The Odyssey Map: Odysseus’s Journey Home, Scene by Scene
After the fall of Troy, Odysseus set out for Ithaca with twelve ships. He came home ten years later, alone, having lost every ship and every man. This map follows him stop by stop, from the Cyclops’s cave to Circe’s island, past the Sirens and between Scylla and Charybdis, with a 3D scene of each episode. Press play to sail it.
6,660 km mapped17 episodes10 years12 ships → 0
Map of Odysseus’s Journey
- Route from recorded positions
- Reconstructed or uncertain track
- Over ice, overland or up a river
- 1Numbered stop (see the itinerary)
- Ship on the map: oared ship with a single square sail (ancient and medieval), sailing as a fleet of 12, four drawn
- Ships of the fleet lost: 11 at stop 9, 1 at stop 16
- Odysseus on the mast and keel
- Odysseus’s raft
- Phaeacian ship
- Telemachus
- Shown as she gets there: the storm at stop 3, the storm at stop 7, the storm at stop 16
- The ship goes down at stop 16: play the voyage, or open the stop, to watch
Each episode opens in 3D, with its story read aloud, as the voyage reaches it. Tap a numbered stop to open its episode.
The route follows the places most often proposed, after the ancient geographers and Victor Bérard; dashed legs join places that are a matter of interpretation. Lines are drawn by YearMaps at sea around Natural Earth coastlines. Where the places were.
Three Things to Know Before You Sail
It is a myth with real edges
Troy, Thrace, Cape Malea, Pylos, Sparta and Ithaca are real. Between Malea and home, Odysseus sails into a world of giants, witches and monsters that no ancient writer outside the poem records. Where those places lie has been argued since antiquity.
The story is told out of order
The poem begins in the tenth year, with his son Telemachus and with Odysseus stranded on Calypso’s island. The adventures from Troy onwards come as a flashback, told by Odysseus himself at a feast. This map puts them back in order.
A god is against him
Blinding the Cyclops earns Odysseus the anger of Poseidon, god of the sea, who wrecks him at every chance. Athena, on his side, argues his case among the gods until Zeus lets him go home.
How the Odyssey Is Told: the 24 Books
| Books | Part | Where | What happens |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1–4 | The Telemachy | Ithaca, Pylos, Sparta | Twenty years after Odysseus left for Troy, suitors besiege his wife Penelope. His son Telemachus sails off for news of him. |
| 5–8 | Calypso and the Phaeacians | Ogygia, Scheria | The gods free Odysseus from Calypso. He is wrecked on Scheria and welcomed at the court of King Alcinous. |
| 9–12 | The wanderings (the Apologoi) | Troy to Ogygia | At the Phaeacian feast Odysseus tells, as a flashback, everything that happened since Troy: almost all the adventures on this map. |
| 13–24 | The return | Ithaca | Home in disguise, he tests his household, wins the contest of the bow, kills the suitors and is reunited with Penelope and his father, Laertes. |
The Journey, Episode by Episode
In the order they happened. Quotations are from Samuel Butler’s prose translation (1900), which uses the Roman names: Ulysses for Odysseus, Jove for Zeus, Neptune for Poseidon, Minerva for Athena.
1Book 8, 9 · Troy (Ilium)
The fall of Troy
The voyage starts where the Iliad ends. After ten years of siege the Greeks take Troy by the trick Odysseus devised: the wooden horse, filled with soldiers and left outside the walls as an offering. Odysseus loads his share of the plunder into twelve ships and sails for Ithaca, an easy run of a few days. It takes him ten years.
“Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy.” — Book 1
⏳ The war lasted ten years
Where: Hisarlik in north-west Turkey, the site excavated since the 1870s and listed by UNESCO.
Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo · Public domain · Commons 2Book 9 · Ismarus
The raid on the Cicones
The first landfall is a pirate raid. Odysseus sacks Ismarus, kills the men and shares out the women and the plunder. He wants to leave at once, but his crews stay to feast on the beach. By morning the Cicones of the inland country have gathered, and by sunset they have driven the Greeks back to their ships. Odysseus spares the priest Maron, who gives him the strong wine that will later put the Cyclops to sleep.
“The Cicons got the better of us, and we lost half a dozen men from every ship we had; so we got away with those that were left.” — Book 9
⏳ One dayLost: Six men from each ship, 72 in all
Where: The coast of Thrace near Maroneia in north-east Greece; Ismarus is a real place known to later Greek writers.
Francesco Primaticcio · CC0 · Commons 3Book 9 · Cape Malea and Cythera
Blown off course at Cape Malea
Rounding Cape Malea, a day or two from home, the fleet meets the north wind and a contrary current and is swept out past the island of Cythera. For nine days the ships run before the storm. The classicist W. B. Stanford called this the point where Odysseus "leaves the sphere of Geography and enters Wonderland": every place after it, until Ithaca, is a matter of opinion.
“I should have got home at that time unharmed had not the North wind and the currents been against me as I was doubling Cape Malea.” — Book 9
⏳ Nine days adrift
Where: The south-east tip of the Peloponnese, a cape sailors feared throughout antiquity.
Rijksmuseum · CC0 · Commons 4Book 9 · Land of the Lotophagi
The Lotus-eaters
On the tenth day they reach a people who live on the fruit of the lotus. The Lotus-eaters mean no harm: they simply share their food, and the three scouts who eat it lose all wish to go home. Odysseus drags them weeping to the ships, ties them under the benches and puts to sea before anyone else can taste it.
“They gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home.” — Book 9
⏳ A short stop for water
Where: Djerba, an island off southern Tunisia, as Polybius and Strabo placed it; nine days’ sail from Malea fits a crossing to North Africa.
Also proposed: A headland in Libya (Herodotus; Tim Severin); The Gulf of Sidra (the Obregons).
Rijksmuseum · CC0 · Commons 5Book 9 · Land of the Cyclopes
Polyphemus the Cyclops
Exploring with twelve men, Odysseus enters the cave of Polyphemus, a one-eyed giant son of Poseidon, who rolls a great stone across the door and eats six of them over two days. Odysseus gets him drunk on Maron’s wine, tells him his name is "Noman", and drives a sharpened olive stake into his eye. When the other Cyclopes come running, Polyphemus shouts that Noman is killing him, so they go away. The Greeks escape tied under his rams. Sailing off, Odysseus boasts his real name, and the blinded giant prays to his father, Poseidon, whose anger follows Odysseus for the rest of the poem.
“My name is Noman; this is what my father and mother and my friends have always called me.” — Book 9
Lost: Six men
Where: Eastern Sicily under Mount Etna, the identification of Thucydides and Strabo; the rocks off Aci Trezza are still called the Isles of the Cyclopes.
Also proposed: Posillipo near Naples (Victor Bérard); Marsala in western Sicily (Ernle Bradford); Around Trapani in western Sicily (Samuel Butler); The Balearic Islands (the Obregons).
Arnold Böcklin · Public domain · Commons 6Book 10 · Aeolia
Aeolus and the bag of winds
Aeolus, whom Zeus has made keeper of the winds, entertains them for a month. As a parting gift he ties every wind but the west wind into an ox-hide bag, binds it with silver thread and stows it aboard. For nine days the west wind carries the fleet straight home.
“He put the sack in the ship and bound the mouth so tightly with a silver thread that not even a breath of a side-wind could blow from any quarter.” — Book 10
⏳ A month as guests
Where: Lipari in the Aeolian Islands north of Sicily, after Strabo. Homer’s Aeolia is a floating island ringed by a wall of bronze.
Also proposed: Stromboli (Victor Bérard); Ustica (Ernle Bradford); The Balearic Islands (the Obregons).
