journey of odysseus cruise

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Cruisin’ Together

A classicist and his father retrace the steps of odysseus..

Photograph by De Agostini/Getty Images.

This piece is reprinted from Travel + Leisure .

In the end, we never got to Ithaca—never followed “in the wake of Odysseus,” as the brochure for the cruise had promised; at least, not all the way to this most famous of literary destinations, Ithaca ( Itháki in modern Greek), the small and rocky island of which Homer sings, and where Odysseus had his famously gratifying homecoming. We saw much that he had seen: Troy, where his war ended and his wanderings began; Malta, where he was imprisoned by the nymph Calypso for seven years; Sicily, where his sailors were devoured by Scylla; the Neapolitan coast, which the ancients believed was close to the entrance to the underworld. But Ithaca turned out to be unattainable. For the hero of legend, that island was the culminating adventure; for us, on our Mediterranean cruise, there were just the inconveniences of modern politics—in this case, a strike that forced us to make a mad nighttime dash for Athens to catch our flights home.

But we weren’t at all disappointed, those of us who’d signed up for Journey of Odysseus: Retracing the Odyssey through the Ancient Mediterranean, one of several history- and literature-themed voyages run by Travel Dynamics International, a small-ship cruise operator. The opening lines of The Odyssey , after all, describe Odysseus as someone curiously like us—he’s the first tourist, the first person in either legend or recorded history who traveled because he thought the world was interesting, because he wanted to “know the minds and see the cities of many men,” as the poem puts it. So did we; and for a brief period, we felt a bit like our hero—for the 10 days we sailed, one day for each of the years he had to travel before he got to the home we never managed to see.

I was on this Mediterranean cruise less for myself than for my father. As a classicist, I have read and taught The Odyssey many times, and have been to many of these sites before, but my dad hadn’t. Now in his 80s, a retired research scientist—a man more comfortable with numbers than with literature, I had always thought—he decided a couple of years ago that he wanted to read the Greek classics, to know what I’ve spent much of my own career reading and writing about. And so, he’s been studying his Homer. (He even took my Odyssey seminar, enlivening the class with his irreverent comments: “Hero? How can Odysseus be a hero when he cheats on his wife and lies so much?!”) When I saw an advertisement for Journey of Odysseus, it seemed ideal—a perfect way to introduce him to the landscapes, the weather, the flavors of the eastern Mediterranean, none of which has changed much since Homer first sang his songs.

But I wanted him to have more than just a pleasant vacation. I’d been a guest lecturer about 10 years ago on a Travel Dynamics cruise of the eastern Aegean, and had been impressed by the intellectual seriousness of the undertaking. For one thing, the tours are often conducted by the archaeologists excavating the historical sites, a privilege not available to the average tourist. Our cruise on the intimate, 57-suite Corinthian II would include daily excursions to archaeological sites in Troy, Pylos, Malta, and Sicily, as well as a full program of onboard lectures every day—often two in a day—given by scholars of classical antiquity and archaeologists.

And then there was the homework. The hefty pre-embarkation packet came complete with a reading list that suggested six “essential” texts— The Odyssey , of course, but also Henry Miller’s Colossus of Maroussi and Moses Finley’s classic The World of Odysseus —and 15 “recommended” texts. Very soon after we set sail from Athens to our first stop, Çanakkale, in northwestern Turkey—the modern-day site of Troy—a nice rhythm established itself, of morning excursions, a leisurely lunch back on the ship on the aft sundeck, and then a lecture or two. Then there would be cocktails and dinner. It was like a very opulent graduate seminar—rich, but also rigorous.

I didn’t really understand how committed our little group of about 80 or so passengers was until one day at lunchtime, when I turned to the youngster standing next to me at the buffet—a serious-looking boy of about 10 whom I’d noticed traveling with what looked like three generations of his family. I jokingly asked what he thought of Robert Fagles’s rendering of The Odyssey , one of our “required” texts. He leveled a cool glance at me. “It’s very good, although it was pretty clear that Homer needed an editor,” the boy, whose name was Robert, replied. I didn’t dare admit that I myself had neglected to do my homework.

We began, of course, in Troy—the city where The Iliad ends, and where Odysseus’ homeward-bound adventures begin. Troy is not the name that the Greeks gave to the city where the greatest war of myth was fought; they called it Ilion, a word ultimately derived from the ancient Hittite name Wilusa. ( Iliad just means “a song about Ilion.”) Homer calls the city “windy,” and it is windy still. On the day we visited, there was, despite the summer heat, a faint, steady breeze, coming from somewhere you couldn’t quite identify, just enough to persuade the spiky acanthus plants to wave their hostile leaves in your direction or the thronging wildflowers to nod their heavy heads. It’s a large, meandering site, and most of what there is to look at—once you get past the pier, which has inherited the giant Trojan horse constructed for the movie Troy —is walls: The remains of what were, in fact, nine successive settlements on the site, a seemingly endless series of massive accumulations of stone, from whose crevices little yellow flowers poke out. Brian Rose, the improbably boyish University of Pennsylvania archaeologist who was one of the cruise leaders and who’s been working at the site since 1988, led us around. He explained to the rapt gaggle of shipmates how the dogleg layout of the walls may have been meant to foil invaders. It seemed pretty good at holding tourists back, too: Troy never feels as crowded as, say, Pompeii, which we later visited.

Rose specializes in Troy’s post–Bronze Age history, and he reminded us that the area was a major tourist attraction in ancient times; wandering around gawking at the famous walls is something people have been doing since the time of the Persian king Xerxes (480 B.C.). Alexander the Great visited, en route to conquering Asia. (He slept with a copy of The Iliad under his pillow.) That thought—the idea that you, as a tourist, aren’t somehow desecrating an ancient site by visiting it, but joining its long history—together with the whispering of that never-dying breeze, makes the place feel alive with ghosts. Unquiet ghosts, to be sure: Across the strait from Çanakkale is Gallipoli. As we first sailed up the strait, Gallipoli on our left—with its heart-wrenching monument to the Australian and Kiwi World War I dead—and Troy on our right, my dad (who has always had more respect for The Iliad than The Odyssey ) shook his head and said, “2,500 years, and it’s still the same story.”

A few days later, after some bad weather had forced us into an un-Odyssean but delicious daylong detour on the Cycladic island of Syros—the capital of the Cyclades, it now seems to spend all of its time posing for postcards, with its little white houses as crisp as newly folded laundry and harbor bristling with masts—we landed at Pylos, at one of the southernmost tips of the Peloponnese, the legendary stronghold of Homer’s King Nestor. Already an old man in The Iliad and very ancient indeed in The Odyssey , Nestor is the hero who enjoys regaling the younger warriors with his tales of how much stronger heroes were in his day.

Pylos isn’t far from Kalamata: When you arrive at the site known as Nestor’s Palace, the landscape shimmers with silver-green olive leaves. The palace is a Mycenaean structure consisting, now, of little more than some thigh-high foundations and an occasional column-base to suggest what the architecture had been. But every now and then, something extraordinary will pop out at you, an object that draws you right into Homer’s world. It was here we saw the richly carved, nearly intact bathtub that sits at one end of the palace enclosure and is decorated with an undulating pattern of large whorls.

