The Odyssey

A soldier ten years gone from the Trojan war spends ten more years fighting the sea to reach one small Ionian island; the poem's fixed point is real Ithaca, but the wanderings that fill it belong to a mythic Mediterranean whose stops scholars have argued over for centuries.

Odysseus

Ithaca, Odysseus's home

The homecoming

Everything in the poem bends toward this one small island: the kingdom Odysseus is trying to reach, the household where Penelope holds off the suitors, the shore where he finally lands disguised as a beggar. It is the only certainly real place in his long route home, and the poem's whole idea of home is built on it.

Books 13-24

explicit Ithaca is named directly and is a real Ionian island; the poem describes a rugged, goat-grazed place fit for no chariots. The pin marks the modern island of Ithaki, whose identity with Homer's Ithaca is the traditional and majority view, though a minority argues for neighbouring Kefalonia.

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