Bartolomeo Crivellari · CC0 · Commons 7Book 10 · Off Ithaca
So close to home: the bag is opened
On the tenth day the men can see Ithaca. Odysseus, who has held the steering oar the whole way, falls asleep. Sure the bag is full of gold, the crew untie it, and the winds burst out and blow the fleet all the way back to Aeolia. Aeolus will not help a man the gods so plainly hate.
“We got so close in that we could see the stubble fires burning, and I, being then dead beat, fell into a light sleep.” — Book 10
Where: The open sea west of Ithaca, close enough to see the shepherds’ fires.
Rijksmuseum · CC0 · Commons 9Book 10 · Telepylus, city of Lamus
The Laestrygonians
After six days of rowing they reach a harbour closed in by sheer cliffs. The captains moor inside; Odysseus, wary, ties up outside. His scouts meet the king’s daughter at a spring, and then the king, Antiphates, who eats one of them. The Laestrygonians, giants and cannibals, crowd the clifftops and smash the ships with boulders. Odysseus cuts his cable and rows away. Every other ship is lost.
“They threw vast rocks at us from the cliffs as though they had been mere stones, and I heard the horrid sound of the ships crunching up against one another.” — Book 10
Lost: Eleven of the twelve ships, with their crews
Where: Bonifacio, at the southern tip of Corsica, whose harbour runs between high cliffs behind a narrow mouth exactly as Homer describes; Bérard put the Laestrygonians across the strait in northern Sardinia, Michel Gall here.
Also proposed: Sicily (the ancient Greek identification); Formia in Latium (the Roman tradition, followed by Horace and Pliny).
Römischer Meister um 125 v. Chr. · Public domain · Commons 10Book 10, 12 · Aeaea
Circe
The one ship reaches the island of Circe, a goddess and witch. She feeds half the crew a drugged meal and turns them into pigs with a stroke of her wand. Hermes gives Odysseus the herb moly, which protects him from her spell; she frees his men and becomes his lover. They stay a full year. When they finally ask to leave, Circe tells Odysseus he must first sail to the house of Hades.
“She turned them into pigs by a stroke of her wand, and shut them up in her pig-styes.” — Book 10
⏳ A yearLost: Elpenor, who fell from the roof
Where: Monte Circeo on the coast of Lazio, a headland that was once an island. The link with Circe goes back at least to the late 6th century BC.
Also proposed: Ischia in the Bay of Naples (the Obregons); The coast of north-west Greece, where Tim Severin put the later episodes.
John William Waterhouse · Public domain · Commons 11Book 11 · The house of Hades, on the stream of Ocean
The land of the dead
Following Circe’s directions, Odysseus beaches his ship at the edge of the world, digs a trench and fills it with the blood of two sheep. The ghosts swarm up to drink. He meets Elpenor, the prophet Tiresias, who warns him never to touch the Sun-god’s cattle, his own mother, who died of grief while he was away, and the shades of Agamemnon, Achilles and Ajax.
“I cut the throats of the two sheep and let the blood run into the trench, whereon the ghosts came trooping up from Erebus.” — Book 11
⏳ One day’s sail and a night
Where: Lake Avernus by Cumae on the Bay of Naples, where Virgil’s Aeneas later went down to the dead and where Bérard placed Homer’s Nekyia.
Also proposed: The Necromanteion on the river Acheron in north-west Greece (Pausanias; Tim Severin); The country of the Cimmerians on the Black Sea (Strabo).
Alessandro Allori · Public domain · Commons 13Book 12 · The Sirens’ island
The Sirens
Circe has warned him: the Sirens sing so sweetly that sailors steer for them and die, and their meadow is heaped with bones. Odysseus stops his crew’s ears with beeswax and has them tie him upright to the mast, so that he alone can hear. When the song begins he begs to be untied; his men only bind him tighter, and row on.
“Take me and bind me to the crosspiece half way up the mast; bind me as I stand upright, with a bond so fast that I cannot possibly break away.” — Book 12
Where: Li Galli, three islets off Positano on the Amalfi coast, known in antiquity as the Sirenussae.
