We've been wrong about Odysseus’s home for 3,000 years

Sometimes, the truth is hiding in plain sight.

That would seem to be the case for Ithaca, the fabled homeland of Odysseus from Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey. For thousands of years, virtually everyone assumed Odysseus was trying to get back to an island. But groundbreaking new research suggests Ithaca was no island at all—and that Homer himself was trying to tell us that.

Read on to learn about the epic quest upending everything we thought we knew about one of the most famous hero’s journeys of all time.

— Maddie

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For thousands of years, Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey has captured the human imagination. The story of Odysseus finding his way back to his homeland of Ithaca after fighting the Trojan War has resonated across cultures and time. The success of Christopher Nolan’s recent star-studded adaptation—now the top-grossing R-rated movie ever—further underscores the universal appeal of this deeply human tale about love, sacrifice, and a pretty annoying dad battling monsters and deities to return to his family.

But it’s not just ancient Greek war veterans who care about finding the fabled Ithaca. More than 20 years ago, scientists embarked on their own epic quest to determine the true location of Odysseus’s homeland. It’s a tale with fewer sea monsters and a lot more geophysical surveys than Homer’s Odyssey, which may explain why it hasn’t been optioned for film yet. Still, the latest plot twist is as movie-worthy as they come in the world of geology: Ithaca, long presumed to be an island by just about everyone, may have been something else entirely.

According to a classicist and a geologist who have studied the matter for decades, the latest scientific data doesn’t support the conclusion that Odysseus was trying to return to an island. And neither does the 3,000-year-old source material.

“There are two facts which are indisputable,” James Diggle, an emeritus professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Cambridge wrote last month in the online journal Antigone. “First, Homer never describes Ithaca as an island. Second, there is no evidence that Homer thought of Ithaca as an island.

Before we get into the scientific and textual evidence, a bit of geography is in order. After sailing to Troy (located in modern-day Turkey) to fight in the Trojan War, Odysseus attempts to return home to Ithaca, where he is king. Homer’s Ithaca sits somewhere in the Ionian sea off western Greece, where, according to descriptions in The Odyssey, it comprises part of a cluster of islands that include Kefalonia, Zakynthos, and Ithaki, as they are known on modern maps.

It would be reasonable to suppose that Ithaki is the same island Odysseus called Ithaca—and many readers have assumed just that over the years. But as Homer’s poem shows, it’s not so simple. In particular, scholars have spent centuries scratching their heads over Odysseus’s description of Ithaca to the Phaeacian king Alcinous.

Here is the translation from British businessman Robert Bittlestone’s 2005 book Odysseus Unbound: The Search for Homer’s Ithaca:

Bright Ithaca is my home: it has a mountain,

Leaf-quivering Neriton, far visible.

Around are many islands, close to each other,

Doulichion and Same and wooded Zacynthos.

Ithaca itself lies low, furthest to sea

Towards dusk; the rest, apart, face dawn and sun.

This description tells us that Ithaca is the westernmost landmass (facing “towards dusk”) amongst a series of islands that include Doulichion, Same, and Zacynthos. Same is an ancient name for the island of Kefalonia, which has a town called Sami on its eastern shoreline. Homer’s Zacynthos corresponds to the present-day island with the same name.

But the description of Ithaca does not match modern-day Ithaki, which is the easternmost island in the cluster, and mountainous rather than low-lying. In his 2005 book, Bittlestone proposed an alternative location for Ithaca: modern-day Paliki, the low-lying western peninsula of Kefalonia. 

Paliki joins the rest of the island via a narrow land bridge. This land bridge, Bittlestone theorized, could have been a marine channel in the Late Bronze Age. To support his hypothesis, Bittlestone pointed to the Greek geographer Strabo’s account of the landscape from roughly the first century AD. Strabo wrote that “where the island [of Kefalonia] is narrowest it forms a low isthmus, so that it is often submerged from sea to sea.”