Clustered around this stolid household fixture that had so improbably survived, our little group nodded in eager recognition, remembering the scene in which Odysseus’ son is given a bath during a visit to Nestor’s Palace, where he goes seeking news of his long-lost father. One of our fellow cruisers also recalled another famous bathtub moment in The Odyssey : The scene in which Odysseus, having made his way back to his own palace disguised as a filthy beggar, is recognized by the old slave-woman who’s bathing him after she notices a telltale scar on his leg—a scar that, like pretty much everything in The Odyssey , has a story of its own. Clearly, people were doing their homework and enjoying it.

Pylos is typical of the places you encounter on a cruise like this one, where every site has innumerable strata of history; we were always encouraged to explore these post-Homeric layers. Far grander than Nestor’s Palace at Pylos, for instance, is the nearby fortress of Methoni, a relic of the Venetians’ ownership of much of Greece during the Middle Ages: its gargantuan stone walls are studded with carvings of the Lion of St. Mark. I noticed my 10-year-old friend and his grandparents strolling through the silver-gray artemisia, wild with yellow blossoms, that grows riotously among the crumbling arches.

Sometimes, a site would convey not so much this or that era in history, but merely the enormity of time itself. Not far from Nestor’s Palace is a Mycenaean “beehive” tomb. Given the blazing sun, many of us practically ran to the black opening at the base of what does indeed look like a giant domed hive. But once you’re inside, the hairs on the back of your neck stand up: A dank and perfect stillness suggests what 30 centuries of being dead might feel like. When we emerged, we were grateful for the whiff of red currants in the air. They grow wild all around the tomb.

Indeed, I kept worrying secretly that the very richness of these sites and the immensity of their histories threatened, rather pleasantly, to distract us from our Homeric focus at times—although it occurred to me that such distraction was itself very Odyssean. The greatest threat to his homecoming is the pleasure and interest and beauty of so much of what he encounters on his journey: fascinating new cultures; opulent riches; amorous nymphs. The claustrophobia-inducing little grotto on Gozo that has been identified as Calypso’s cave—at least since the era of the Grand Tour, when local guides wooed gullible northern Europeans (“Looks a little phony,” my dad said, casting an anxious eye down the lumpy, narrow steps)—is certainly picturesque, but can’t possibly compete, for sheer jaw-dropping impact, with the enormous, Stonehenge-like, Neolithic temples nearby. “I know this isn’t what we came for,” a smartly dressed businesswoman from California—whose tender care of her frail but sprightly father had made her a favorite among the other passengers—turned to me and said as we examined some 19 th -century graffiti, as insubstantial as chicken scratches on the man-size stones. “But as far as I’m concerned, it’s worth the whole trip.”

Unlike some college students, grown-up readers of The Odyssey on Mediterranean cruises like ours aren’t fulfilling an “area requirement”; their enthusiasm was palpable, and created an infectious shipboard bonhomie. One morning, during yet another lavish breakfast outside on the afterdeck—the coffee cups gleaming white in the Mediterranean sun, the teak tables shaded by blue canvas awnings—my father and I got to talking with a couple from California. In one of those improbable coincidences that somehow characterizes everything to do with The Odyssey , the husband had been the CEO of the company my dad had spent most of his life working for. “We’re having the greatest conversations we’ve ever had,” the husband declared about the cruise. Evenings after dinner, a group (including the dutiful daughter from California, after she had put her dad to bed) would gather in the lounge for drinks. My dad highly approved of the pianist’s penchant for Gershwin, and Rodgers and Hart; on some nights, Elena Myasoedova, the cruise manager, and Rose gave impromptu folk music concerts—congenial sessions that would last late into the night. It was on one of these evenings, as the pianist played Cole Porter, that Rose told us how he’d trained GI’s fighting in Iraq to recognize and, if possible, to avoid disturbing potentially important archaeological sites. “If you see a gentle mound, it’s an archaeological site—there are no natural hills in southern Iraq.”

After a few days sailing, we reached the Sicilian coast, the cone of Mount Etna hazily beckoning in the distance, as symmetrical and ethereal as something on a Japanese print. Whatever claims this stretch of coast may have as the mythical home of the huge, cannibalistic Laestrygonians who terrorized Odysseus and his crew, it’s the doggedly optimistic symmetries of the Doric temple at Segesta, which was begun three centuries after Homer composed his poems and has sat on a little hilltop ever since, quietly asserting the values of order and aesthetic calm through two and a half millennia of war and destruction and renewal, that I remember best from the ship’s stop on the coast near Erice.

As Homer knew well, the danger of a great odyssey is that, like the Lotus-Eaters, you can be so distracted by incidental pleasures that you forget your destination and purpose. One afternoon after our visit to Segesta, I bumped into my young friend Robert in the ship’s library, and offered to split some of the sugary pastries I’d bought ashore. While he was happily munching, I couldn’t help noticing what he’d written on his iPad about Odysseus: “He makes many stupid mistakes that get him in trouble.”

But maybe it doesn’t matter how closely you follow in Odysseus’s footsteps, in the end. More than anything, The Odyssey is a story about stories—stories about Odysseus, so long missing in action; stories that Odysseus hears; stories that, often to save his skin, he tells; stories that we all tell about ourselves, often without knowing it: the canny businesswoman who becomes a little girl again with her dad, the family whose Mediterranean reunion seeks to palliate a recent loss, the scientist who sits breakfasting pleasantly with the executive who dismantled the company to which he gave his life.

And then there was the story that I couldn’t have made up if I were writing a novel instead of a travel article. One day, while I was sunbathing, I noticed that the elderly gentleman next to me had quite a scar on his leg; when he noticed me noticing it, he smiled. “There’s a story to that scar,” he said; I settled in to listen. The scar, he began, was why he was on the cruise. He was Dutch, and during the final, most dreadful winter of World War II, when he was a teenager and people in Holland were eating tulip bulbs to stay alive, he went out, weak and underfed as he was, to chop some wood; unable to wield the heavy axe properly, he ended up swinging it into his own leg. For weeks he hovered near death. What saved him was The Odyssey . A family friend who was a professor of Greek would come every day and, to distract the teenager from his pain, would teach him bits of Greek and recite passages from Homer’s epic of wonder and pain. “I can still recite parts of it in Greek!” he exclaimed; and did just that, right there on the deck of the Corinthian II, nearly seven decades later. He grew quiet and said, “I made a vow that, before I died, I would see what Odysseus saw.”

The stories we tell! This was why, when the captain announced that the Corinth Canal had been closed by disgruntled strikers, and that we’d therefore have to skip Ithaca—skip Ithaca!—in order to get back to Athens in time for our flights, I don’t think anyone really minded. For Ithaca—as the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy writes in his famous poem by that name—represents the gift of a “beautiful journey.” If the island itself disappoints, you’re still “rich with all you’ve gotten on the way.”

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A Father And Son Go On Their Last 'Odyssey' Together

Author Daniel Mendelsohn, left, and his father, Jay, on the Odysseus-inspired cruise. Andrea Wyner/Travel Leisure - April 2012 hide caption

Author Daniel Mendelsohn, left, and his father, Jay, on the Odysseus-inspired cruise.

A few years ago, author, critic, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn was teaching the epic Greek poem The Odyssey when his father decided to take his class.

Jay Mendelsohn, a retired research scientist, wanted to understand his son better, and understand his life's work. When Daniel decided he wanted to retrace one of the most epic journeys of Greek literature, Jay became his travel partner.

Daniel, a professor at Bard College in New York, wrote about the trip for the April 2012 issue of Travel and Leisure Magazine . His father did not like the character of Odysseus in the first place, Daniel tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz.