Also proposed: Cape Peloro by the Strait of Messina (an alternative Strabo gives); The coast of Lucania (Victor Bérard); Naples itself (Strabo).
John William Waterhouse · Public domain · Commons 14Book 12 · The Wandering Rocks, Scylla and Charybdis
Scylla and Charybdis
Two rocks a bowshot apart. Under the lower one the whirlpool Charybdis swallows the sea three times a day; in a cave in the higher one lives Scylla, a monster with six long necks and six heads, each with three rows of teeth. Better to lose six men than the whole ship, Circe advised. Odysseus hugs the Scylla side, and as they stare at the whirlpool her heads strike down and carry off six of his crew.
“Three times in the day does she vomit forth her waters, and three times she sucks them down again.” — Book 12
Lost: Six men
Where: The Strait of Messina between Sicily and Calabria, first named by Polybius; the town of Scilla stands on the Calabrian side.
Also proposed: Cape Skilla at the mouth of the Ambracian Gulf (Tim Severin).
Henry Fuseli · Public domain · Commons 15Book 12 · Thrinacia
The cattle of the Sun
Both Tiresias and Circe warned him to leave the Sun-god’s cattle alone. Odysseus wants to sail past the island; his exhausted men insist on landing. Then the wind blows from the south for a month. When the food runs out and Odysseus goes off to pray and falls asleep, Eurylochus persuades the crew to kill the best of the cattle. The hides crawl and the meat lows on the spits. Helios demands revenge.
“You will now come to the Thrinacian island, and here you will see many herds of cattle and flocks of sheep belonging to the sun-god.” — Book 12
⏳ A month stormbound
Where: Sicily, whose ancient name Trinacria (three capes) echoes Homer’s Thrinacia; the stop is at Cape Pachino, the southernmost of the three.
Rijksmuseum · CC0 · Commons 16Book 12 · The open sea
Zeus’s thunderbolt
As soon as the island drops out of sight, Zeus sends a black cloud and a westerly gale. The mast comes down and crushes the helmsman; a thunderbolt sets the ship spinning in fire and sulphur, and the men are thrown into the sea, "looking like so many sea-gulls". Odysseus lashes the mast to the keel and rides out the storm on them alone.
“Then Jove let fly with his thunderbolts, and the ship went round and round, and was filled with fire and brimstone as the lightning struck it.” — Book 12
Lost: The last ship and every man aboard but Odysseus
Where: Out of sight of land after leaving Thrinacia.
18Book 1, 5, 7 · Ogygia
Seven years with Calypso
The current takes him back through Charybdis, where he saves himself by clinging to the fig tree above the whirlpool, and then he drifts for nine days to Ogygia. The nymph Calypso keeps him there for seven years and offers to make him immortal. He spends his days on the shore weeping for home, until the gods send Hermes to order his release. Calypso gives him tools, and he builds a raft.
“I stayed with Calypso seven years straight on end, and watered the good clothes she gave me with my tears during the whole time.” — Book 7
⏳ Seven years
Where: Gozo in the Maltese islands, as Callimachus identified it; the cave above Ramla Bay is shown as Calypso’s.
Also proposed: Perejil island off Ceuta, by the Strait of Gibraltar (Victor Bérard); Malta (Ernle Bradford); In the Atlantic (Strabo; Plutarch, west of Britain).
Arnold Böcklin · Public domain · Commons 19Book 5–8, 13 · Scheria
Nausicaa and the Phaeacians
After seventeen days on the raft Poseidon sees him and smashes it with a storm; he swims for two days and crawls ashore half-dead. Princess Nausicaa, washing clothes by the river, takes him to the palace of her father, Alcinous. At the feast the bard sings of the wooden horse, Odysseus weeps, and finally says who he is. His story of the wanderings (Books 9 to 12) is told here, in the Phaeacian hall.
