The Wandering Rocks
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.
Circe offers a choice: the Wandering Rocks, past which no ship has ever come except the Argo, or the strait of Scylla and Charybdis. She recommends the strait. The Rocks are therefore described in detail and never visited.
Because the Argo passed them, they belong to a different story — the Argonaut tradition, which later writers such as Apollonius located in the Adriatic or the far west. The Odyssey borrows them as a boundary marker of its own world.
Identifications proposed
No coordinates — this place is not located.
Why this class
Mythical and unlocated: no hypothesis is recorded, because the poem itself presents them as the road not taken, and every later identification comes from the Argonaut cycle rather than from this text.
What is disputed
Whether the Planctae are a doublet of Scylla and Charybdis, a borrowing from an older Argonautic poem, or a memory of a real hazard now unrecognisable. The atlas takes no position and plots nothing.
Sources
- Primary textHomer, Odyssey (trans. A. T. Murray, Loeb, 1919)
- Primary textApollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 4.922-963 — the Planctae in the Argonaut tradition
- Primary textStrabo, Geography 3.2 — on Homer's western geography and its limits