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Odysseus’ Ten-year Journey Home

A map illustrating the journey home of the Achean warrior-king Odysseus after the Trojan war. His travel from Troy to Ithaca (and his wife Penelope) took innumerable twists and turns and lasted ten years. Ever since Homer’s Odyssey was written about 600 BCE (and undoubtedly long before that), people have been trying to plot the hero’s trek on the actual Mediterranean map. And for just as long other people have been considering this an utterly futile exercise. As far as we know - in 1597, Abraham Ortelius became the first cartographer to set Odysseus’ travels on a map. Many trials later (including the prime minister of Britain, William E. Gladstone), we aren’t any closer to getting a definitive layout of this epic journey. To illustrate the narrative flow of Hommer’s Odyssey, we drew inspiration from the University of Pennsylvania classicist Peter T. Struck’s study (2000) of Odyssean geography.