"He said, 'How can this guy be a hero? You know, he lies, he tricks people, he cheats on his wife, he cries' — my father didn't like that at all," Daniel remembers – "How can you make this guy the center of a poem,'" Daniel remembers.

But Jay did love Homer's first poem, The Iliad , and he wanted to learn more about Homer and Ancient Greece. So, they partnered up and began cruising the Mediterranean, starting in the ancient city of Troy in modern Turkey – the city where Odysseus' journey begins.

"One certainly gets a sense of the cultural power and authority of the Homeric poems, both The Iliad and The Odyssey ," he says, "from the fact that already in antiquity, it was a tourist destination to go to Troy." Even Alexander The Great visited the city as a tourist, he says.

Of course, Daniel and Jay didn't stop there. They visited places throughout Greece and the Mediterranean associated with locations in Homer's The Odyssey . There's a lot of speculation, however, about whether these sites are truly the places mentioned in these epic poems.

"A lot of these sites," Daniel says, "like Calypso's cave on Malta, one definitely feels like they were sort of invented — or at least hyped." Jay got a big kick out of each location anyway, Daniel says, even the phoniest ones.

The two companions traveled the ancient world on a cruise ship, which offered lectures by academics and archeologists. It was a small cruise ship, with about 80 passengers on board, but that didn't stop them from having unlikely encounters.

" The Odyssey is, of course, about funny encounters and unexpected coincidences and meetings that are too good to be true," Daniel says. "We got to talking with a couple that we had seen a couple times, and it turns out he had been the CEO of my dad's company," he says.

Some of the people they met even had an uncanny resemblance to characters from The Odyssey.

For example: There's one key moment in The Odyssey when Odysseus returns to his palace in Ithaca — in disguise, to slay all the suitors who had been courting his wife while he was away. Once at the palace, however, he's recognized by a scar on his leg from a childhood wound.

Coincidentally, Daniel was sunbathing on the deck when he noticed a Dutch man with a scar on his leg and an extraordinary story.

During World War II, this man was a starving teenager. He was weak and malnourished and ended up injuring himself while chopping firewood, swinging the axe into his own leg. This wound almost cost him his life.

"A family friend, who was a classicist, helped him get through this illness in part by reading The Odyssey to him," Mendelsohn says. "Even though he was not a classic student, he recited to me, on the deck of this ship as an elderly man, lines from The Odyssey in Greek," he says.

The man told Daniel he was on the cruise because he had vowed to see what Odysseus saw before he died.

All in all, it was a good trip for both father and son — and an especially poignant one. On April 6, 2012, Jay Mendelsohn passed away.

"I can't travel with him anymore," Daniel says, "but in a lot of ways, he will stay with me during the remaining trips that I am making and the readings I am making of these texts," he says. "That just became a different kind of odyssey."

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Recreate Odysseus's Legendary Sailing Adventure

After the fall of Troy, Odysseus and his men embarked on the perilous and unexpectedly long journey back to Ithaca, Greece. Along the way they faced monsters, battled cannibals, got played by the mischievous Gods, killed many, lost many, and circled the entire Mediterranean for 10 years – before arriving home, alone and garbed in rags.

Today, adventure seekers can recreate that legendary odyssey by motor or sailboat with relative ease (and in well under a decade). The route will take you to several key seaports on three different continents that snakes back and forth across the Mediterranean. There are many theories about which route the epic hero took exactly, but for the sake of travel, we recommend the route that visits as many Mediterranean hotspots as possible.

Traveling through the very setting that inspired Homer’s epic novel, The Odyssey, it is easy to see how the region could stimulate the imagination between fantastic islands ringed in picturesque beaches, commanding cliffs, bright blue waters, unforgettable sunrises and unimaginable sunsets. Embark on your own Odyssey following the footsteps of a literary hero.

Troy – Along The Aegean Sea, West of Edremit, Turkey

The journey of several thousand miles starts at the legendary Trojan city in modern-day Turkey . Odysseus and his men had just finished the grueling Trojan War that saw the fall of Troy, and was the basis for Homer’s first work, The Illiad . Exhausted, and ready to return home to Greece, they set out, unknowingly to embark upon one of the greatest adventures ever known.

You can visit the ruins of Troy. They have been thoroughly weathered by the ages, but tourists can still see the stacked stones of the once towering walls of this [nearly] impenetrable city. It was one of the greatest sieges in history, and you can stand on the battlefields where Achilles, Paris and Hector fought and bled in the Trojan War.

Across The Aegean Sea

Rather than sailing south around the Greek islands to Ithaca, their endpoint, the crew went North, stopping at the Island of Cicones to resupply.

Ismaros (Island of Cicones) – Eastern Greece

Odysseus and his jolly men stopped in at Ismaros to pillage the city, taking all the food, water and gold that was there. The gods were unhappy with their actions, thus beginning their plight.

Today Ismaros is in the eastern-most part of Greece, along the Aegean Sea. Alexandroupoli is a nearby port city where you can dock, check out the Alexandroupoli Lighthouse, and enjoy some fresh Greek seafood.

South Across The Mediterranean

Upon their departure from Ismaros, the much-smaller crew was blown drastically off course by fierce winds and ugly storms. They were driven south down the length of the Aegean Sea and then west across the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Gabes in modern day Tunisia, Africa.

Island of The Lotus Eaters – Gabes, Tunisia

It was in Tunisia where the team met the seemingly hospitable Lotus Eaters who shared their stupefying lotus-liquor with the sailors. The elixir drained the men of all desire to go home and nearly ended the journey altogether. But Odysseus realized this, and pig-tied his boys, tossing them aboard the ship before real disaster struck.

Gabes is a port city that has a lot of beautiful Muslim architecture and cool local markets. But if you want to see some truly remarkable African desert beaches that might drain you of all desire to leave, check out the nearby Island of Djerba.

North Across The Mediterranean

When the crew departed the Island of the Lotus Eaters, they headed north, and landed back in Europe on the Island of Sicily, where they ran into a terrifying and unforeseen adversary…

The Island of the Cyclops – Agrigento, Sicily

Sicily is as wonderful and relaxing as it is always described: temperate, beautiful and quintessentially Italian. But when Odysseus landed here he found it ominous and unsettling. Captured by the Cyclops known as Polyphemus, four men were eaten alive before they managed to escape.

Sicily doesn’t have a Cyclops problem any more, so you are more than welcome to dock your boat and explore. Agrigento is a hilltop city sporting a valley full of exquisite Greek temples and the ruins of the ancient city of Agrakas. Or head to Riserva Naturale di Punta Bianca, a beautiful nature reserve full of rolling coastal hills and sea life.

Southwest Across The Mediterranean

The boys departed the Island of the Cyclops in a hurry, not paying a whole lot of attention to their course. They sailed due west away from their destination landing on yet another island.

Aeolia (The Island of Aeolus) – Pantelleria, Italy

Legend has it that wind god, Aeolia, showed great hospitality to the Greeks and gifted Odysseus a bag full of the Westward winds – which was to remain closed until they reached Ithaca. Unfortunately, Odysseus’ jealous men opened the bag, convinced their leader was secretly hoarding gold and silver. The winds were unleashed and they were blown far off course.

The tiny volcanic outcrop is still Sicily’s largest offshore island, and is the picture of relaxation. The jagged lava-stone and caper bush blankets make for a spectacular backdrop for snorkeling and scuba diving (although there are no true beaches). There is also a magnificent natural arch that extends far into the sea, which is a popular photo stop.

