Geography of the Odyssey

Events in the main sequence of the "Odyssey" (excluding the narrative of Odysseus's adventures) take place in the Peloponnese and in what are now called the Ionian Islands (Ithaca and its neighbours). Incidental mentions of Troy and its neighbourhood, Phoenicia, Egypt and Crete hint at geographical knowledge equal to, or perhaps slightly superior to, that of the "Iliad". [Setting aside the geographical knowledge shown in the Catalogue of Ships and Trojan Battle Order, which are extremely detailed and precise, but may have a different history from the remainder of the "Iliad" narrative.] However, scholars both ancient and modern are divided as to whether or not any of the places visited by Odysseus (after Ismaros and before his return to Ithaca) were real.

Geography of the Telemachy

The journey of Telemachus to Pylos and Sparta raises a few geographical problems. The location of Nestor's Pylos was disputed in antiquity; towns named Pylos were found in Elis, Triphylia and Messenia, and each claimed to be Nestor's home. Strabo (8.3), citing earlier writers, argued that Homer meant Triphylian Pylos. Modern scholarship, however, generally locates Nestor's Pylos in Messenia. The presence of Mycenaean ruins at the archaeological site of Ano Englianos, the so-called "Palace of Nestor", have greatly strengthened this view. The Linear B tablets found at the site indicate that the site was called "Pu-ro" ("Pylos") by its inhabitants. [Simpson and Lazenby, p. 82. See also the section headed Atlantic Ocean theories.]

Identification of Ithaca and neighbouring islands

The geographical references in the "Odyssey" to Ithaca and its neighbours seem confused and have given rise to much scholarly argument, beginning in ancient times. Odysseus's Ithaca is usually identified with the island traditionally called "Thiaki" and now officially renamed Ithake, but some scholars have argued that Odysseus's Ithaca is actually Leucas, and others identify it with the whole or part of Cephalonia. For further information on these debates see Homer's Ithaca; for more on Robert Bittlestone's recent work, identifying the Paliki peninsula with Homeric Ithaca, see "Odysseus Unbound".

Geography of Odysseus's narrative

The geography of the "Apologoi" (the tale that Odysseus told to the Phaeacians, forming books 9-12 of the "Odyssey"), and the location of the Phaeacians' own island of Scherie, pose quite different problems from those encountered in identifying Troy, Mycenae, Pylos and Ithaca.
* The names of the places and peoples that Odysseus visits or claims to have visited are not recorded, either as historical or contemporary information, in any ancient source independent of the "Odyssey".
* What happens to Odysseus in these places, according to his narrative, belongs to the realm of the supernatural or fantastic (to an extent that is not true of the remainder of the "Odyssey").
* It can be doubted whether Odysseus's story is intended, within the general narrative of the "Odyssey", to be taken as true.
* We cannot know whether the poet envisaged the places on Odysseus' itinerary, and the route from each place to the next, as real.
* Even if the places were envisaged as real, the effects of coastal erosion, silting and other geological changes over thousands of years can alter the landscape and seascape to the point where identification may be extremely difficult.For these reasons, the opinions of later students and scholars about the geography of Odysseus's travels vary enormously. It has repeatedly been argued that each successive landfall, and the routes joining them, are real and can be mapped; it has been argued with equal conviction that they do not exist in the real world and never can be mapped.

Ancient identifications

Ancient sources provide a wealth of interpretations of Odysseus' wanderings, with a complex range of traditions which affect one another in various ways. Broadly speaking there are two dominant trends:

# Euhemerist accounts, which re-wrote mythical stories without their fantastic elements, and were often seen as thereby recovering "historical" records; and
# foundation myths, whereby stories of a city or institution being founded in the course of Odysseus' travels often came to have political significance.

Some identifications are common to both groups. The main distinctions between them are in how the identifications were passed down through the generations, and the uses to which they were put. The most standard identifications, which are rarely disputed in ancient sources, are

