The Physical World of Homer

Sources

Pillars of Herakles . Greeks in the eighth century (and perhaps even earlier) conceived the earth to be a flat disk, on which the landmass of Europe, Asia, and Africa was surrounded by a vast river called Ocean. Thus, the inhabited earth was thought to be an “island” encircled by water. In the eighth century b.c.e. Homer and Hesiod used this image to good effect in their poetry; early Greek maps also showed this characterization. Although the water encircling the inhabited world was described as a “river,” the ancient poets do not say what the boundary of Ocean was: early Ocean just stretches away into the measureless distance. The Greeks knew that the Strait of Gibraltar (the ancients called this spot the Pillars of Herakles) was to the west, and for them it marked the boundary between the known and the unknown; between ease and fear: the later poet Pindar terms what lay beyond the Pillars as “the untrodden sea.”

Geographical Reality . Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey appear to be a mixture of memories from the twelfth century (the time period in which the events of the stories are thought to take place), the eighth century (in which Homer himself lived), and some picturesque fantasy. The “Catalogue of Ships” in Book Two of the Iliad, in which all the Greek participants in the Trojan War are designated, names 152 towns or districts in Greece and 19 in Thrace and Asia Minor; most of the action of the lliad and the Odyssey takes place bounded by the island of Ithaca (Odysseus’s homeland) in the west, Troy in the east, and the island of Crete to the south. Homer, however, does describe some peoples and places further distant (possibly preserving some early travelers’ tales). Unknown lands and peoples held a fascination for the Greeks, and in Homer scholars find mention of Egypt and Libya, pygmies and Ethiopians in the south, Sidon and the Phoenicians to the east, and the Cimmerians to the north. As for Odysseus’s decade of extravagant wanderings after the end of the Trojan War, the Greeks themselves located these travels mainly in the western Mediterranean (perhaps reflecting the fact that pockets of Greek civilization were being established there at this time). However, most of the places mentioned in the Odyssey, (the island of the beautiful witch Circe, the land of the Lotus-Eaters, or the Underworld) have their basis in myth or folk tales and do not represent geographical reality.

Sources

James S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

Richard J. A. Talbert, ed., Atlas of Classical History (London & New York: Routledge, 1985).