West Along Africa’s Northern Coast

They were blown back to Africa, traveling westward along the coast until they reached a place known as Telepylus – the stronghold of king of the Laestrygonians, King Lamos.

Telepylus (The Island of Laestrygonians) – Northeast Algeria, Between Skikda and Filfilla

Upon arriving, the Greeks sent several men ashore to scout the area, one of whom was eaten by the cannibalistic Laestrygonians. As the remaining crew fled for the ships, the natives pummeled them with boulders, smashing several of the boats and killing hundreds of men.

Today, you'll find a peaceful, thriving port city. Skikda isn’t really known for it's tourism – so many may choose to continue onwards. If you do wish to explore, the Abazza theater features local music, and the Collo and Skikda Beaches are a nice place to chill and soak in some Algerian rays.

Fleeing Telepylus in a hurry, the men sailed northwest towards modern day Spain.

Aeaea (Circe’s Island) – Palma, Baleric Islands, Spain

It was here, on Circe’s island that Odysseus’ luck turned for the better… at least, for a little while. The beautiful goddess of magic, Circe, tricked half of Odysseus’ men into drinking poisoned wine that turned them into pigs. She fell in love with Odysseus (immune to her magic) and demanded he make love to her. Odysseus, the sly dog that he was, negotiated the re-transformation of his swine-bretheren back into humans before allowing Circe to have her way with him. He stayed for a full year, feasting with his crewmates and enjoying the romantic rendezvous, before nobly deciding it was time to return to his wife.

Modern day Palma is one of the most relaxing and beautiful beach resorts in the Mediterranean. Gorgeous vistas are available across the island, and the architecture is distinctly Moorish in style. There are a ton of historical monuments, cathedrals, market places, and hiking trails ripe for exploration. Even without the spectacular cuisine of this region, Palma would still be a highly sought after destination, but the fresh Spanish seafood dishes of this land are renowned worldwide for their distinct flavor and spices.

West to Spain Proper

Once Odysseus determined it was time to return to his family, Cerci gave him a lot of advice and convinced him to make a quick pit stop in the Underworld to find the prophet known as Tiresias. The prophet, she said, could tell Odysseus how to get home.

The Underworld (Land of the Dead) – Valencia, Spain

While it sounded easy enough in The Odyssey , there is no known way to sail to the underworld. Instead, the southern villages of mainland Spain is only a hop and a skip from Palma . Picturesque, vibrant and suffused with excellent food, wine and music, it's not hard to feel gluttonous and sinful. Try a big bowl of paella, spiced with locally grown saffron and cooked with locally caught shellfish.

East Across The Mediterranean

After our hero made his lonesome trip into the underworld, he returned to his crew alive and successful. He had found the prophet Tiresias, who advised him how to appease the gods so they would allow him at long last return home. Off they sailed, east this time, prepared for whatever obstacles may come their way.

The Island of the Sirens – Cagliari, Sardegna

When they reached the Island of the Siren’s (southern Sardegna) upon recommendation from Circe, Odysseus filled his crew’s ears with beeswax, so they wouldn’t fall victim to the irresistible sound. Tying himself to the mast of the ship so he could hear the Sirens’ song, he writhed, begged, and pleaded to let them pass. Successful, they continued on.

Sardegna’s southern coast is an amazing place. Cagliari (literally meaning “castle”) is the closest location to the fabled Siren Island. This port town is full of colorful buildings and golden-hued domes, the centerpiece being Il Castello, a citadel that stands watch over the city. The architecture and culture is distinctly different than Italy's mainland so take a few days to enjoy the vivid and historical ambience.

They continued east toward modern day Messina, but their course took them through an extremely dangerous strait.They would have to pass between two cliffs, both monitored by deadly mythological beasts: Scylla and Charybdis.

Scylla and Charybdis – Messina, Sicily

Scylla was a giant six headed beast that lived on the cliff directly across from Charybdis, an underwater monster that would swim up from beneath and swallow ships whole. Weighing the options, Odysseus decided to pass by Scylla and sacrifice six men instead of potentially losing the entire ship.

Messina is an important gateway to and from the island of Sicily , and it has been a strategic transportation hub throughout history. The narrow strait dividing Sicily from the mainland is very thin, and is the setting for the Scylla and Charybdis encounter. Messina is a big, bustling city, plagued by traffic, but it is full of poignant monuments and cathedrals.

Continuing south, the crew of weary adventurers stopped on the island of the sun god himself: Helios.

The Island of Helios – Malta

When the crew stepped ashore they noticed an abundance of cattle on the island. But Odysseus had been warned about these tasty looking bovines: they belonged to Helios, and he loved them very much. So Odysseus sternly commanded that no one touch the cows. The winds were violent, though, and the men were stuck on the island for over a month, driven to such hunger that they broke down and ate one of Helios’ cows.

Throughout its lengthy history, Malta has been ruled by the Romans, the Moors, the Knights of St. John, the British, and the French. As such, the culture is extremely rich and varied, with plenty of well-preserved historic sites. There are numerous fortresses, megalithic temples and even a subterranean complex of halls and burial chambers as old as 3600 BC.

West (ALL THE WAY) Across The Mediterranean

Suffice it to say, Helios was upset by the consumption of his sacred cattle. When the crew left his island, their ship was sunk by of terrific storm and every crew member save Odysseus was sucked into and eaten by the Charybdis. Odysseus drifted at sea for a long time, before washing ashore several hundred miles west.

Ogygia (Calypso’s Island) – Ibiza, Baleric Islands, Spain

Much to Odysseus’ dismay, the beautiful nymph Calypso (modern Ibiza in the Baleric Islands) made him her lover for seven years until finally, Athena stepped in and forced Calypso to let him go, determined to return to his wife and son.

Fortunately for tourists today, Ibiza is one of the most beautiful vacation destinations in the Mediterranean. Quiet villages, sandy coves, and fragrant pine forests are contrasted with the lively, world renowned nightlife.The bars and clubs are always rowdy, but if you'd prefer to enjoy a beer on the beach, no one will stop you.

West Across The Mediterranean

Alone now, our hero made his way east – past Circe’s island (Palma) – on a raft provisioned with food, wine and water. But the legendary sailor was once again foiled by a storm that destroyed his raft and drifted ashore on the Island of the Phaeacians.

Sheria (Island of The Phaeaians) – Santa Teresa Gallura, Sardegna

When Odysseus awoke, he was surrounded by naked women, bathing and playing ball. One was the daughter of the King and Queen. The girl, Nausica, fell in love with Odysseus, the ragged adventurer. But before she could marry him, Odysseus was painfully reminded of the Trojan horse by a blind bard, and resolved to finish his journey to Ithaca.

The north Island of Sardegna is equally as beautiful as the south (where the sirens made their attempt to lustfully lure Odysseus off-course). The small coastal city of Santa Teresa di Gallura is situated on some of Sardegna’s most pristine beachfront. Despite big crowds during the high season, this small Italian town retains its local flavor. Relax on the beach and listen to the unique Italian/Corsican dialect spoken by the locals. It is also a good place to get underwater and see some aquatic life by scuba or snorkel.

West Across The Mediterranean, Around The Tip of Italy

The final stretch of the odyssey was covered in a boat offered by Nausica’s father when he heard the hero’s unbelievable tale. He was outfitted with proper gear and supplies, and sent east, towards home.