“After a perilous voyage of twenty days upon a raft he is to reach fertile Scheria, the land of the Phaeacians.” — Book 5
⏳ Twenty days at sea, then a few days as a guest
Where: Corfu (ancient Corcyra), the identification of Thucydides, Callimachus and Apollonius; local tradition puts Odysseus’s landing at Ermones beach.
Also proposed: Cyprus (the Obregons); In the Atlantic (Strabo).
Jacob Jordaens · Public domain · Commons 20Book 13–14 · Ithaca
Home to Ithaca
The Phaeacians carry him home overnight and leave him asleep on the beach of Phorcys with their gifts; on their way back Poseidon turns their ship to stone. Athena lifts the mist from the island, and Odysseus kisses the soil of home. Together they hide his treasure in the cave of the Nymphs, and she turns him into an old beggar, wrinkled and in rags, so that no one will know him. He climbs to the hut of his loyal swineherd, Eumaeus, and waits there for his son.
“Then Ulysses rejoiced at finding himself again in his own land, and kissed the bounteous soil.” — Book 13
⏳ Twenty years after he left
Where: The island of Ithaki (Ithaca) in the Ionian Sea, landing at the bay of Phorcys near Vathy.
Also proposed: The Paliki peninsula of Kefalonia (Robert Bittlestone, Odysseus Unbound, 2005); Lefkada (Wilhelm Dörpfeld).
Rijksmuseum · CC0 · Commons
Meanwhile: the Journey of Telemachus
The first four books follow Odysseus’s son, a baby when his father sailed for Troy. His voyage happens while Odysseus is still on Calypso’s island; the map plays it last, from Ithaca, as a second ship, and ends where father and son meet.
21Book 1–3, 15
Telemachus at Pylos
The poem opens not with Odysseus but with his son. Telemachus, now a young man, borrows a ship and twenty rowers and slips away from the suitors to look for news of his father. At Pylos he finds the people on the beach sacrificing black bulls to Poseidon, and old King Nestor tells him what he knows of the voyages home from Troy.
“The people of Pylos were gathered on the sea shore to offer sacrifice of black bulls to Neptune lord of the Earthquake.” — Book 3
Where: The Palace of Nestor at Ano Englianos above Navarino Bay, whose Linear B tablets name it Pu-ro, Pylos.
Picture: Rijksmuseum · CC0 · Commons
22Book 4, 15
Telemachus at Sparta
With Nestor’s son Pisistratus, Telemachus drives over the mountains to Menelaus and Helen, back from Troy and living in a palace that dazzles him. Menelaus tells how he caught the shape-shifting sea-god Proteus in Egypt and learned that Odysseus is alive, held on Calypso’s island. In Book 15 Athena sends Telemachus home, and he dodges the suitors’ ambush to meet his father at the swineherd’s hut.
“Look, Pisistratus, man after my own heart, see the gleam of bronze and gold—of amber, ivory, and silver.” — Book 4
Where: The valley of the Eurotas around Sparta, reached by chariot through Pherae (Kalamata).
Picture: Rijksmuseum · CC0 · Commons
Together Again: Odysseus, Telemachus and Penelope
The two journeys meet on Ithaca, and the last nine books tell how father and son win back their house. On the map it is the final stop, told in five parts.
24Book 16–24 · Ithaca: Eumaeus’s hut and the palace
Father, son and Penelope: the house won back
Telemachus slips past the suitors’ ambush and comes to the swineherd’s hut, where the old beggar is waiting. When they are alone, Athena gives Odysseus back his own looks, and he tells his son who he is; the two weep together. Disguised again, he goes to the palace and is mocked in his own hall. Penelope offers to marry whichever suitor can string her husband’s bow and shoot an arrow through twelve axes. None of them can; the beggar does. Then he tears off his rags, and with Telemachus, Eumaeus and the cowherd Philoetius he kills the suitors. Penelope tests him with the secret of their bed, built round the trunk of a living olive tree, and at last she knows him. In the final book he finds his old father, Laertes, and Athena makes peace in Ithaca.
