The ulysses voyage, p.1
The Ulysses Voyage, page 1
THE ULYSSES VOYAGE
TIM SEVERIN
© Tim Severin 2018
Tim Severin has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1987 by Hutchinson.
This edition published in 2018 by Lume Books.
Table of Contents
Prologue - The Riddle
1 - Bard and Hero
2 - Troy
3 - Sacker of Cities
4 - The Lotus-eaters
5 - The Cyclops
6 - Ruler of the Winds
7 - The Harbour of the Massacre
8 - King Nestor's Palace
9 - Circe and the Halls of Hades
10 - The Roving Rocks
11 - The Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis
12 - Cattle of the Sun King
13 - Calypso: J Alcinous and Ithaca
14 - The Greek Odyssey
Crew List
Author’s Note
A Note on the Translation of Homer
Images
Prologue - The Riddle
No single poet - Dante, Goethe or even Shakespeare - has had a more pervasive influence on the cultural foundation of the West than the shadowy figure we call Homer. His name is so familiar that it is easy to overlook just how long his work has been our heritage. Homer described events that took place, as far as we can tell, at roughly the same time as the Exodus. Before the Old Testament was complete, his works were already the basic scrolls in a cultured man's library. By the time Jesus was born, so much had been written about Homer and his work that it would be a very long time before any of the Apostles could challenge his leading position as the most intensively studied author in Western civilization. All this Homer accomplished with just two poems - the Iliad and the Odyssey - written in a language that the Greeks of the classical era already found so old-fashioned that they had difficulty in understanding some words, while in our own century a lexicon to elucidate his vocabulary runs to 445 densely written pages without solving dozens of doubtful meanings. Yet this ambiguity never cloaked Homer's essential genius. His characters are so timeless, the phrases so elegant, and the mosaics of the word pictures so vivid that his tale of one man's extraordinary journey 3,000 years ago has never been eclipsed. With the Odyssey, the subject of this book, Homer composed such an evocative saga that its very title has been retained as the word to describe lengthy travels.
Homer's genius has always been irresistible to the inquiring mind. In the early days of the Roman empire there was a time when educators considered that Homer provided the foundation for all useful knowledge - whether history or geography or rhetoric. Today an echo of that variety survives. Archaeologists, historians, folklorists, all continue to dissect Homer's work and find - or think they find - fresh insight. After more than 2,000 years of research it seems almost inconceivable that anything can be added to the awe-inspiring mass of scholarship that has been piled on those two poems.
No one, then, can tackle Homer lightly. But for me, intrigued by the mix of truth and fiction in stories of early voyages and travels, the bait was laid early and the trap was very tempting. The Odyssey's adventures - with the Cyclops and Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, and Aeolus, the Ruler of the Winds - had been introduced as childhood tales. Then, studying the history of exploration at Oxford, I encountered a few of the dozens of theories about the Odyssey. Some claimed the tale was pure fantasy, others traced real routes to plausible sounding places which they said the hero Ulysses (to use the Latin version of his Greek name, Odysseus) had actually visited. Still other commentators proposed explanations which seemed more fantastic than if the Odyssey had been a fairy tale in the first place.
Finally, in 1981, I fell firmly into the jaws of the trap. That year I began to prepare an expedition to investigate the route of Jason and the Argonauts to fetch the Golden Fleece. I wanted to build a replica of an early Greek galley, assemble a crew of volunteers and row and sail the vessel from Greece to Soviet Georgia along the route that Jason took. But everywhere I turned to study Jason, I kept on stumbling across Homer and the Odyssey. The stories of Jason and Ulysses are closely intertwined. Homer, I discovered, seemed to have borrowed ideas from the story of the Argonauts. He even mentioned Jason's ship by name. To try to sort out the overlap, I found myself compiling two separate catalogues of file cards, one labelled 'Jason', the other 'Ulysses'. There were cross-references, contradictions, similarities, and the two catalogues continued to grow side by side. In 1984 we made the Jason Voyage. We successfully rowed and sailed our galley, the 54-foot Argo, from Greece to Soviet Georgia at the eastern end of the Black Sea. There we found our Golden Fleece among the Svan people of the Caucasus mountains who showed us the ancient technique of submerging sheepskins in the stream-beds so that grains of alluvial gold were trapped in the wool. By August that year we had brought Argo back to Istanbul for her winter lay-up, pulled ashore, courtesy of the Mayor, among the luxury yachts of the very rich in the city's most exclusive boat park. But I already knew that the galley's role was far from over. My boxes of file cards held the research into the Odyssey's text; and I would not be satisfied until I had tried my hand at solving the longest running geographical riddle in the world: quite simply, that riddle asked, was the Odyssey the story of a real voyage? And if so, where did Ulysses go?