Ithaca, Greece

When he finally arrived at home, Odysseus did as any nobleman who had been gone for ten years would do, and disguised himself as a beggar to confirm that his wife, Penelope, had remained loyal...killing all her suitors to live happily ever after.

Ithaca is still a harbor city, just off of the Ionian Sea. It is a small town, with a very local Greek feel. Sailboats and motorboats come in and out lazily through the summer months, relatively undiscovered by the masses. There is plenty of hiking on the island, and even some great mountain biking tails. The scuba diving is world-class and the beaches are the perfect place to rest your weary body.

An adventure on the scale of Odysseus’ is no easy or small undertaking. It requires courage, and planning, and knowledge of sailing and weather. There are few people alive who could recreate such a massive journey, but to those brave souls who dare to dream we say "try it."

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A Father’s Final Odyssey

By Daniel Mendelsohn

One January evening a few years ago, just before the beginning of the spring term in which I was going to be teaching an undergraduate seminar on the Odyssey, my father, a retired computer scientist who was then eighty-one, asked me, for reasons I thought I understood at the time, if he could sit in on the course, and I said yes. Once a week for the next fifteen weeks, he would make the trip from the house in the Long Island suburbs where I grew up, a modest split-level he and my mother still lived in, to the riverside campus of Bard College, where I teach. At ten past ten each Friday morning, he would take a seat among the freshmen, who were not even a quarter his age, and join in the discussion of this old poem, an epic about long journeys and long marriages and what it means to yearn for home.

It was deep winter when the term began, and my father was worrying a great deal about the weather: the snow on the windshield, the sleet on the roads, the ice on the walkways. He was afraid of falling, he said, his vowels still marked by his Bronx childhood: fawling . I would stay close to him as he crept along the narrow asphalt paths that led to the bland brick building where the class met, or up the walkway to the steep-gabled house at the edge of campus which was my home for a few days each week. Often, if he was too worn out after class to make the three-hour drive back home, he would sleep over in the extra bedroom that serves as my study, lying on a narrow daybed that had been my childhood bed. This bed, which he had built himself fifty years earlier, had a little secret: it was made out of a door, a cheap, hollow door, to which he’d attached four wooden legs that are as sturdy today as they were when he built it. I would think of this bed often a year later, after he became seriously ill, and my brothers and sister and I had to start fathering our father, anxiously watching him as he slept fitfully in a series of enormous, elaborately mechanized contraptions that hardly seemed like beds at all.

But that came later. Now, in the early months of 2011, he would come each week and spend the night in the bed he had made, in the house where I spent a part of each week.

It used to amuse my father that I divided my time among several places: this house on the rural campus; the mellow old home in New Jersey, where my boys and their mother lived and where I would spend long weekends; my apartment in New York City, which, as time passed and my life expanded, had become little more than a pit stop between train trips. “You’re always on the road ,” my father would sometimes say at the end of a phone conversation, and as he said the word “road” I could picture him shaking his head in gentle bewilderment. For nearly all his adult life, my father lived in one house, the one he moved into a month before I was born—which over time filled up with five children and then was emptied of them, leaving him and my mother to live a life that was quiet and circumspect, at least in part because she didn’t like to travel—and which he left for the last time one January afternoon in 2012, a year to the day after he started my class.

The Odyssey course ran from late January to early May. A week or so after it ended, I happened to be on the phone with my friend Froma, a classics scholar who had been my mentor in graduate school and had lately enjoyed hearing my periodic reports on Daddy’s progress in the seminar. At some point in the conversation, she mentioned a cruise that she’d taken a couple of years earlier, called “Journey of Odysseus: Retracing the Odyssey Through the Ancient Mediterranean.” “You should do it!” she exclaimed. “After this semester, after teaching the Odyssey to your father, how could you not go?” Not everyone agreed: when I e-mailed a travel-agent friend to ask her what she thought, her response came back within a minute: “Avoid theme cruises at all costs!” But Froma had been my teacher, after all, and I was still in the habit of obeying her. The next morning, I called my father.

As we talked, we each went online to look at the cruise company’s Web site. The itinerary, we read, would follow the mythic hero Odysseus’ convoluted, decade-long journey as he made his way home from the Trojan War, plagued by shipwrecks and monsters. It would begin at Troy, the site of which is in present-day Turkey, and end on Ithaki, a small island in the Ionian Sea which purports to be Ithaca, the place Odysseus called home. “Journey of Odysseus” was an “educational” cruise, and my father, although contemptuous of anything that struck him as being a needless luxury, was a great believer in education. And so, a few weeks later, in June, fresh from our recent immersion in the text of the Homeric epic, we took the cruise, which lasted ten days, one for each year of Odysseus’ long journey.

The hero’s return to Ithaca is hardly the only voyage in which the Odyssey is interested. It is not for nothing that, in the original Greek, the first word in the first line of the twelve thousand one hundred and ten that make up the epic is andra: “man.” The poem begins with the story of Odysseus’ son, a youth in search of his long-lost father. It focusses next on the hero himself, first as he recalls the fabulous adventures he had after leaving Troy and then as he struggles to return home, where he will reclaim his identity as father, husband, and king, taking terrible vengeance on the suitors who tried to woo his wife and usurp his throne. And, in its final book, it gives us a vision of what a man might look like after his life’s adventures are over: the hero’s elderly father, the last person with whom Odysseus is reunited, now a decrepit recluse who has withdrawn to his orchard, tired of life. The boy, the adult, the ancient: the three ages of man. The underlying journey that the poem charts is a man’s passage through life, from birth to death. How do you get there? What is the journey like? And how do you tell the story of it?

As far as my father was concerned, Odysseus wasn’t worth all the fuss the poem makes about him. Again and again, as the semester wore on, he would find a way to rail against the legendary adventurer. “Hero?” he would sputter at some point during each class session. “He’s no hero!”

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His contempt amused the students, but it didn’t surprise me. The first adjective used of Odysseus in the epic—it comes in line 1, soon after andra —is polytropos . The literal meaning of this word is “of many turns”: poly means “many” and tropos is a “turning” (which is why a flower that turns toward the sun is known as a heliotrope). On one level, the word accurately describes the shape of Odysseus’ journey: he’s the man who gets where he’s going by meandering—indeed, often by travelling in circles. In more than one of his adventures, he leaves a place only to come back to it, not always on purpose. And then there is the biggest circle of all, the one that brings him back to Ithaca, the home he has left so long ago that, by the time he returns, he and his loved ones are unrecognizable to one another. But “of many turns” is also a canny way to describe the hero himself. Throughout Greek literature, Odysseus is a notorious trickster, given to devious twists and evasions. In contrast with Achilles, the hero of the Iliad—who declares at one point that he hates “like the Gates of Death” the man who says one thing but means another—the hero of the Odyssey has no scruples about lying to get what he wants.

