page_title: Geography of the Odyssey
section_title: Geography of Odysseus's narrative
hierarchical_section_title: Geography of the Odyssey / Geography of Odysseus's narrative
caption_attribution_description: English: Homer's conception of the world during the Heroic era. From The Challenger Reports (summary), 1895
context_page_description: Events in the main sequence of the Odyssey take place in the Peloponnese and in what are now called the Ionian Islands. Incidental mentions of Troy and its house, Phoenicia, Egypt, and Crete hint at geographical knowledge equal to, or perhaps slightly more extensive than that of the Iliad. However, scholars both ancient and modern are divided as to whether or not any of the places visited by Odysseus were real.
  The geographer Strabo and many others came down squarely on the skeptical side: he reported what the great geographer Eratosthenes had said in the late third century BCE: "You will find the scene of Odysseus's wanderings when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of winds."
context_section_description: 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 Scheria, 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.
caption: "The World according to Homer", according to an 1895 map.
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