Clearly there had to be some truth in Homer's tales. Troy, the city whose siege by a Greek expeditionary force is the subject of the Iliad, was real. Its ruins have been found on the coast of Anatolia and studied with minute care. Mycenae, the capital of King Agamemnon who, Homer tells us, led the besieging army, has been excavated. So too - and Argo was to take us there - has the palace home of King Nestor, leader of the second most important Greek contingent. Several of the world's most gifted archaeologists and historians have been drawn into the search for the remarkable world that Homer described. In their hunt for the historic facts within the Homeric poems these experts pioneered techniques which changed the entire science of archaeology. They made international reputations as well as furious controversy. As we shall see, the same giants of scholarship appear again and again in the Homeric context, for each of them found it difficult to dig at Troy without wondering about Mycenae, or to investigate Mycenae without searching for the ruins of Ulysses' home or Nestor's palace. The links in the chain of their discoveries led on and on, crossed and recrossed in confusion, and still no end is in sight.
The scholars tended to concentrate on the Iliad, for this story is based on land and in a specific spot - before the walls of Troy. Here the archaeologists could dig, lay bare the walls and streets, compare sherds of pottery from one site to the next, and establish the lifestyle of the time. The Odyssey has been far more difficult to pin down. The spade is not the right tool to investigate a tale of far voyaging which might contain clues to the wandering of a man who lived 3,000 years ago. Nothing is more tantalizing or more puzzling than Homer's geography in the Odyssey. It is like a detective story about a series of murders where even the corpses are so bizarre that perhaps they may only be hallucinations as they lie littered along the trail. Homer sends Ulysses to a country whose inhabitants eat a wonderful plant that makes them forget their homes, then to visit cannibal giants who live in caves and tend flocks of sheep and goats but somehow gather crops that grow without any attention. There is an island encircled by steep bronze walls where lives a man who can control the winds by bottling them up in a leather sack. Soon afterwards Ulysses' squadron is wiped out by cannibals who massacre the crews in a death trap of a harbour with an entrance so narrow that they cannot escape.
As the trail continues, the curious episodes become even more curious. Ulysses and his surviving companions recuperate on an idyllic island ruled by a witch who can turn men into animals. A day's sail away they visit the lobby of Hades where Ulysses consults with the spirits of the dead and then, continuing on the homeward route, he and his crew row past the beach of the entrancing Sirens, daemons whose sweet singing lures sailors to their deaths. They narrowly evade a dangerous whirlpool in a narrow strait, but a six-headed monster living in a cave in a cliff-face snatches up six men from the deck and devours them. When the rest of the crew commit the sacrilege of killing and eating the cattle of the Sun God on his sacred island, their ship is sunk as punishment, and all are drowned except for Ulysses who clings to the wreckage. He is cast up in the pleasant realm of the demi-goddess Calypso and becomes her lover. From there the hero escapes in a makeshift boat, only to be sunk again and washed ashore in the kingdom of a seafaring people, the Phaeacians, who entertain him in the palace of their king Alcinous, before finally transporting him home in one of their swift ships. He had been nineteen years away from home.
Many-headed monsters are fantastic, and so too is the one-eyed Cyclops whom Ulysses blinded in his cave during the homeward journey. But were they pure inventions, or was there some real foundation to each legend? Did Homer have such extraordinary originality of mind that he could dream up such a remarkable string of bogeys without a shred of reality on which to hang his tales? And even if Ulysses' adventures were imaginary, did Homer think that they took place somewhere real? Or was his geography, like his fantastic creatures, without any footing in this world? 'You will find the scenes of the wanderings of Odysseus,' scoffed Eratosthenes, the world's first scientific geographer in the third century BC, 'when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of winds...'