Odysseus’ sly proficiency as a fabulist, as a teller of tall tales and an outright liar, has endeared him to audiences over a hundred generations; writers and poets, in particular, see him as a virtuoso of language. (In one memorable episode, he uses a pun on the word “nobody” to defeat the Cyclops, a one-eyed giant who has eaten some of his men.) But all this made him unbearable to my father. A mathematician by training, he valued accuracy, precision—a kind of hardness, even. He had meticulously calibrated standards for virtually everything, as if (I often resentfully thought, when I was young) life were an equation and all you had to do was work out the variables: children, marriage, friendships. Everything, for him, was part of a great, almost cosmic struggle between the qualities he championed and the weaker, softer qualities that most other people settled for, whether in songs or cars or novels or spouses. The lyrics of the pop music we secretly listened to, for instance, were “soft”: “Assonance is assonance but a rhyme is a rhyme. You can’t approximate!” Many of my father’s pronouncements took this x -is- x form, always with the implication that to think otherwise, to admit that x could be anything other than x , was to abandon the strict codes that governed his thinking and held the world in place. “Excellence is excellence, period,” he would bark. “Smart is smart—there’s no such thing as being a ‘bad test-taker.’ ” For him, the more arduous something was to achieve or to appreciate, the more worthwhile it was.

All this hardness, the sanity and exactitude and rationality, often made me wonder how he came to acquire the incongruously silly nickname we used for him: Daddy Loopy. True, there were sudden and unexpected softenings that, when I was a child, I used to wish would come more frequently. Some nights, instead of staying hunched over his small wooden desk in the hours after dinner, muttering at the bills as he passed a slender hand over his smooth pate, he would stand up with a sigh and walk across the narrow hallway, into my room, and then, after doing a “super-duper tucker-inner,” sit at the edge of the bed he had built and read “Winnie-the-Pooh” aloud to me. I would lie there in bliss, cocooned like a mummy, unable to move my arms but nonetheless feeling safe as his nasal baritone wrapped itself around the short, straightforward sentences.

And there was the time he took me down to Florida to see his own father, who’d fallen ill. This was in the mid-nineteen-sixties; I was about four. At the beginning of the flight home, we were told that there was “weather” over New York and that we’d have to circle. I was unsettled by the plane’s continual tilting, by the moon passing our window again and again, and just wanted to get home; but, instead of being impatient with me, my father put a book in my hands and said, “If you look at this, you won’t notice.” My father would occasionally tell this story, ostensibly because it showed what a good, patient boy I had been. But now that I know what it’s like to travel with small children I realize that it’s about how good and patient he was. Of course, being my father, he didn’t take long to segue from this tender anecdote into mathematics. The story, he would say as he started to tell it—and this is another reason that the Odyssey makes me think of him—hinged on a riddle: How can you travel great distances without getting anywhere? The answer to the riddle was: If you travel in circles.

In my father’s eyes, the hero of the Odyssey miserably fails the x -is- x test. Hence his derision, the sputtered imprecations: “He’s no hero!”

The first time this happened was around eleven-fifteen on the morning of January 28, 2011, about an hour into the first meeting of Classics 125: The Odyssey of Homer. We’d been talking about the way the poem starts. The proem, as the first few lines of an epic are known, establishes the backstory: our polytropos hero has been delayed on his return “after sacking the holy citadel of Troy”; having “wandered widely,” he has been detained by the amorous nymph Calypso, who wants to marry him despite his determination to get back to his wife, Penelope; all the men he took with him to fight in the Trojan War have perished, some through foolish misadventures on the journey home. But, after this brief introduction, the poem turns not to Odysseus but to his son, Telemachus, who was a baby when the hero left for Troy. Now a youth of twenty, he sits around the royal palace as the epic gets going, fretting about the disastrous effects that Odysseus’ two-decade absence has wrought. Not only have the suitors overrun the palace, draining its stores of food and wine, carousing day and night, seducing the servant girls, but the social fabric of the island kingdom has frayed, too: some Ithacans are still loyal to Odysseus, but others have thrown their lot in with the suitors. Meanwhile, Penelope has withdrawn to her chambers, dejected. This is how the Odyssey begins: the hero himself nowhere in sight, the crises precipitated by his absence consuming all our attention.

As the session began, I tried to elicit ideas from the class about why the poem might begin this way. I looked around the big rectangular seminar table and peppered the students with leading questions. Why focus on the son, an inexperienced youth, and not the father, already famous for his exploits in the Trojan War? What narrative purpose is served by making us wait to meet the hero? Could the information we glean about Ithaca in these opening lines prove to be useful later on? The students stared at their texts in silence. It was only the first day of class, and I wasn’t surprised that they were shy; but nonetheless I was anxious. Oh, God, I thought. Of course this would be the class that Daddy is observing.

But then a young woman next to me, who’d been scribbling in her notebook, straightened up. “I think the first book is meant to be a kind of surprise,” she said. “So here we are, at the beginning of this big epic about this great hero, and the first reference to him is that he’s this kind of loser . He’s a castaway, he’s a prisoner, he has no power and no way of getting home. He’s hidden from everything he cares for. So it’s, like, he can’t go any lower, it can only go uphill from there?”

“Great,” I said. “Yes. It provides a baseline for the hero’s narrative arc.”

It was at this point that my father raised his head and said, “Hero? I don’t think he’s a hero at all.”

He pronounced the word “hero” with slight distaste, turning the “e” into an extended aih sound: haihro . He did this with other words—“beer,” for instance. I remember him telling my brothers and me, after his father died, that he hadn’t been able to look into the open casket, because the morticians had rouged his father’s cheeks. Then he said, “When I die, I want you to burn me, and then I want you boys to go to a bar and have a round of baihrs and make a toast to me, and that’s it.”

When we’d first talked about the possibility of his sitting in on the course, he’d promised me that he wasn’t going to talk in class. Now he was talking. “ I’ll tell you what I think is interesting,” he said.

Nineteen heads swivelled in his direction. I stared at him.

He sat there with his hand in the air. A curious effect of his being in the room with these young people was that now, for the first time, he suddenly looked very old to me, smaller than I remembered him being.

“O.K.,” I said. “What do you think is so interesting? Why isn’t he a hero?”

“Am I the only one,” he said, looking around at the students, as if for support, “who’s bothered by the fact that Odysseus is alone when the poem begins?”

“What do you mean, ‘alone’?” I couldn’t see where he was going with this.

“Well,” he said, “he went off twenty years earlier to fight in the Trojan War, right? And he was presumably the leader of his kingdom’s forces?”

“Yes,” I said. “In the second book of the Iliad, there’s a list of all the Greek forces that went to fight at Troy. It says that Odysseus sailed with a contingent of twelve ships.”

My father’s voice was loud with triumph. “Right! That’s hundreds of men. So my question is, what happened to the twelve ships and their crews? Why is he the only person coming home alive?”

After a moment or two, I said, “Well, some died in the war, and, if you read the proem carefully, you’ll recall that others died ‘through their own recklessness.’ As we go through the poem, we’ll actually get to the incidents during which his men perished, different groups at different times. And then you’ll tell me whether you think it was through their own recklessness.”

I looked around the room encouragingly, but my father made a face—as if he could have done better than Odysseus, could have brought the twelve ships and their crews home safely.

“So you admit that he lost all his men?”

“Yep,” I said, a little defiantly. I felt like I was eleven years old again and Odysseus was a naughty schoolmate whom I’d decided I was going to stand by even if it meant being punished along with him.

Now my father looked around the table. “What kind of leader loses all his men? You call that a hero?”

The students laughed. Then, as if fearful that they’d overstepped some boundary, they peered down the length of the seminar table at me, as if to see how I’d react. Since I wanted to show them I was a good sport, I smiled broadly. But what I was thinking was, This is going to be a nightmare .

In the weeks that followed, my father drew up an extended charge sheet of Odysseus’ failings.

