Thursday, September 3 — Departure

Sitting at the gate at the airport in San Diego, I haven’t actually departed yet, but I already got the first adventurous wrinkle of my trip when my travel agent called, about an hour before I left home, to say that Turkey had been put on “high alert” for U.S. citizens.  She didn’t think it would interfere with my plans, and I didn’t think so either after I went to the State Department website and read the specifics, since the warnings seem limited to an area near the Syrian border.  There was a link to sign up for travel alerts via text and email, so I signed up, but it felt a bit unnerving to start my trip this way.

Now that I’m at the airport, everything is business as usual at British Airways, with my bag checked through to Istanbul, and I realize that I would not have even been aware of the “high alert” if my travel agent hadn’t called.  Well, there still are hostile individuals in the world, as there were 3,000-some years ago, but no travel alerts or embassies in foreign lands to assist Bronze Age travelers.  Nevertheless, the bottom line of the State Department’s alert is still that travelers are on their own and need to be cautious and aware, so I will take that advice and just see what the situation is when I arrive — and hope to be more fortunate than the Bronze Age (fictional) traveler whose route I am attempting to (sort of) follow.

I’ll even take the comfort of a little superstitious good omen I remarked about on Saturday to my friend at the performance of A Comedy of Errors.  I hadn’t thought about it beforehand, but on this trip I will visit both Ephesus and Syracuse (homes of the two sets of identical twins separated in infancy), and then I remembered that I had also seen A Comedy of Errors in London at the start of my last sabbatical trip, during which every wrinkle had a happy resolution.  I hardly expect to discover some long lost twin from whom I was separated at birth, but while the Odyssey cannot truly be described as a comedy (generally, no one has to die or suffer permanent harm for conflicts to be overcome in a comedy), it does have a happy resolution for Odysseus and his family, and peace is restored on Ithaca without a cycle of retribution for his slaughter of the suitors.

I would like use some of my travel time to put my upcoming travels in context, particularly for those less familiar with the Odyssey, the epic poem about Odysseus’s return (nostos in Greek) from the Trojan War.

First off, any attempt to retrace, much less recreate, Odysseus’s wanderings is an exercise in speculation at best and futility at worst; to paraphrase Eratosthenes, such seekers will have as much luck finding the actual locations of Odysseus’s adventures as they will finding the cobbler who sewed all the ill winds into a leather bag (on King Aeolus’s island).  However, that has not stopped a great many people from doing so over the last 2500 years, beginning with Herodotus and Thucydides in antiquity (5th century BCE) and including more recently Tim Severin’s 1985 voyage in a replica of a Bronze Age galley and Ernle Bradford’s somewhat earlier twentieth century descriptions of hearing sounds like female (siren) singing…but only when his wife was not on board.

While I will travel to some of the places most commonly identified as the locations for Odysseus’s adventures, any associations I may make with the story of them told in the Odyssey will be purely imaginative — as indeed this story may be even in the context of the poem, since it is narrated in flashback by Odysseus himself, the sole survivor of the contingent from the Ithaca under his command and a character known for, even defined by, his consummate skill in lying, deceiving, and manipulating.  Although Odysseus is a remarkably likable character, and his account of his adventures is the most well-known and undoubtedly most intriguing part of the Odyssey, honest is not a word that Homer ever uses to describe him.  And even if he isn’t lying or embellishing, who knows what a man might believe he hears, sees, or experiences when his wife is not along, especially when he hasn’t seen her in nearly twenty years and has spent eight of the last nine years in the captivating arms of, first, an enchantress, Circe, and, then, a goddess, Calypso?  Nevertheless, generations upon generations of readers of this poem have fallen under the spell of Odysseus’s story and have wanted to believe that Odysseus’s adventures actually happened or at least have tried to recreate them somehow.  I will admit that my travels are in part inspired by a good dose of experiential curiosity regarding sailing around the eastern half of the Mediterranean, visiting various ports of call, interacting with local inhabitants, and generally experiencing whatever there is to experience.

Second, as fascinating as Odysseus’s tales of his wanderings are, they make up only one-sixth of the Odyssey.  The fact that the title of this poem has become a word meaning a particularly adventurous or transformative journey, and not simply “a poem about Odysseus,” may help explain why many people believe that these tales are the whole poem, not just a fraction of it.  However, the stories of returns (nostoi) are predicated by the hero’s long absence at war, most famously the ten-year siege of Troy, and about the fact that coming home is not necessarily smooth or easy.  I am curious, too, about these parts of the poem, both what remains of the citadels inhabited by the likes of Kings Priam and Agamemnon and what evidence exists of the cultures of the late Bronze Age and the world depicted in the poem — not necessarily the same thing, as scholars like M.L. Finley demonstrate.

There is a historical basis for the Trojan War, or at least a war at Troy, if not for the names of the heroes who fought in it (except, maybe, Achilles and Alexander/Paris), how long it lasted, or how it started, and since Troy is where Odysseus’s journey started, I will (more or less) start there, too, and continue on by sea, very roughly following the first part of his route, which he details fairly well at the outset of his tale about his wanderings told to the Phaeacians.

I will leave off a bit north of where Odysseus leaves the known map and — in a somewhat Homeric vein — fly off to another locale to pick up the thread of a different narrative: that is, I will return to Turkey and explore more of its Aegean Coast in search of the long, complicated story of its history of migrations and colonizations, exchanges of goods and culture, as well as political and military conflicts, from the Bronze Age to World War I to the present.  Obviously, I won’t be able to do justice to this long, complicated history in any comprehensive way, but I will look for connections to the Odyssey, particularly those that may serve to enhance my teaching of the poem and engage students.

In the third segment of my travels, I will return to Greece to visit Corfu, the island most often identified as Scheria, home to the Phaeacians, and then the heartland of Mycenaean Greeks, the Peloponnese, home to the most powerful Greek kings and queens in Homer.

Finally, I will return to the sea and pick back up the wanderings of Odysseus — not exactly where I will have left them, but as close as I could manage to arrange — where the majority of speculators have placed them, sailing the southern coast of Italy, around Sicily, and to Malta (including the island of Gozo, almost universally identified as Calypso’s Island).