Places

The city the Iliad besieges, identified since 1822 with the mound of Hisarlık in north-western Türkiye and excavated continuously since 1870. The identification of the place is settled; what happened there is not.

Agamemnon's city, and the one Homeric capital that never had to be found: the citadel was visible above ground throughout antiquity and gives its name to the entire Bronze Age civilisation.

Nestor's kingdom, and the Homeric palace we can actually walk through: the Late Bronze Age complex at Ano Englianos, whose Linear B archive survived because the building burned.

Menelaus and Helen's kingdom. The valley is certain, the palace is not: Laconia has produced Mycenaean mansions and an early cult of Menelaus, but no palace to match Pylos or Mycenae.

A Catalogue-of-Ships city whose Homeric epithet is a literal description of what survives: walls so massive that later Greeks assumed giants had built them.

Minos' city in the Odyssey and the largest palace on Crete — an identification nobody disputes, attached to a civilisation the poems only half remember.

Where the fleet gathered before Troy — a real, agreed anchorage whose Homeric event is a portent, not a battle: the serpent and the sparrows that told the Greeks the war would last ten years.

The mountain the gods watch the war from, and a piece of real topography that anchors the Iliad's landscape: it is visible from Hisarlık, and the plain's rivers come off it.

The strait beside the war. The Achaean ships are beached on it, Achilles' funeral games are held by it, and its current is the most plausible economic reason for Troy to have existed at all.

The fixed point in the Ionian puzzle. Every reconstruction of Odysseus' kingdom, however radical, agrees on where Zacynthus is.

The hinge of the whole Odyssey. Rounding it, Odysseus is blown off course for ten years — and the poem's geography changes from a map to a story at exactly this point.

The far edge of the poems' real world. Menelaus is blown there and comes home rich; Odysseus' invented life stories go there too, because it is where a plausible lie about hard travel would go.

Where Menelaus is becalmed and wrestles the shape-shifting sea god Proteus. The island is certain; the distance Homer gives it is one of the clearest errors in the poems.

The island offshore from Troy: a staging point in the Iliad, a hiding place in the later tradition, and a reminder that the Troad's seascape is as checkable as its land.

The oracle of Zeus in the Epirote mountains, and one of the few Homeric institutions we can excavate: the same god, the same oak, the same valley.

Odysseus' home and the destination of the whole poem — and, awkwardly, one of its least secure locations. Modern Ithaki carries the name; the Odyssey's own description of the island fits it poorly.

The second island of Odysseus' kingdom, generally taken to be Kefalonia — the largest island in the group and the one with the most Mycenaean graves and the fewest Mycenaean buildings.

The one hazard in the wanderings that behaves like a real place: a narrow strait with a lethal tidal race on one side and cliffs on the other. Antiquity put it at Messina and never argued.

A real river with an underworld reputation, and the site most often confused with the entrance to Homer's Hades. The atlas keeps them apart: this place is here, that one is not.

The first stop out of Troy, and the only one Odysseus reaches by ordinary sailing: a Thracian town he sacks, and where his crew's refusal to leave costs six men per ship.

Where the Iliad starts. A priest of Apollo comes from Chryse to ransom his daughter, Agamemnon refuses, and the god's plague sets the whole poem in motion.

The island of Odysseus' kingdom that has simply gone missing. It sends more suitors than anywhere else and matches nothing on the modern map.

The islet where the suitors lie in wait for Telemachus — a place the poem describes precisely and the map has never produced.

Where Odysseus loses six men and blinds Polyphemus. Two traditions place it on volcanic coasts — Sicily and Campania — and the poem places it nowhere in particular, on purpose.

The floating island of Aeolus, keeper of the winds, whose gift Odysseus' crew open within sight of Ithaca. The Aeolian islands carry the name — which is evidence about Greek naming, not about the poem.

Where Odysseus loses eleven of his twelve ships in a single afternoon. The harbour is the most precisely described anchorage in the poem, and nobody can prove which one it is.

Circe's island, where the crew are turned into pigs and where Odysseus is told how to reach the dead. Roman tradition put it on a headland that only looks like an island.

Two singers on a flowery meadow surrounded by the bones of the men who stopped to listen. The poem gives no coordinates and one navigational instruction: wax in the ears, and tie the captain to the mast.

The island of the Sun's cattle, where the crew commit the sacrilege that kills them all. Antiquity read the name as Sicily; the poem describes a place that cannot be visited safely.

The first stop after the storm, and the first temptation: a people whose fruit makes visitors forget the way home. Ancient geography put them on the Libyan coast, at Djerba.

The island of the Phaeacians, the last stop before home and the most civilised place in the poem — a harbour city with walls, ships and a court, described in more social detail than anywhere Odysseus actually rules.

Calypso's island, where Odysseus spends seven of his ten years away. The Odyssey places it deliberately nowhere — 'the navel of the sea' — which is exactly why identifications of it are so revealing.

Where Odysseus goes to question the dead. The poem gives sailing directions to it — and they lead past the edge of the world, which is why this entry carries no coordinates at all.

The route Circe tells Odysseus not to take. They are described, named and then avoided — the only place in the poem that exists purely as an alternative.