“He’s a liar and he cheated on his wife,” he’d say. (He was right: whatever his yearning for home, Odysseus does sleep with Calypso every night of his seven years with her.)

“He’s always crying!” he’d exclaim, referring to Odysseus’ bouts of homesick weeping. “What’s so haihroic about that?”

And then there was the “real weakness” in the epic. “He keeps getting help from the gods!” my father said. “Everything he does, every bit of success he has, is really because the gods help him.”

“I’m not so sure,” I said, when this came up. We were talking about a passage in Book 6 in which Athena dramatically enhances Odysseus’ looks so that he can ingratiate himself with the rulers of an island where he has just washed ashore. “The poem also makes clear that even without the help of the gods he’s very clever—”

“ No ,” my father said, with a ferocity that made some of the students look up from their note-taking. “No. The whole poem happens because the gods are always helping him. It starts because Athena decides it’s time to get him home, right? And then the reason he’s able to get away from Calypso is because Zeus sends Hermes to tell her to let him go.”

“Well, yes,” I said, “but—”

“Let me finish,” he pushed on, the jackhammer rhythm of his argument, with its accusatory emphasis on certain words, familiar from other, much older arguments. “So it’s really the gods . And it’s Athena who keeps dolling him up when he needs to look good.”

He made a little face when he said “dolling him up.” The students chuckled.

“Yeah, what is that about?” one of them snorted. “Now he has curls ‘like the blossom of a hyacinth’? Not very manly!”

“It does seem a bit artificial for him to get this total makeover,” the girl who sat next to me said. “Why isn’t it good enough for him just to wash off and put on some nice clean clothes?”

“She dolls him up,” my father said again, “and helps him in a lot of other ways. So it’s pretty obvious that he gets a lot of help directly from the gods .”

His vehemence took some of the students aback. It didn’t surprise me. The religion thing, I said to myself. Here we go.

He abhorred religion and rituals. Having to attend ceremonies of any kind reduced him to adolescent sulking. He would slouch low in the pews at weddings or bar mitzvahs or confirmations, covering his eyes with the fingers of his left hand, the way you might cover your face during a slasher movie, wincing like someone with a headache, and mutter his atheistic invectives to me or my siblings or, sometimes, to no one in particular as the rabbi or the cantor or the priest droned on: “Nobody can prove this crap. It’s like voodoo!” He would leaf through the prayer books as if their pages were evidence of a crime, stabbing a finger at this or that passage with an incredulous shake of his head.

After repeating, “He gets a lot of help from the gods ,” my father sat back in his chair.

One of the students said, “Well, yeah, I have to agree with what, uh, Mr. Mendelsohn said. The thing that stuck out to me the most this week was how much Athena intervenes in the story. It’s like she’s holding Odysseus’ hand even when it seems unnecessary. After all, if Odysseus is such a great trickster, why can’t he trick his way back home on his own ? If everything is predetermined to go his way, then why should I be impressed by his masterful cunning or physical abilities?”

My father was beaming: “Exactly! Without the gods, he’s helpless.”

It was when he said the word “helpless” that I suddenly understood. I had been thinking that his resistance to the role of the gods in the Odyssey was just part of his loathing for religion in general. But when he said the word “helpless” I saw that the deeper problem, for my father, was that Odysseus’ willingness to receive help from the gods marked him as weak, as inadequate. I thought of all the times he had growled, “There’s nothing you can’t learn to do yourself, if you have a book!” I thought of the 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air under whose chassis he had spent so many weekends, reluctant to let it die, a pile of car-repair manuals just within reach of one greasy hand; of the Colonial armchairs he had painstakingly assembled from kits in the garage “with no help from anyone.” I thought of how, after taking out the appropriate books from the public library on Old Country Road, he had taught himself how to write song lyrics, how to build barbecue accelerators, to create a compost heap, to construct a wet bar. No wonder he was allergic to religion. No wonder he couldn’t bear the fact that—right up until the slaughter of the suitors, at the end of the poem—the gods intervene on Odysseus’ behalf.

If you needed gods, you couldn’t say you did it yourself. If you needed gods, you were cheating.

A month after the end of the semester, my father and I were on a ship in the middle of the Aegean, retracing the Odyssey.

At the start of the cruise, he’d been tense. He was prickly when his taxi pulled up in front of my apartment building in New York for the trip to J.F.K. and our flight to Athens. He’d insisted on hiring his local car service for the drive, and when I made a face on entering the sedan—it had no air-conditioning, and the day was very hot—he snapped, “A taxi is a taxi .” After we landed and collected our luggage, we boarded the air-conditioned coach that would take us to Piraeus, the port of Athens. My father seemed as tightly coiled as a spring.

As the bus lurched and twisted its way through the traffic, which had been snarled by demonstrations protesting the country’s economic crisis, a representative from the cruise line gave a brief orientation. We’d board our small ship in midafternoon, and at cocktail time there’d be a welcome reception, followed by an introductory lecture. After dinner, we’d start our twelve-hour voyage across the Aegean toward Çanakkale, in Turkey, the site of Troy’s ruins, which we’d visit in the morning.

When my father and I were booking our tickets, a few weeks earlier, he had surprised me by insisting on paying for one of the more expensive cabins. It had a private balcony. Entering the cabin for the first time, he looked around, surveyed the sleek furnishings, and then walked onto the balcony, loudly sniffing the Mediterranean air. But even though he seemed to approve of the posh touches, the orchids and the cocktails waiting on a gleaming side table, I could sense in him a kind of resistance, as if he were going to prove to me by the end of our ten days at sea that the Odyssey wasn’t worth all this effort, all this luxury.

Almost imperceptibly, however, he started easing into the rhythm of our days. Mornings were for trips ashore to visit the sites associated with the epic. Many of these were not easy to access, and we’d return from our excursions exhausted and dusty, grateful for the tall glasses of lemonade and iced tea that would be handed to us after we’d climbed back up the gangplank. Early evenings were for bathing and changing; then there was dinner.

After a couple of days at sea, a small group of passengers started to gather after dinner each night around a piano in the ship’s bar. My father would invariably request one of his favorites from the Great American Songbook. It was this more than anything, I think, that relaxed him as the days and nights passed. These reminders of home—the words he knew so well, the echoes of the culture of his past—reassured him. He seemed almost visibly to unclench once he was settled into a chair with a Martini, singing along in a raspy Sprechstimme as the pianist played:

Is your figure less than Greek?

Is your mouth a little weak?

When you open it to speak, are you smaaaart?

My father took a sip of his Martini and smacked his lips. “Ah, so great. Rodgers and Hart. That’s when a song was a song!”

To my surprise, it was soon clear that he was enjoying the rituals of the cruise itself—the late-night cocktails and the piano-playing, the desultory conversations with strangers over drinks or at breakfast—at least as much as he did the sites. He even seemed to enjoy the fussy pre-dinner dressing up. Clothes, to put it mildly, had never been his forte; it was always a bit of a shock to see him wearing anything other than one of his beloved hooded sweatshirts, blazoned with the names of the schools my brothers and sister and I—and, later, our children—had attended. On the first night of the cruise, when we were getting ready for the welcome cocktail party, he started to put on a brown polyester shirt, which I snatched from his hands and threw over the balcony railing into the Aegean.

“ Daddy! It’s a Mediterranean cruise! Mom must have packed something blue or white!”

“Whaaat? A shirt is a shirt!”

