For nearly 3,000 years, Homer’s “The Odyssey” has reigned as literature’s ultimate road trip. It’s a sweeping tale of a displaced king who fights wrathful gods and sea monsters to reclaim his throne on the Ionian island of Ithaca. It has at least 60 translations into English alone and more than three dozen film interpretations, including Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster version, which hits theaters worldwide on Friday.
Was the crafty monarch who dreamed up the Trojan Horse a flesh-and-blood ruler or just a figment of Homer’s imagination? Modern scholars generally view the epic poem as folklore. But in recent years, archaeologists working in Ithaca have found evidence that the ancients viewed the story quite differently. High on a rocky ridge, they have uncovered what might be antiquity’s most devoted fan club: the ruins of a sprawling, 2,400-year-old sanctuary with details suggesting that King Odysseus was a figure of local worship.
The partially standing complex is carved directly into the terraces of Mount Exogi and has long been known locally as the School of Homer. Archaeologists have poked into the site for more than a century but largely dismissed any relation to “The Odyssey.” An 1878 excavation at the outcrop found little to match the vivid descriptions in Homer’s text.
Since 2018, however, Giannos G. Lolos, an archaeologist at the University of Ioannina, in Greece, has led excavations at the site, building on systematic digs that were conducted there from 1994 to 2011. In a statement last summer, the Greek Ministry of Culture described major discoveries from the site, including a grand ceremonial hall, what may have been a strategic watchtower and an intact cistern built in the Mycenaean style.
Locals have long wondered if the ruins were the foundations of Odysseus’ Mycenaean palace. But Dr. Lolos noted that his team had found nothing to indicate that the surviving parts of the complex dated as far back as 1200 B.C., when Odysseus’ travels would have taken place. Nonetheless, the ruins bridge the gap between ancient poetry and historical reality. To the Greeks of antiquity, Odysseus was real enough to command deep, abiding reverence.
“What these new pieces help us understand isn’t the Bronze or Iron Age era of Homer,” said Rachel Kousser, an archaeologist and art historian at the City University of New York who was not involved with the project. “Instead, it is the way that the Hellenistic Greeks created an imagined Homeric past.”
The Odysseion
The School of Homer, which archaeologists refer to as the Odysseion, dates to about the third century B.C., roughly 500 years after Homer composed his epics, and a full millennium after the hero supposedly began his disastrous commute home from the war.
Deep in the soil of the Odysseion, Dr. Lolos and his colleagues discovered a remarkable trove of polished black cups, jewelry and private prayer vessels. But the true treasure lay in thousands of shattered pottery fragments. Among them were roof tiles etched with Latin and classical Greek, suggesting this remote site was a surprisingly cosmopolitan hub.
The team found more than 100 bronze and silver coins minted in city-states across the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. “It points to a constant flow of sailors, merchants and pilgrims, even from far distant places, to the Odysseion of Ithaca,” said Christina Marabea, an archaeologist at Hellenic Open University in Patras, Greece, and a researcher on the site. In 2022, Dr. Marabea collaborated with Dr. Lolos and other scholars on a paper titled “Emerging Evidence for Neolithic Ithaca” that was published in the Journal of Neolithic Archaeology.
On three separate tiles, the name Odysseus was stamped or inscribed into the clay. One translates to “of Odysseus,” implying that the mythical hero owned the grounds. Another reads “to Odysseus” — a direct gift to the king himself.
These rites were not reserved solely for the wayfaring hero. Across the excavation site, archaeologists found dozens of spindle whorls and pear-shaped loom weights — the everyday tools of a time-honored craft. To Dr. Marabea, their presence strongly suggests that women played a leading role in the rituals. She believes that these female worshipers may have been venerating the clever king’s equally resourceful wife, Penelope, who famously used her loom to keep suitors at bay.
A vast collective memory
Although Homer’s tale was not inspired by a real Odysseus, historians say, it did immortalize a vanished era of gritty Bronze Age chieftains who raided overseas, ruled enormous stone citadels and controlled wide trade networks from 1700 to 1050 B.C. And the myth of Odysseus helped inspire a powerful religious phenomenon known as the hero-cult. By the eighth century B.C., these regional sects had grown so dominant that when the Athenian lawgiver Draco drew up the city’s first legal code, he didn’t just mandate punishments for mortals — he legally required citizens to honor local heroes alongside the Olympian gods.