“I am no god, why should you take me for one? I am your father, on whose account you grieve and suffer so much at the hands of lawless men.” — Book 16
Where: Ithaca. Homer puts Eumaeus’s pigs by the Raven’s Rock and the spring of Arethusa, which local tradition finds in the south of the island; the palace of Odysseus has been looked for on the hill of Aetos above Vathy and at the “School of Homer” near Stavros in the north.
Where the Ten Years Went
| Where | How long | Book |
|---|---|---|
| Ismarus | A day of fighting | 9 |
| From Cape Malea to the Lotus-eaters | Nine days adrift | 9 |
| The Cyclops’s cave | Two nights and a day | 9 |
| Aeolia | A month | 10 |
| Aeolia to within sight of Ithaca | Nine days and nights | 10 |
| Aeolia to Telepylus | Six days and nights rowing | 10 |
| Aeaea, with Circe | A year | 10 |
| Thrinacia | A month, stormbound | 12 |
| Adrift on the mast and keel | Nine days | 7, 12 |
| Ogygia, with Calypso | Seven years | 7 |
| Building and sailing the raft | Four days building, seventeen sailing, two swimming | 5 |
| Scheria | Three days | 6–8, 13 |
The stays Homer gives add up to a little over eight years, most of them with Calypso; the poem does not account for every month of the ten.
Twelve Ships to None
- 2
Ismarus
Six men from every ship (72)
- 5
The Cyclops’s cave
Six men, eaten
- 9
Telepylus
Eleven ships and their crews
- 10
Aeaea
Elpenor, who fell from Circe’s roof
- 14
Scylla
Six men
- 16
Zeus’s thunderbolt
The last ship and every man left but Odysseus
Homer never gives the size of the crews. Odysseus reaches Ithaca on a Phaeacian ship, the only man of his company to come home.
Where Did Odysseus Really Go? The Theories
Ancient readers were divided. The geographer Eratosthenes, in the 3rd century BC, scoffed that you would find the scene of Odysseus’s wanderings when you found the cobbler who sewed up the bag of winds. Others took the poem as a record of real voyages. Thucydides and Callimachus already accepted the identifications that became standard: the Cyclopes and Laestrygonians in Sicily, Aeolus in the Aeolian Islands, Scheria on Corfu and Ogygia on Gozo.
Polybius (2nd century BC) argued that nine days’ sail from Cape Malea could not reach the Atlantic, put the Lotus-eaters on Djerba, and was the first to name the Strait of Messina as Scylla and Charybdis. Strabo, writing around the time of Augustus, gave the fullest ancient list, though he imagined Calypso’s and the Phaeacians’ islands far out in the Atlantic.
Among modern scholars, Victor Bérard mapped the whole voyage in the western Mediterranean as the record of Phoenician sailing routes, and his identifications were taken into the standard atlases of the classical world; this map follows them in most places. Ernle Bradford, a sailor, proposed Marsala for the Cyclopes, Ustica for Aeolus and Malta for Calypso. Samuel Butler, whose translation is quoted here, argued that the poem was written by a young Sicilian woman and set around Trapani. Tim Severin sailed a replica Bronze Age galley from Troy in 1985, following the sailing directions in the poem, and placed many of the later episodes on the north-west coast of Greece, with the land of the dead at the Necromanteion on the river Acheron. Robert Bittlestone has argued that Homer’s Ithaca was the Paliki peninsula of Kefalonia, once a separate island.
Many classicists side with Eratosthenes: after Cape Malea, W. B. Stanford wrote, Odysseus “leaves the sphere of Geography and enters Wonderland”. The links between the wonders and real places, such as Circe’s with Monte Circeo, were made centuries after the poem, as Greek colonists in Italy and Sicily gave their new coasts a heroic past.
