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Mount Ida

Accepted10/12HighThe TroadHomeric name(s): Ἴδη

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.

Ida is the Iliad's vantage point. Zeus sits on Gargarus, one of its peaks, and the poem's weather, its rivers and its similes come down from the massif to the plain. It is also where Paris judged the goddesses, in a story the Iliad alludes to rather than tells.

The identification is unremarkable, which is the point: the Troad's physical geography — mountain, rivers, plain, strait, offshore islands — is coherent and checkable, and it is the strongest single argument that the poem's setting was known to whoever composed it.

Identifications proposed

  • Kaz Dağı (Mount Ida of the Troad)

    Proposed by: Strabo, Geography 13.1; standard in Troad topography

    Accepted10/12High

    The massif south-east of the Troad, the highest ground in sight of the plain, from which the Iliad has Zeus watch the fighting. Rivers named in the poem — Scamander among them — rise on its slopes. Nothing about the identification is disputed.

    39.7000, 26.8500· Area

    • ScholarshipMount Ida of the Troad — modern Kaz Dağı, Turkey; the identification is standard in the topographical literature on the Troad
    • Primary textStrabo, Geography 13.1
    • Primary textHomer, Iliad (trans. A. T. Murray, Loeb, 1924)
    Confidence
    10/12 · High confidence
    Textual
    3
    Archaeological
    1
    Scholarly
    3
    Geographic
    3

Why this class

Accepted: a named, unmistakable landform, agreed since antiquity. Archaeological scores 1 because a mountain is not an excavation, not because anything is in doubt.

What is disputed

Nothing about the mountain. What the entry contributes is corroboration for the Troad landscape as a whole — the point at which several Homeric place names stop being names and start being a map.

Sources

  • Primary textHomer, Iliad (trans. A. T. Murray, Loeb, 1924)
  • ScholarshipMount Ida of the Troad — modern Kaz Dağı, Turkey; the identification is standard in the topographical literature on the Troad
  • Primary textStrabo, Geography 13.1