But Eratosthenes was a rare sceptic. His doubts about the reality of the Odyssey did not stop his contemporaries from trying to make geographical sense of it by trying to work out which were the lands where Ulysses met his adventures. The Greeks of the classical period treated the Iliad as real history, and modern archaeology has proved them at least partially right. Many of their finest scholars were equally sure that the scenes of the Odyssey were stages on a real voyage by a real man and they could identify the islands and harbours he had visited.
'As when some skilful man overlays gold upon silver…' observed Strabo, the most influential classical geographer of all, 'so he [Homer] took the Trojan War, an historical fact, and decked it out with his myths; and he did the same in the case of the wanderings of Odysseus.' Strabo, writing in the time of Augustus Caesar, listed half a dozen leading geographers who had already tried to unravel the mysteries of the Odyssey. Their efforts to locate Ulysses' wanderings have been repeated over the centuries by pedagogues of every hue - historians, armchair travellers, classicists, archaeologists, eminent novelists, even a British prime minister, Gladstone. Conflicting theories have placed Ulysses' wanderings in Italy, in the Black Sea, in Spain, out in the Atlantic, in the Indian Ocean, off Ireland or Norway. Scarcely a year goes by without a new interpretation of the text. In the last decade theories have despatched Ulysses as far as the high Andes in South America or as near as the Adriatic which, it was recently claimed by a Yugoslav sea captain, contains every scene of every adventure.
I checked the various theories against the charts. Every scene that Homer mentions has been differently located by a score of experts. His physical descriptions (and they can be frustratingly vague) are matched against a variety of real places, and each one is claimed to be precise, but they are rarely in the same location. Ulysses' vessel jumps up and down the length of the Mediterranean like the knight on a chessboard. It skips over inconvenient land masses, skids around capes, travels at speeds that would do credit to a modern cruise liner in its attempts to link up sites that appear to be suitable. Only a tiny handful of the modern commentators were themselves sailors, even fewer had sailed the possible routes. No one had any first-hand idea of how a Late Bronze Age galley might travel.
Astonishingly, no one seemed to have asked themselves the basic question - if there was a real Ulysses and he made a real voyage, surely after the Siege of Troy, which reputedly lasted ten years, he would have been anxious to return home as quickly as possible. If so, what was the normal route he would have taken? Could this route have provided the scenes of the Odyssey without any of the dramatic leaps of navigation? Maybe this question was never asked because there was a risk that it could turn out to be an anticlimax, a question that might destroy one charm of the tale, the idea of Ulysses as the great explorer venturing beyond the horizon. On the other hand if such a straightforward route fitted the details of the Odyssey then something much more important would result: the riddle of the Odyssey would be solved on a rational basis that would bring Ulysses back from the unreal fairyland where the too fantastic and impractical interpretations had effectively consigned him.
So I knew what I would do: I would take Argo from Troy to Ithaca, Ulysses' home in the Ionian Islands off the west coast of Greece, following the track that a Late Bronze Age sailor would have chosen if he was a prudent man. Along that 'logical' route, as I thought of it, I wondered if we would find sites that matched the descriptions in the Odyssey and perhaps uncover explanations for some, if not all, of the extravagant tales. I did not aspire to answer thorny questions of history or linguistics or land archaeology. Those were matters best left to the experts. Their work gave me the basic tools - encyclopaedias, concordances, translations, commentaries, all the scholarly apparatus that had accumulated over two millennia of studying Homer. My approach would be practical - geographical and maritime. It would be from a common sense viewpoint - the stern deck of a replica Bronze Age galley. For this purpose Argo was ideal. Built for twenty oarsmen, she was precisely the size and style of craft that Homer mentions in the Odyssey as the standard voyaging galley of her day. Already I knew something about Bronze Age navigation, for on the 1,500 miles of the Jason Voyage we had gone from northern Greece, passed through the Dardanelles within sight of Troy, crossed the Marmara Sea and penetrated the Straits of the Bosphorus, and coasted all the way to the furthest reaches of the Black Sea. Thus I had some concept of the distances we could expect Ulysses to have travelled each day, the limitations under oar and sail, the weather that his ship could withstand or not, the method of navigating by line-ofsight from headland to headland. This experience I now proposed to apply to the Odyssey. But first, before embarking on the voyage, I had to know our quarry. Who was Ulysses? Indeed, who was Homer?
