Walk the Odyssey, Troy to Ithaca

The longest way home

The war is over by the first page. What is left is a man trying to sail home to an island he can nearly see, and taking ten years about it, largely because he cannot stop announcing his own name. Four thousand miles, by the longest route anyone has ever taken.

Homer gives no distances and no coordinates, and people have argued about where Odysseus actually sailed since antiquity. Bematist follows the places tradition settled on: the Cicones on the Thracian coast, the Lotus-Eaters in North Africa, the Cyclops in Sicily, Scylla and Charybdis in the Strait of Messina, the Phaeacians on Corfu. The result is a real route across a real sea, drawn on a real map.

It is also a strange shape for a journey. Ithaca is only a few hundred miles from Troy, and Odysseus comes within sight of it early on before the winds blow him back. Seven of his ten years are spent on a single island, going nowhere. Samuel Butler's prose translation keeps it plain and quick, which suits a book you read a stop at a time.