* land of the Cyclopes = Sicily [ Earliest sources for this identification: Euripides' play "Cyclops", set near Mount Etna; and Thucydides 6.2.1. ]
* land of the Laestrygonians = Sicily [ Earliest source for this identification: Thucydides 6.2.1. ]
* island of Aeolus = one or more of the Aeolian Islands off Sicily's north coast [ Earliest source for this identification: Thucydides 3.88. ]
* Scheria, the land of the Phaeacians = Corcyra (modern Corfu), off the west coast of Greece and Albania [ Earliest source for this identification: Thucydides 1.25.4. It is notable that the Archaic poem the "Naupactia" referred to Corcyra in the context of the story of Jason, which was earlier in the mythic age than Odysseus, but does not seem to have identified it with Scheria ("Naupactia" fr. 9 West). ]
*Ogygia, the island home of the nymph Calypso = Gaudos, modern Gozo, part of the Maltese archipelago. [Strabo 7.3.6, referencing Callimachus' account in relation to Euhemerus. Also, Bradford, Ernle (1963), "Ulysses Found"]

Euhemerist accounts

Euhemerist accounts are generally those found in writers on antiquarian subjects, geographers, scholars, and historians. The most important ancient sources are the 1st century geographer Strabo, who is our source for information on Eratosthenes' and Polybius' investigations into the matter; and the novelisation of the Trojan War that goes under the name of Dictys of Crete, which many later writers treated as an authentic historical record of the war.

The prototypes for this tradition are in the 5th century BC. Herodotus identifies the land of the lotus-eaters as a headland in the territory of the Gindanes tribe in Libya, and Thucydides reports the standard identifications mentioned above. [ Herodotus 4.177; Thucydides 1.25, 3.88, 6.2. ] Herodotus and Thucydides do not actively euhemerise, but simply take local myths at face value for the political importance they had at the time. [ On the political importance of Corcyra's identification with Scheria, see e.g. C.J. Mackie 1996, "Homer and Thucydides: Corcyra and Sicily", "Classical Quarterly" 46.1: 103-13. ]

Euhemerist accounts become more prominent in Alexandrian scholarship of the Hellenistic period. Callimachus identifies Scheria as Corcyra, and also identifies Calypso's island with Gaudos (modern Gozo, part of Malta). [ Strabo 7.3.6. ] His student Apollonius of Rhodes also identifies Scheria as Corcyra in his epic the "Argonautica". [ "Argonautica" 4.983ff. ]

Apollonius' successor as head of the library of Alexandria, Eratosthenes, wrote a detailed investigation into Odysseus' wanderings. Eratosthenes takes a cynical view, regarding Homer as an entertainer, not an educator: "You will find the scene of the wanderings of Odysseus when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of the winds." [ Strabo 1.2.15. ] This does not mean that he refuses any and all identifications. He conjectures that Hesiod's information about the wanderings (see below on Hesiod) came from historical inquiries that Hesiod had made. [ Strabo 1.2.14. ] The 2nd century BC poet-historian Apollodorus sympathises with Eratosthenes, believing that Homer imagined the wanderings as having taken place in a kind of fairyland in the Atlantic; he actively criticises the standard identifications in and around Sicily, and refuses to offer any identifications of his own. [ Strabo 1.2.37, 7.3.6. ]

The 2nd century BC historian Polybius discusses the wanderings in book 34 of his history. He refutes Apollodorus' idea that the wanderings were in the Atlantic on the basis of "Odyssey" 9.82, where Odysseus says that he sailed for nine days from Cape Malea in the Peloponnese to the land of the lotus-eaters: it would take much longer than nine days to reach the Atlantic. He accepts the standard identifications around Sicily, and is the earliest source to identify Scylla and Charybdis explicitly with the Strait of Messina. [ Strabo 1.2.15-16. ] He also identifies the land of the lotus-eaters as the island of Djerba (ancient Meninx), off the coast of Tunisia. [ Strabo 1.2.17. ] Polybius is the most euhemerist source to this date: he justifies the description of Aeolus in the "Odyssey" as "king of the winds" on the grounds that Aeolus "taught navigators how to steer a course in the regions of the Strait of Messina, whose waters are ... difficult to navigate", and insists that the mythical elements in the wanderings are insignificant in comparison to the historical core. [ Strabo 1.2.15. ]

Strabo, living in the late 1st century BC and early 1st century AD, says that he tries to strike a balance between reading Homer as an entertainer and as a historical source. [ See especially 1.2.3, 1.2.17, 1.2.19. ] He is Euhemerist to the extent that he believes that any hypothesis at all, no matter how outrageous, is more plausible than saying "I don't know"; [ Strabo 1.2.37. ] in this regard he accepts Polybius' arguments completely. Strabo offers the most detailed surviving set of identifications:

* Lotus-eaters: Djerba, following Polybius (1.2.17)
* Cyclops: south-east Sicily, near Etna and Lentini (1.2.9); also suggests that Homer "borrowed his idea of the one-eyed Cyclopes from the history of Scythia, for it is reported that the Arimaspians are a one-eyed people" (1.2.10)
* Aeolus: Lipari, among the Aeolian Islands north of Sicily
* Laestrygonians: south-east Sicily (1.2.9)
* land of the Cimmerians: the Bosporus (1.2.9)
* the Ocean: the Black Sea (ancient Pontus; 1.2.10)
* Sirens: either Cape Faro, by the Strait of Messina; or Sirenussae, a headland in Italy between the Bay of Naples and the Gulf of Salerno; or Naples itself (1.2.12-13)
* Scylla and Charybdis: Strait of Messina (1.2.9, 1.2.16)
* Ogygia (Calypso's island) and Scheria: "imagined in fantasy" as being in the Atlantic (1.2.18)

Plutarch agrees with Strabo on the location of Calypso's island of Ogygia in the Atlantic, and specifically west of Britain. [ Plutarch, "Concerning the face which appears in the orb of the moon", 941A-B. ] He also repeats what Plato had described as a continent on the opposite side of the Atlantic, [Plato, Timaeus, 24E - 25A] and he adds that from this continent Ogygia was about 900 km distant. Plutarch's account of Ogygia has created a lot of controversy as to whether he was referring to a real or a mythical place. Kepler in his "“Kepleri Astronomi Opera Omnia”" estimated that “the great continent” was America and attempted to locate Ogygia and the surrounding islands. G. Mair in 1909 proposed that the knowledge of America came from Carthaginian sailors who had reached the Gulf of Mexico. Hamilton in 1934 indicated the similarities of Plutarch's account and Plato's location of Atlantis on the Timaeus, 24E - 25A. [ [http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/The_Face_in_the_Moon*/Introduction.html#ref49 Introductory notes] on Plutarch's "Concerning the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon" at the Loeb Classical Library, particularly notes on p21, p22 and p23.]

Other sources offer miscellaneous details. The "Library" wrongly attributed to Apollodorus summarises most of the accounts given above. Aristonicus, a contemporary of Strabo's, wrote a monograph "On the wanderings of Menelaus", which influenced Strabo's own discussion.

Finally, the "Ephemeris" attributed to Dictys of Crete, who claims to have been present at the Trojan War, was probably written in the 1st century CE or perhaps a little earlier. It falls into a tradition of anti-Homeric literature, based on the supposition that Homer got most things about the Trojan War wrong by making virtuous people look like villains, and vice versa. It is important because later historians took Dictys as a historical record, including Sisyphus of Cos, John Malalas, George Cedrenus, John of Antioch, and others. Many Western mediaeval writers also accepted Dictys (in the Latin summary by Lucius Septimius) as the definitive account of the Trojan War.

According to Dictys, Odysseus fled from Troy after being accused of murdering Aias. He first went north to the Black Sea for a while; he sacked the Ciconian town of Ismarus in Thrace on his way back. After visiting the lotus-eaters he went to Sicily, where he encountered three (or four) brothers, Antiphates, Cyclops, and Polyphemus (and possibly Laestrygon, according to Septimius), who each ruled a portion of the island. Odysseus and his men were mistreated by each of these kings in turn. Notably, they were imprisoned by Polyphemus when one of Odysseus' men fell in love with Polyphemus' daughter (Arene or Elpe) and tried to kidnap her; but they escaped. They passed through the Aeolian Islands, but the surviving accounts of Dictys do not give specific locations for the rest of the wanderings. Malalas' account of Dictys, however, tells us that Circe and Calypso were sisters ruling over neighbouring islands; that Odysseus visited a lake called Nekyopompos ("guide of the dead") near the sea, whose inhabitants were seers; that he passed some rocks called the Seirenidai; and Cedrenus' account seems to identify Scheria with Corfu, or at least an island near Ithaca. [ This summary is based on a comparison of Septimius (5.15, 6.5) with Malalas (5.114-122 Dindorf). ]

Foundation myths

Numerous places in Italy and northern Greece had aetiological legends about cities and other institutions founded by Odysseus on his various travels. Among these foundation myths the continuation of Odysseus's travels told in the "Telegony" is at least as important as the wanderings reported in the "Odyssey".

