Myth, Geography, and Ethnography at the Strait of Messina

Abstract

At the end of Book 12 of the Odyssey, after the last of his men have been dispatched by Zeus to a watery grave for killing and eating the Cattle of the Sun, Odysseus clings perilously to a branch of a fig tree overhanging the abyss of the monstrous whirlpool Charybdis. As he had prepared to depart from Circe, she warned him he would need to pass between the cave-dwelling dog-woman Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis, and that the only way to survive was to avoid the whirlpool and thus let Scylla snatch up six of his men, and so it transpired. Now, his return from the island of the Sun brings him again into their narrow strait. Pieces of his ship emerge from the whirlpool, he drops down onto them from the fig tree, is kept hidden by Zeus from Scylla, and floats away on his nine-day voyage to Calypso’s island. Since antiquity, inquiring minds have mapped Homeric narrative onto the real world. Mount Ida overlooks the Trojan plain. Ithaca, Pylos, Crete and Ethiopia are real places. Strabo understands Homer as a repository of geographical knowledge, observing that when Homer mentions several places, these are correctly organized in a spatial sense (1.2.20). The digital project Mapping the Catalogue of Ships (Clay, Evans, Jasnow, n.d.) graphically demonstrates the “spatial mnemonic” that organizes the display of geographical knowledge in the catalogue of Greeks ships assembling for the expedition against Troy. Sometimes the relation between poem and place is less straightforward: Pharos at the mouth of the Nile could arguably be recognized in Homer’s account of the