Bittlestone went on to propose that “Strabo’s channel” could have been filled in over the last several millennia by rock and landslides, which occur often in the tectonically active region. (Sitting right where the African continental plate smacks into the Eurasian one, the Ionian islands experience frequent earthquakes). After thousands of years of upheaval, Bittlestone theorized that the marine channel was lost, turning Homer’s island of Ithaca into a peninsula.

It’s a neat and tidy solution to an age-old geography puzzle. And beyond Strabo’s account, there’s other evidence backing it up. Medieval cartographers sometimes referred to Ithaki as Doulichion. What is more, a number of locations on Paliki match descriptions of Ithaca from the Odyssey.

But Diggle and geologist John Underhill, who helped Bittlestone flesh out the ideas and arguments in his book, wanted proof that Paliki was Homer’s island of Ithaca. And so they embarked on their own 20-year odyssey, collecting reams of geological data to determine whether the peninsula Paliki really was separated from Kefalonia by a seaway 3,000 years ago.

They now believe it was not. Writing in Antigone, Underhill explains that the latest scientific data—including airborne geophysical surveys, and analysis of microfossils contained in boreholes—shows that the valley connecting Paliki to the rest of Kefalonia was last submerged beneath the sea hundreds of thousands of years ago, not in the Late Bronze Age. 

But geological survey work also identified riverbeds that connect to a basin at the valley’s summit. During periods of heavy rainfall, that basin forms a freshwater lake or wetland that spills into ephemeral streams. Those streams flow to the ocean on both sides of the valley, effectively separating Paliki from Kefalonia when they’re active.

These new findings prompted Underhill and Diggle to re-examine Strabo’s description of the “low isthmus” that is “often submerged from sea to sea”. When they did, they realized they’d misinterpreted the ancient Greek geographer’s meaning. Underhill explains:

But if the marine channel hypothesis was wrong, does that mean that the ruins of Odysseus’s palace lie elsewhere? Not necessarily. Even if Paliki was never an island (or at least not recently), there is still ample evidence that Homer’s Ithaca was modern-day Paliki. So, was Homer wrong about the island part?

Diggle, the classicist, now believes that the mistake was ours. While virtually everybody who has ever read the Odyssey assumed Ithaca was an island, Homer never actually says that, a fact that has been hiding in plain sight for 3,000 years. Diggle writes that Homer and his characters typically refer to Ithaca as “land,” “native land,” or “country” but never an island per se. And while there are several instances in which readers might assume Homer is describing an island called Ithaca, on closer examination, he’s doing no such thing. 

For instance, Diggle writes:

So, the age-old question “which island was Homer’s Ithaca?” may have a faulty premise. If Underhill and Diggle are correct, Ithaca was no island at all, but the loosely-connected arm of a larger island that was periodically severed by heavy rainfall. 

Manel Ramos, a PhD student researching salt tectonics who has written about the scientific mystery surrounding Homer’s Ithaca, said that Underhill and Diggle’s conclusion that Paliki is occasionally cut off from the rest of Kefalonia by streams fits the data better than the marine channel hypothesis. 

“I never thought about that because I was thinking in black-and-white: It’s a marine island, or it’s just nothing,” Ramos told The Science of Fiction. “But this in-between [makes] more sense.”

The research, Ramos added, underscores why ancient descriptions of the land should be taken seriously, even if they’re buried within otherwise fantastical stories. The field of geology, he says, has its roots in everyday people going out into the world and writing down observations in simple, non-technical terms.

 “It’s something we need to take into account and respect,” he said.

Hopefully, the work that’s been done to rediscover Homer’s Ithaca will inspire more collaboration between natural scientists and experts in classical literature and mythology. After all, even words that have been poured over by generations of scholars still have secrets to reveal.

Maddie is a prolific science journalist. She is the former science editor of Gizmodo, founding editor of Earther, and runs The Science of Fiction blog, which explores the real world science behind your favorite fictional monsters, alien planets, galaxies far far away, and more.

@themadstone | maddiestonewriting.com

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