The earliest record of a foundation myth connecting Odysseus with Italy is the lines surviving in Hesiod's "Theogony" (1011ff.), which report that Odysseus and Circe had two sons Agrius and Latinus, who ruled over the Etruscans ("Tyrsenoi"). Latinus is an important figure in many early Italian myths. The lines are not in fact Hesiodic, but they are probably no later than the 6th century BC. [ J. Poucet 1985, "Les origines de Rome" (Brussels), p. 46 n. 27; T.J. Cornell 1995, "The Beginnings of Rome" (London), p. 210. ]

E.D. Phillips gives a very full treatment of myths that placed Odysseus and Telegonus, his son by Circe, in Italy. [ E.D. Phillips 1953, "Odysseus in Italy", "Journal of Hellenic Studies" 73: 53-67. ]

Modern views

Imaginary places

The modern Greek Homerist Ioannis Kakridis may be compared with Eratosthenes in his approach to the problem. He argued that the Odyssey is a work of poetry and not a travel log. To attempt a quick outline of Kakridis's views, it is useless to try to locate the places mentioned in Odysseus' narrative on the map; we cannot confuse the narrative of Odyssey with history unless we believe in the existence of gods, giants and monsters. Kakridis admits that one may indeed ask what real locations inspired these imaginary places, but one must always bear in mind that geography is not the main concern either of Odysseus (as narrator) or of the poet. ["Ελληνική Μυθολογία, vol. 5: The Trojan War" (1986) Ekdotike Athenon, Athens. Kakridis compares the effort to locate Circe's island to locating the hut of the seven dwarves.] Similarly, Merry and Riddell, in their late 19th century school edition of the "Odyssey", state the following opinion: "Throughout these books [books 9-12] we are in a wonderland, which we shall look in vain for on the map". [Harv|Stanford|1947|vol=1|p=352.] W. B. Stanford in his mid 20th century edition comments as follows on book 9 lines 80-81 (where Odysseus says that he met storms off Cape Malea near the island of Cythera): "These are the last clearly identifiable places in O.'s wanderings. After this he leaves the sphere of Geography and enters Wonderland ..." [Harv|Stanford|1947|vol=1|p=351.] Thereafter, while frequently referring to ancient opinions on the location of Odysseus's adventures, Stanford makes little or no reference to modern theories.

The view that Odysseus's landfalls are best treated as imaginary places is probably held by the majority of classical scholars today.

The western Mediterranean

By contrast with these views, some recent scholars, travellers and armchair travellers have tried to map Odysseus's travels. Modern opinions are so varied in detail that for convenience they need to be classified, as do the ancient ones. This article deals first with those who believe, as did many ancient authors, that the hero of the "Odyssey" was driven west or south-west from Cape Malea and, more than nine years later, returned from the west to his native Ionian islands: his landfalls are therefore to be found in the western Mediterranean.

For a long time the most detailed study of Odysseus's travels was that of the French Homeric scholar Victor Bérard. [Harv|Bérard|1927-9; Harv|Bérard|1933.] Although adopting the general frame of reference of the ancient commentators, Bérard differed from them in some details. For Bérard the land of the Lotus-Eaters was Djerba off southern Tunisia; the land of the Cyclopes was at Posillipo in Italy; the island of Aeolus was Stromboli; the Laestrygonians were in northern Sardinia; Circe's home was Monte Circeo in Lazio; the entrance to the Underworld was near Cumae, just where Aeneas found it in the "Aeneid"; the Sirens were on the coast of Lucania; Scylla and Charybdis were at the Strait of Messina; the Island of the Sun was Sicily; the homeland of Calypso was at the Straits of Gibraltar. From there Odysseus's route took him to Scherie, which Bérard, like so many of his ancient predecessors, identified with Corcyra.

Bérard's views were taken as standard in the 1959 "Atlas of the Classical World" by A. A. M. van der Heyden and H. H. Scullard. [ [http://www.classics.upenn.edu/myth/homer/media/odybig.jpgSee map] .] They were adopted in whole or in part by several later writers. Michel Gall, for example, followed Bérard throughout except that he placed the Laestrygonians in southern Corsica. [Harv|Lessing|1970.] Ernle Bradford had meanwhile added some new suggestions: the land of the Cyclopes was around Marsala in western Sicily; the island of Aeolus was Ustica off Sicily; Calypso was on Malta. [Harv|Bradford|1963.] The Obregons, in "Odysseus Airborne", follow Bradford in some identifications but add several of their own. The Lotus Eaters are in the Gulf of Sidra; the Cyclops and Aeolus are both to be found in the Balearic Isles; the island of Circe is Ischia in the Bay of Naples; most unexpectedly, Scherie is Cyprus. [Harv|Obregon|1971.]

