All places

Tenedos

Accepted10/12HighAegeanHomeric name(s): Τένεδος

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.

Tenedos appears early — Apollo is invoked as its lord in Book 1 — and again as the fleet's first stop on the way home in the Odyssey's account of the nostoi. The Epic Cycle puts the Achaean fleet behind it during the trick of the horse.

It is a small entry, and it earns its place by corroboration: the Troad's islands, straits and mountain are all where the poems imply they are.

Identifications proposed

  • Bozcaada (Tenedos)

    Proposed by: Universal identification since antiquity

    Accepted10/12High

    The island twenty kilometres off the Troad coast, named identically in every period and inhabited throughout. It is where the later tradition has the fleet hide while the horse stands in Troy — a detail from the Epic Cycle rather than from Homer.

    39.8300, 26.0500· Island

    • ArchaeologyBozcaada (Tenedos) — continuously inhabited island off the Troad, with occupation attested from prehistory onward
    • Primary textStrabo, Geography 13.1
    • Primary textHomer, Iliad (trans. A. T. Murray, Loeb, 1924)
    Confidence
    10/12 · High confidence
    Textual
    2
    Archaeological
    2
    Scholarly
    3
    Geographic
    3

Why this class

Accepted: an unmistakable, continuously named island with continuous occupation.

What is disputed

Nothing about the island itself. The interesting question is how much of the Tenedos material belongs to Homer and how much to the Cycle that grew around him.

Sources

  • Primary textHomer, Iliad (trans. A. T. Murray, Loeb, 1924)
  • Primary textHomer, Odyssey (trans. A. T. Murray, Loeb, 1919)
  • Primary textStrabo, Geography 13.1
  • ArchaeologyBozcaada (Tenedos) — continuously inhabited island off the Troad, with occupation attested from prehistory onward