For centuries, scholars have argued over whether the places in Homer's Odyssey were real locations or pure invention, an...

For centuries, scholars have argued over whether the places in Homer's Odyssey were real locations or pure invention, and modern researchers still don't have a clear answer. Ancient Greek polymath Eratosthenes, the first man to measure the Earth's circumference, was dismissive of the whole idea. He said you'd find Odysseus's route on a map around the same time you found the cobbler who sewed Aeolus's bag of winds, meaning never. Greek historian Polybius, who lived some 600 years after Homer, took the opposite view, arguing the Odyssey was a real story with mythological elements layered on top, not the other way around. Geographer Strabo, writing nearly seven centuries after Homer, placed many of the poem's locations in his 17-volume Geographica, a massive atlas of the Greek world under Emperor Augustus. Ptolemy, the Roman mathematician who mapped the known world around 150 BC, also charted Homeric sites including Lotophagitis, the land of the Lotus-Eaters, and the islands of the Sirens. Modern attempts to match those coordinates to today's maps have run into serious trouble, though, because Ptolemy worked from a completely different understanding of the Earth's circumference and projection. In the late 16th century, Dutch cartographer Abraham Ortelius produced the first complete map of Odysseus's journey in his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, placing it all in the Mediterranean. He argued that Ithaca, Odysseus's home, was actually modern-day Corfu, and when Homer's text required an island west of Corfu that didn't exist, Ortelius simply invented one, which then kept appearing on maps through the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1912, French scholar Victor Bérard retraced the route physically, placing Calypso's island near Gibraltar, the land of the Lotus-Eaters in Djerba in southern Tunisia, and the Cyclops's country near Posillipo in Naples. His theory was that Homer drew on Phoenician coastal navigation charts that used the stars as guides. The debate over Ithaca itself remains unresolved. Most scholars long assumed it was the Greek island of Ithaca in the Ionian Sea, but Homer describes the island as "low-lying," while the actual island is mountainous. #Odyssey ...