Routes

The ten-year voyage home from Troy — the most mapped and least mappable itinerary in European literature. The atlas plots it as competing reconstructions, not as a line.

• The Mediterranean readingSpeculative6/12Medium15 · Stops
• The Atlantic readingSpeculative2/12Minimal12 · Stops

A young man's journey from Ithaca to Pylos and Sparta and back, in search of news of his father. It is the Odyssey's other voyage — and the only one the atlas can plot with confidence throughout.

• Ithaca — Pylos — Sparta — IthacaPlausible11/12High5 · Stops

How the army got there. The Iliad begins in the tenth year and takes the journey for granted, so this route is assembled from the Catalogue, from Aulis and from the camp on the shore.

• Muster at Aulis, crossing to the TroadPlausible11/12High5 · Stops

Odysseus is not the only one coming home. The Odyssey spends its early books on the other nostoi — Nestor's easy one, Menelaus' eight-year detour, Agamemnon's murder — and they are the control group for the whole poem.

• Menelaus: eight years by way of EgyptSpeculative7/12Medium7 · Stops
• Nestor home, Agamemnon murderedPlausible9/12Medium5 · Stops