ODYSSEUS UNBOUND. The search for Homer's Ithaca. By Robert Bittlestone. 618pp.
Cambridge University Press. Pounds 25 (US $40). - 0 521 85357 5
In the Ninth Book of Homer's Odyssey, washed up in Phaeacia in the course of his long journey home from the Trojan War, Odysseus describes his native land to his host, King Alcinoos. He hails, he explains, from "clear-seen Ithaca . .
. lying low in the sea", the westernmost ("the furthest towards the dark") of a group of islands, which also includes "Doulichion, Same (or 'Samos') and wooded Zacynthos".
We can infer more about the layout and location of Ithaca from other Homeric references. To judge, for example, from the detailed account of how Odysseus' son, Telemachos, set out from the island to visit old King Nestor in Pylos, Ithaca's harbour was so placed that ships could leave it "driven by a strong following wind from the west". Then again, when Telemachos returns, his mother's suitors lay an ambush for him on an island with two harbours, "in the straits between Ithaca and rugged Samos".
The trouble is that none of this matches up at all convincingly with the characteristics of the island off the west coast of Greece that has been called Ithaca in modern (and later classical) times. That island is certainly one of a group -with Lefkas, Cephalonia and Zacynthos. But it lies to the north-east of the others, and is by no stretch of the imagination the westernmost. Besides, no ship could easily be driven out of any of its major harbours by a following west wind, and there is no sign of any plausible off-shore island from which the suitors could have launched their ambush. This is the nub of the long-running "Ithaca problem", which has prompted a range of more or less likely solutions (and some of them very less likely) over the past 400 years.
Most readers and critics have concluded that Homeric geographical hints are not to be taken a la lettre; that Homer's Ithaca is the same as our Ithaca -but that the details given in the Odyssey of its topography are as much fantasy or literary construction as they are accurate description. True, some of the poem's scene- setting is very vivid; but vividness is no guarantee of documentary accuracy.
After all, how was "Homer" (or whoever composed or wrote the Odyssey) supposed to known the exact layout of Ithaca, given that the poem is usually argued to have taken shape somewhere on the coast of Asia Minor? This is the most reasonable, albeit unexciting, solution to the Ithaca problem and it is, in my experience, what most students of Homer think.
Much more eye-catching have been those solutions which suggest that Homer's Ithaca is not identical with our own. There has been an elaborate game of "musical islands" among the four in the group, with the name of (Homeric) Ithaca being ascribed to Cephalonia or parts of it, as well as to the northernmost island of Lefkas. Further afield, and sometimes well beyond the lunatic fringe, Odysseus' home -as Robert Bittlestone notes in his new assault on the question, Odysseus Unbound -has been placed in Cambridgeshire, America and the Ukraine. The most influential of the theories to take us beyond the Ionian Islands themselves is that of Samuel Butler in The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897). Butler claimed that Homer's geography was largely drawn from the area around Trapani in Sicily, and that in particular "the lofty and rugged island of Marettimo" (conveniently the westernmost of the small group of Aegadean Islands) "did duty in the writer's mind for Ithaca".
