Episodes

The Iliad opens with a local dispute over a captive woman from a nearby coastal town — and with nine days of arrows from Apollo.

1 · Competing theories · 9/12

Two hundred and seventy lines listing twenty-nine contingents, their commanders, their ship counts and their towns. It is the single densest piece of geography in Greek literature and the backbone of this atlas.

2 · Competing theories · 10/12

The Iliad's second setting: a beach of drawn-up ships, a ditch, a wall with gates, and the ground between it and the city where almost all the fighting happens.

1 · Competing theories · 8/12

Three circuits of the city at a run, past the springs where the women of Troy used to wash — the most topographically specific action scene in Greek epic.

1 · Competing theories · 10/12

An old king crosses the plain at night with a wagon of treasure to ask the man who killed his son for the body. The Iliad ends here, and so does its geography.

1 · Competing theories · 9/12

A young man arrives by ship at a sacrificing shore, is fed before he is questioned, and hears an old king talk. It is the most ordinary episode in the Odyssey and the easiest to place.

1 · Competing theories · 12/12

The strangest domestic scene in Homer: Helen, back in her husband's house, drugs the wine so the company can talk about Troy without weeping.

1 · Competing theories · 11/12

Becalmed off Egypt, Menelaus ambushes a shape-shifting god to ask the way home — and gets, instead, the news that his brother has been murdered.

1 · Competing theories · 8/12

The Odyssey's counter-example: the homecoming that goes wrong. Agamemnon reaches his own country and is killed at dinner, and the story shadows Odysseus' return from Book 1 onward.

2 · Competing theories · 9/12

Twenty suitors take a ship and wait in a strait for Telemachus to sail home. Six lines of text, one named islet, and an identification that has failed for two thousand years.

1 · Competing theories · 5/12

Seven years of the ten are spent here, and the poem spends them almost entirely off-stage. When the Odyssey finally opens on Ogygia in Book 5, it gives a lush description and no coordinates.

2 · Competing theories · 2/12

Odysseus washes ashore naked and is found by a princess doing laundry. What follows is the most civilised sequence in the poem — and the last place he visits before home.

1 · Competing theories · 5/12

The best-known episode of the war is not narrated in either poem: the Odyssey has a bard sing it in twenty lines. Its location is the most secure in the atlas, and its historicity the least.

2 · Competing theories · 7/12

The last piece of ordinary history in the Odyssey. Odysseus leaves Troy, sacks a Thracian town, loses seventy-two men to a counter-attack, and then the wind takes over.

1 · Competing theories · 9/12

Twenty-three lines, no violence, and the most quietly frightening danger in the poem: a fruit that makes men stop wanting to go home.

1 · Competing theories · 6/12

The most famous episode in Homer and one of the least locatable. Odysseus loses six men, blinds a giant, escapes under a ram, and then shouts his own name — which is what costs him ten years.

2 · Competing theories · 5/12

The cruellest episode in the poem: Ithaca is in sight, the crew open the bag their captain has guarded for nine days, and the winds blow them all the way back.

1 · Competing theories · 3/12

Eleven ships lost in a single harbour. The most precisely described anchorage in the Odyssey is also its deadliest, and nobody can prove where it is.

2 · Competing theories · 6/12

A year on an island with a goddess who turns men into pigs, and the only host in the wanderings who sends Odysseus on with instructions instead of injuries.

1 · Competing theories · 5/12

Book 11 sends Odysseus to the edge of the world to consult the prophet Tiresias. It is the one journey in the poem with detailed directions and no possible destination.

2 · Competing theories · 3/12

The one danger Odysseus survives by planning: wax in the crew's ears, his own body lashed to the mast, and the song heard by a man who cannot act on it.

1 · Competing theories · 4/12

A choice between losing six men and losing everyone. It is the only hazard in the wanderings whose physical behaviour matches a real place.

1 · Competing theories · 8/12

The crew's last mistake. Warned twice by name, trapped a month by contrary winds and starving, they kill the Sun's immortal cattle while their captain sleeps.

1 · Competing theories · 6/12

The Phaeacians sail Odysseus home asleep and leave him on his own shore with his treasure. The poem describes the landing place in unusual topographical detail — two headlands, an olive tree, a cave of the nymphs.

2 · Competing theories · 8/12