Volume 53, Number 19 · November 30, 2006
Finding Ithaca
By Peter Green
Rediscovering Homer: Inside the Origins of the Epic
by Andrew Dalby
Norton, 266 pp., $26.95
Odysseus Unbound: The Search for Homer's Ithaca
by Robert Bittlestone with James Diggle and John Underhill
Cambridge University Press, 598 pp., $40.00
Archaeology and the Emergence of Greece
by A.M. Snodgrass
Cornell University Press, 485 pp., $85.00; $39.95 (paper)
In 1911 the Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy circulated a long-meditated poem extolling the many benefits of travel as against those of arrival. The theme was no novelty (it had found its way into at least one proverb): indeed, the most striking thing about it was the particular journey that Cavafy had chosen as a model for his readers. He assumed, rightly, that they would instantly recognize and identify with the postwar return to his island kingdom of a warrior who, if he ever in fact existed (which many scholars doubt), set out nearly three millennia ago, and for much of his trip, even on his own account (possibly a tall story to entertain his hosts), was off the map in fairyland. As Andrew Dalby reminds us in his combative new survey, Rediscovering Homer, the immortalizing of Odysseus and his action-and-sex-filled progress from Troy to Ithaca was the work of an elusive genius, poised between the oral tradition and the advent of writing, who may or may not have been called Homer, whose dates and homeland are quite uncertain, who just possibly was not a person but a guild—but whose epic poem chronicling the return of Odysseus remains as fresh today as when it was first composed, and continues to spawn innumerable translations, many of them best sellers.
Review, 3900 words
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