. I also believe that we are innately religious beings, whose daily life is given in service to something. We just don't always recognize who, or what, we are serving. Sometimes we get a glimpse.
Posted by: The Colossus at January 10, 2007 02:44 PM
Image courtesy of the lovely and talented 