The Odyssey on Screen
Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey, released by Universal in July 2026, has sent many readers back to the poem. This map follows Homer’s text, not any film: the episodes, their order and the places proposed for them are those of the poem and of the scholars who have tried to map it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What route did Odysseus take home from Troy?
In the usual reading he sailed from Troy to Ismarus in Thrace, was blown past Cape Malea to the Lotus-eaters (Djerba, Tunisia), then went north to the Cyclops in Sicily, Aeolus in the Aeolian Islands, the Laestrygonians (Bonifacio), Circe (Monte Circeo), the Underworld (Cumae), the Sirens (Li Galli), Scylla and Charybdis (Strait of Messina), Thrinacia (Sicily), Calypso’s Ogygia (Gozo) and Scheria (Corfu), and home to Ithaca.
How long did it take Odysseus to get home?
Ten years. Added to the ten years of the Trojan War, he was away from Ithaca for twenty. Seven of the ten were spent on Calypso’s island and one with Circe.
How many ships did Odysseus have?
Twelve. The Laestrygonians destroyed eleven of them in their harbour, and Zeus’s thunderbolt broke up the last one after the crew ate the cattle of the Sun. Odysseus reached Calypso’s island alone on the wreckage.
How many of Odysseus’s men survived?
None. Every one of his companions died on the way home: at Ismarus, in the Cyclops’s cave, at Telepylus, on Circe’s roof, to Scylla, and finally in the shipwreck off Thrinacia. Odysseus came home alone, on a Phaeacian ship.
Where is Ithaca?
The island of Ithaki (Ithaca) in the Ionian Sea, landing at the bay of Phorcys near Vathy. Some scholars argue Homer’s Ithaca was elsewhere: The Paliki peninsula of Kefalonia (Robert Bittlestone, Odysseus Unbound, 2005); Lefkada (Wilhelm Dörpfeld).
Where was Calypso’s island, Ogygia?
Gozo in the Maltese islands, as Callimachus identified it; the cave above Ramla Bay is shown as Calypso’s. Other proposals: Perejil island off Ceuta, by the Strait of Gibraltar (Victor Bérard); Malta (Ernle Bradford); In the Atlantic (Strabo; Plutarch, west of Britain).
Were the places in the Odyssey real?
Troy, Ismarus, Cape Malea, Pylos, Sparta and Ithaca are real places. The wonders of Books 9–12 are not found in any source independent of the poem, and scholars have argued for two thousand years over whether they can be mapped at all. This map follows the identifications handed down from ancient geographers such as Polybius and Strabo, and shows the main alternatives for each.
In what order are the events of the Odyssey told?
Not in the order they happened. The poem opens in the tenth year with Telemachus (Books 1–4) and with Odysseus leaving Calypso (Book 5). He tells the earlier adventures, from Troy to Calypso, as a flashback at the Phaeacian court (Books 9–12). The map plays them in the order they happened.
Where were Scylla and Charybdis?
Since Polybius in the 2nd century BC they have been placed in the Strait of Messina, between Sicily and Calabria, where the town of Scilla stands on the Italian side and strong currents and eddies run through the narrows.
Where did Telemachus go?
In Books 1 to 4 Telemachus sails from Ithaca to Pylos to ask King Nestor for news of his father, then drives by chariot over the mountains to Sparta, where Menelaus tells him Odysseus is alive on Calypso’s island. He returns in Book 15 and meets his father at the swineherd’s hut.
How does the Odyssey end?
Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, reveals himself to Telemachus at the swineherd’s hut (Book 16). In his own hall he is the only one who can string his bow and shoot through twelve axes (Book 21); then, with Telemachus and two loyal herdsmen, he kills the suitors (Book 22). Penelope tests him with the secret of their bed, built round a living olive tree, and they are reunited (Book 23). In Book 24 he finds his father, Laertes, and Athena makes peace in Ithaca.