“The kings lived in palaces across the region and were buried in grand beehive-shaped tombs with splendid armor,” said Daisy Dunn, a classicist and the author of “The Missing Thread: A Women’s History of the Ancient World.” Homer describes Odysseus as wearing a boar-tusk helmet; archaeologists have indeed found splinters of boar ivory in some graves.
Nearly as much debate surrounds the author of “The Odyssey.” Seven Mediterranean cities have fought for the bragging rights to Homer’s birth, a bitter rivalry captured by the 16th-century playwright Thomas Heywood: “Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead / Through which the living Homer begged his bread.” Other scholars argue that “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” are simply too far apart in style, tone and worldview to have ever burst from a single mind.
Today, mainstream academic opinion lands squarely in the middle: There was not one Homer but a long line of them. The masterworks we read today were not cooked up by a solitary genius. Rather, around the eighth century B.C., just as Greece was tweaking the Phoenician alphabet to build its own writing system, the texts were stitched together from a vast collective memory.
In this telling, the tales are centuries-old anthologies. They were shaped by so-called rhapsodies, roving oral entertainers who plucked sagas from the mists of time, constantly reinventing them to keep their own audiences hooked.
But not everyone agrees.
“I feel no shame in saying I believe there was one Homer, even if that wasn’t his actual name,” Dr. Dunn said. “‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’ are just so well-structured, so well-paced, that it feels like one person has really thought through their development.” She envisions Homer not as a passive relic, but as an active architect of the written word, a master editor racing to capture a fleeting world before it slipped into silence.
No place like home
After 20 years of brutal warfare and aimless drifting, King Odysseus finally made it home to Ithaca. Or did he?
Even ancient historians had their doubts. In the third century B.C., the geographer Eratosthenes urged readers not to take “The Odyssey” too literally. “You will find the scene of the wanderings of Odysseus when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of the winds,” he wrote wryly.
For generations, the map has refused to fit the myth. In “The Odyssey,” Ithaca is described as a low-lying sanctuary sitting farthest to the west, where the sun sets into the gloom. Yet the modern Greek island bearing that name is decidedly mountainous, and it sits stubbornly to the east of its neighbor, Cephalonia.
A long-running theory proposes that a Bronze Age channel once separated the Paliki peninsula from Cephalonia, making it a distinct island, a notion supported by researchers for decades. But 20 years of geological research yielded no evidence for this channel, prompting a reinterpretation by scholars. In an article published July 5 in the online journal Antigone, James Diggle, a classicist, and John Underhill, a geologist — and authors, with Robert Bittlestone, of “Odysseus Unbound: The Search for Homer’s Ithaca” — propose that early translators and mapmakers misunderstood the poet. A strict, literal reading of the original Greek text, they note, never identifies Ithaca as an island but rather in terms more suggestive of a peninsula.
But the recent findings at the Odysseion may point the dispute back toward tradition. According to Dr. Lolos, the excavations strongly validate modern Ithaca as Homer’s true Ithaca. He contends that the description “lying low and far to the west” was born of poetic perspective, not literal cartography. Seen from the sea, Ithaca’s dramatic coastline mirrors Homeric vistas.
Dr. Lolos said the strongest proof of the island’s mythic past are the artifacts retrieved from its soil. For instance, a fragment of a late Hellenistic clay prayer mask, scratched with a blunt vow to Odysseus. Or a small bronze bust, found in 1904, that echoes the hero’s signature capped silhouette from antique Ithacan coins. Or a late third century B.C. decree that was recorded and preserved on stone walls in Magnesia (what is now western Turkey): It was issued by the people of Ithaca and explicitly names the Odysseia, an athletics and cultural festival held to celebrate the king.
These objects do more than reshape archaeological timelines; they tie literature to landscape. For those who lived there, Dr. Lolos notes, modern Ithaca was indisputably home. Myth, it turns out, may just be history waiting to be dug up.
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