Around Greece

A minority view is that the landfalls of Odysseus were inspired by places on a much shorter itinerary along the coast of Greece itself. One of the earliest to suggest any locations here was the second century AD geographer Pausanias who, in his "Description of Greece", suggested that the nekyia took place at the river Acheron in north west Greece, where the Necromanteion was subsequently built. [Pausanias, "Description of Greece": 1.17.5 "Near Cichyrus is a lake called Acherusia, and a river called Acheron. There is also Cocytus, a most unlovely stream. I believe it was because Homer had seen these places that he made bold to describe in his poems the regions of Hades, and gave to the rivers there the names of those in Thesprotia."] However the location was overlooked or dismissed by many subsequently, until the archaeologist Sotirios Dakaris excavated the site, beginning in 1958. He found evidence of sacrifices to the dead that matched Homer's description of those made by Odyssesus. [Vanderpool, Eugene "News Letter from Greece" in "American Journal of Archaeology", Vol. 65, No. 3 (Jul., 1961), p. 302] Subsequently the location was accepted by others as that described by Homer. [Besonen, Mark R., Rapp, George(Rip) and Jing, Zhichun "The Lower Acheron River Valley: Ancient Accounts and the Changing Landscape" in "Hesperia Supplements", Vol. 32, "Landscape Archaeology in Southern Epirus, Greece" 1 (2003), p. 229] [Harv|Severin|1987 page 193]

Working on the assumption that the discoveries at the Acheron could challenge the traditional assumptions about the "Odyssey"'s geography, Tim Severin sailed a replica Greek sailing vessel (originally built for his attempt to retrace the steps of Jason and the Argonauts) along the "natural" route from Troy to Ithaca, following the sailing directions that could be teased out of the "Odyssey". Along the way he found locations at the natural turning and dislocation points which, he claimed, agreed with the text much more closely than the usual identifications. However, he also came to the conclusion that the sequence of adventures from Circe onwards derived from a separate itinerary to the sequence that ended with the Laestrygonians and was possibly derived from the stories of the Argonauts. He placed many of the later episodes on the north west Greek coast, near the Acheron. Along the way he found on the map Cape Skilla (at the entrance to the Ambracian Gulf) and other names that implied traditional links with the "Odyssey". Severin agrees with the common opinion that the Lotus Eaters are in North Africa (although he placed them in modern Libya rather than Tunisia) and that Scherie is Corcyra. [Harv|Severin|1987.]

A key part of Severin's thesis is that whilst the text of the "Odyssey" contains many place names to the east and south of Greece, there are very few identifiable references to places to the west. As a result he questions whether the western Mediterranean was known about at the time the original legends emerged (which he estimated to be some centuries before Homer composed the poem) and so consequently he doubted whether the stories had their origins there. In addition he noted that the Acheron is marked on the map, but traditionally ignored, whilst in the "Argonautica" of Apollonius of Rhodes the Argonauts' home voyage took them into the Adriatic and Ionian Seas, corresponding to a north west Greek location for many of the later adventures. [Ibid]

Atlantic Ocean theories

Strabo's opinion (mentioned above) that Calypso's island and Scherie were imagined by the poet as being "in the Atlantic Ocean" has had significant influence on modern theorists. Henriette Mertz, a 20th century author, argued that Circe's island is Madeira, Calypso's island one of the Azores, and the intervening travels record a discovery of North America: Scylla and Charybdis are in the Bay of Fundy, Scherie in the Caribbean. [Harv|Mertz|1964; [http://www.ancientgr.com/Unknown_Hellenic_History/images/Odysseas2.gifsee map] . ]

[http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Mattievich Enrico Mattievich] of UFRJ, Brazil, proposed that Odysseus's journey to the Underworld takes place in South America. The river Acheron is the Amazon; after a long voyage upstream Odysseus meets the spirits of the dead at the confluence of the rio Santiago and rio Marañon. [Harv|Mattievich|1992; [http://www.geocities.com/sample_image/amaz3.jpgsee map] . Mattievich is a physicist at Rio de Janeiro University.] Two centuries ago, Charles-Joseph de Grave argued that the Underworld visited by Odysseus was the islands at the mouth of the river Rhine. [Harv|Grave|1806.] A more extreme view, that the whole geography of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" can be mapped on the coasts of the northern Atlantic, occasionally surfaces. According to this, Troy is in southern England, Telemachus's journey is in southern Spain, and Odysseus was wandering the Atlantic coast. [Harv|Cailleux|1879; Harv|Wilkens|1990; [http://www.trojan-war.co.uk/trojan-war.jpgsee map] . Wilkens supposes that the oral poetry underlying the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" was originally Celtic (see "Where Troy Once Stood").] Finally, a recent publication argues that Homeric geography is to be found in the sky, and that the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" can be decoded as a star map. [Harv|Johnson|1999]