1 - Bard and Hero
Homer was a woman, so runs one theory. Another claims that he was a blind man. A third, that he was not a single individual but a panel of poets. A fourth, that he composed the Iliad but not the Odyssey. The academic views are no more consistent about the identity of Homer than the conflicting theories about the route of the Odyssey. The truth is that no one has yet discovered who Homer was, or precisely when he lived, although some shrewd calculations have been made. At best estimate he lived sometime in the eighth or seventh centuries BC, that is some 500 years after the Siege of Troy and the unfolding of the events he described. It is also agreed that he (or they) was a bard, that is, a professional teller of sagas.
Just possibly - and this is where the theory of the blind man comes in - Homer drew a word picture of himself in the Odyssey rather as some film directors give themselves a walk-on part in their script. At the court of hospitable King Alcinous, there is a teller of tales whom, according to the Odyssey, 'the Muse loved above all others, though she had mingled good and evil in her gifts, robbing him of his eyes but lending sweetness to his song'. A favourite of the court, he was led to his special banqueting place by an equerry and seated on a silver-studded chair in the centre of the company. At his back was one of the great pillars of the hall and on it the equerry hung his 'tuneful lyre' and 'showed him how to lay his hand upon it. At his side he put a basket and a handsome table, together with a cup of wine to drink when he was thirsty'. Thus equipped, the minstrel entertained the assembled company with 'a lay well-known by then throughout the world, the Quarrel of Odysseus and Achilles'.
Whether or not this was meant to be Horner himself, at least it tells us how the Odyssey and the Iliad were used and so warns us to beware. In Albania, in the west of Ireland and among Australian aborigines the techniques of living bards have been studied to see how accurately they hand on their verses and change them. They learn the verses not by rote and memory but in general terms of plot. Stock lines and phrases are repeated, but the bard is free to improvise and polish within the ground rules of his craft. Thus the oral poetry of the saga was a living, changing tale and what we have from Horner is not precisely what the first sagatellers composed. Nevertheless, as we now know, their sources may be very ancient. Recently a Harvard scholar spotted a Homeric-sounding phrase in a fragment of a Bronze Age chronicle on a clay tablet that dates from close to the time of the siege. So it is possible that the first account of the siege was composed in the lifetimes of men like Agamemnon and Ulysses.
It is at the siege that the Iliad gives us our only glimpse of what Ulysses actually may have looked like. Homer provides a typically oblique, not a direct, description of the man. He was, says the poet, short in stature but broad in the shoulder and chest. At first encounter he gave the impression of being stiff and clumsy, what might be described today as something of a yokel. But the moment he began to speak, that impression was dispelled. He had a great voice uttered deep from the chest and his words were like 'the snowflakes of winter' so that 'no man could contend with him'. Several incidents in both the Iliad and the Odyssey flesh out the shadow. Ulysses was clearly very strong. He was a noted warrior when it came to the rough and tumble of hand-to-hand combat and he could throw the discus further than his rivals. He alone was able to bend and string the great bow which had formerly belonged to a legendary archer by the name of Eurytus, and once it was strung he was deadly accurate with it. Unusually for someone who was so stocky, there is also the claim that Ulysses was a good runner, fast enough to be a leading contender in foot races. The overriding impression, however, is of a burly man with tremendous stamina. During two shipwrecks on his voyage home he displayed phenomenal powers of endurance. On the first occasion his entire crew was drowned when a sudden tempest smashed their galley, but Ulysses was strong enough to haul himself onto a piece of wreckage, the main keel timber, and ride it like a life-raft until he came to shelter. The second time he had to abandon a small skiff in a storm and swim a prodigious distance to reach land where he survived a battering on the rocks as he tried to come ashore. In sum the image of Ulysses is of a powerfully built, rather rough-seeming man with the tenacity and physique of a born survivor.