Notes

ee also

*Homer
*Homeric scholarship
*Odyssey

External links

Ancient sources

* [http://classics.mit.edu/Apollonius/argon.html Apollonius, "Argonautica"]
* [http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Hdt.+4.177 Herodotus, "History" 4.177]
* [http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/odyssey.html Homer, "Odyssey"]
* [http://thriceholy.net/Texts/Moon.html Plutarch, "Concerning the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon"]
* Strabo, "Geography" [http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Strabo/1B1*.html 1.2.1-1.2.23] , [http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Strabo/1B2*.html 1.2.24-1.2.40]
* Thucydides, "History" [http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0200:book=1:chapter=25:section=1 1.25] , [http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0200:book=3:chapter=88:section=1 3.88] , [http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0200:book=6:chapter=2:section=1 6.2] , also in Greek [http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Thuc.+1.25 1.25] , [http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Thuc.+3.88 3.88] , [http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0199:book=6:chapter=2:section=1 6.2]

Modern views

* [http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~jburgess/rop/od.voyage.html Jonathan Burgess's page on the travels of Odysseus]
* [http://jean.cuisenier.online.fr/odysseus/index.html Jean Cuisenier's attempt to find Odysseus' route]

Maps

*"The World according to Homer, B.C. 1000" in Atlas of Ancient & Classical Geography. Revised ed. (London: Dent, 1910)
* [http://www.classics.upenn.edu/myth/homer/media/odybig.jpg"The World of Homer"] (based on V. Bérard) from A. A. M. van der Heyden, H. H. Scullard, Atlas of the classical world (London: Nelson, 1959)
* [http://www.geocities.com/sample_image/amaz3.jpgMap representing Homer's Nekyia according to Enrico Mattievich]
* [http://www.trojan-war.co.uk/trojan-war.jpgMap of the geography of the Odyssey based on the ideas of Iman Wilkens]

Bibliography

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*Harvard reference | Surname=Obregon | Given=E. | Title=Ulysses Airborne | Publisher= | Place= | Year=1971 | ISBN=
*Harvard reference | Surname=Romm | Given=James | Title=The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought | Publisher=Princeton University Press | Place=Princeton | Year=1994 | ISBN=
*Harvard reference | Surname=Roth | Given=Hal | Title=We Followed Odysseus | Publisher= | Place= | Year=2000 | ISBN=
*Harvard reference | Surname=Severin | Given=Tim | Authorlink=Tim Severin | Title=The Ulysses Voyage: Sea Search for the Odyssey | Publisher= | Place= | Year=1987 | ISBN=
*Harvard reference | Surname=Simpson | Given=R. Hope | Surname2=Lazenby | Given2=J. F. | Title=The Catalogue of Ships in Homer's Iliad | Publisher=Oxford University Press | Place=Oxford | Year=1970 | ISBN=
*Harvard reference | Surname=Stanford | Given=W. B. | Authorlink=William Bedell Stanford | Title=The Odyssey of Homer | Publisher=Macmillan | Place=London | Year=1947
*Harvard reference | Surname=Stanford | Given=W. B. | Surname2=Luce | Given2=J. V. | Title=The Quest for Odysseus | Publisher=Praeger | Place=New York | Year=1974 | ISBN=
*Harvard reference | Surname=Voss | Given=Johann Heinrich | Authorlink=Johann Heinrich Voß | Title=Alte Weltkunde | Publisher= | Place=Jena, Stuttgart | Year=1804 | ISBN=
*Harvard reference | Surname=Wilkens | Given=Iman | Authorlink=Where Troy Once Stood | Title=Where Troy Once Stood | Publisher=Rider | Place=London | Year=1990 | ISBN=
*Harvard reference | Surname=Wolf | Given=A. | Surname2=Wolf | Given2=H.-H. | Title=Die wirkliche Reise des Odysseus | Publisher=Langenmüller | Place=München | Year=1983 | ISBN=