At the start of the trip, I’d worried that the physical demands of the daily excursions would be too much for him. He was three months shy of eighty-two, after all, and there was a great deal of walking—which, in Greece, inevitably means walking up hills. But, as it turned out, his problem was something else.

“It doesn’t really look that impressive!” he exclaimed, the morning we walked around the ruins in Çanakkale—the first of many times that he let on that a site wasn’t living up to his expectations. As he grumbled, Brian, the cruise’s resident archeologist, lectured us on the history of the site. He explained that there had been a number of successive Troys over the millennia, each rising and falling in turn. Among the ruins of these, he went on, there was evidence of a “major catastrophe” that had occurred around 1180 B.C.—the traditional date of the fall of Homer’s Troy. As he said this, people murmured knowingly and wrote in their notebooks.

My father listened attentively but looked skeptical as we picked our way among the dusty paths and walkways, the giant inward-sloping walls, the heaps of gray stones rising out of patches of yellowed grass. In the obliterating sunlight, the stones appeared weary and porous, as insubstantial as sugar cubes.

My father looked around. “Obviously, it’s interesting ,” he said. “But . . .”

His voice trailed off and he shook his head.

“But what?” I was curious.

To my surprise, he suddenly threw an arm around my shoulders and patted me, smiling crookedly. “But the poem feels more real than the ruins, Dan!”

During the week that followed, this became a refrain of his. “The poem feels more real!” he’d say each evening, as people discussed the day’s activities. When he did so, he’d cast a quick sidelong glance at me, knowing how much the thought pleased me.

One night, after we’d traipsed around a ruin in the southwestern Peloponnese which is known as “Nestor’s palace”—Nestor is an elderly comrade of Odysseus’, whom Telemachus visits in Book 3, looking for news of his father—he turned to the group around the piano.

“Obviously, I’m glad I got to see the places and be able to make a connection between the real places and what’s in Homer,” he said.

People nodded, and he went on. “If I would have read Book 3 now, for instance, I would know exactly what the seashore of ‘sandy Pylos’ looks like”—he wiggled his fingers to indicate that he was quoting verbatim—“where Telemachus landed. And now we all have a sense of Troy, the way it’s sited, how it looks out with the water in the distance. That’s great. But for me it’s a little bit empty compared to the story. Or maybe half-empty. It’s like these places we’re seeing are a stage set, but the poem is the drama. I feel that that is what’s real.”

I smiled and said, “Don’t tell me we’ve come all this way to retrace the Odyssey and now you’re telling me that we could have stayed home.”

“It’s like ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ ” my father said jauntily. “ ‘There’s no place like home . . .’ ”

Brian turned to me. “Would you say that that movie is actually an Odyssey-based story?” he asked.

“It was a book first,” my father interrupted. “L. Frank Baum!”

I thought for a moment. “Sure,” I said. “Totally. The protagonist is torn from home and family and experiences fabulous adventures in exotic locales where she meets all kinds of monstrous and fantastical beings. But all the time she’s yearning to go home.”

My father was staring down into his Martini. “That movie came out just before the war started,” he said, wistfully. “Weeks before, as I recall. Your grandfather was working away from home that summer on a big project, but he was home just then, and he took me and my brother Bobby to the Loews Theatre to see it. Man, in those days when you saw a movie it was really an experience. Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney did a floor show. An organ came out of the floor!”

The small group huddled around the bar had grown quiet as he spoke. To them, I realized, this was who he was: a lovely old man filled with delightful tales about the thirties and forties, the era to which the music tinkling out of the piano belonged, an era of cleverness and confidence. If only they knew the real him, I thought ruefully. His face now, relaxed and open, mellow with reminiscence, was so different from the one he so often presented, at least to his family. I wondered whether there might be people, strangers he had met on business trips, say, bellhops or stewardesses or conference attendees, to whom he also showed only this face, and who would therefore be astonished by the expression of disdain we knew so well. But then it occurred to me that perhaps this affable and entertaining gentleman was the person my father was always meant to be, or had possibly always been, albeit only with others. Children always imagine that their parents’ truest selves are as parents. But why? “No one truly knows his own begetting,” Telemachus bitterly observes, early in the Odyssey. Indeed. Our parents are mysterious to us in ways that we can never quite be mysterious to them.

The only time my father didn’t cap off an evening in the ship’s lounge by saying “the poem feels more real” was after we’d gone to Gozo, a small island off Malta, to see a cave that, according to local legend, belonged to Calypso. We’d been warned that the descent into the cave was rocky and difficult, and that only a few people could go inside at a time, given how cramped it was. Elderly passengers and those who had “mobility issues” were advised not to visit the site.

When I heard all this, I was determined not to go. I suffer from claustrophobia: simply being in an elevator sets my teeth on edge. There was no way I was going into Calypso’s cave.

“What are you talking about?” my father exclaimed when I told him. “You have to go! Seven-tenths of the Odyssey takes place there!”

“Seven-tenths?” I had no idea what he was talking about. “The epic is twenty-four books long—”

“Math, Dan! Math . Odysseus spends ten years getting home, right?”

“And he spends seven years with Calypso, right?”

I nodded again.

“So, in theory, seven-tenths of the Odyssey actually takes place there! You can’t miss it!”

“Well,” I protested weakly, “actually, no. The poem isn’t actually equal to his life. They’re two different things.”

But he wasn’t convinced. “You can’t argue with numbers ,” he said.

We got on the bus and went. As the bus rattled and bumped along the rocky roads, it became touchingly clear that my father was trying to distract me. “Look at those beautiful blue flowers!” he would say, pointing. I looked without seeing; I was thinking about the cave.

We pulled up at the site and found ourselves on the brow of a barren hill. Withered bushes clung to the dun-colored dirt. A narrow parapet above the cave looked out at the glittering sea; about twenty feet below was the opening—a dark vertical gash in the face of the rock, surrounded on either side by parched scrub. A few people had already made the descent and were disappearing into the cleft.

A clammy terror seized me. I shook my head. “No,” I said to my father. “Nope, sorry. I’m not going. You go. You’ll tell me what it’s like.”

“Oh, come on , Dan,” my father said. “I’ll be with you. It’ll be fine.”

Then he did something that astonished me. He reached over and took my hand. I burst out laughing. “Daddy!”

“You’ll be fine ,” he said, holding my hand, a thing I couldn’t remember him having done since I was a small boy. His own hand was light and dry. I looked at it awkwardly.

“I will be there with you every step of the way,” my father was saying. “And if you hate it we’ll leave.”

I looked down at our clasped hands and to my surprise found that I felt better. I looked around to see if anyone was watching and then realized, with a complicated feeling of relief, that the others would assume that I was leading my elderly father by the hand.

And so it was that I visited Calypso’s cave with my father holding my hand. He held it as we made our way down the rocky path to the entrance. He held my hand as we crouched down to squeeze through the opening; he held my hand as we shuffled around inside, my heart thumping so hard that I was surprised the others didn’t hear it; held my hand as I said firmly that, no, I didn’t want to go through a passageway to see the spectacular views of the bay below; held my hand as I scrambled at last into the hot, dry air, not even bothering to conceal my panic. Only after we were back at the parapet above the cave and walking toward the waiting bus did he let go of my hand.

“You O.K., Dan?”

I grinned shakily. “I think this is one time when we can say that the poem does not feel more real,” I said.

“Ha!” my father said. Then he lowered his voice and said, “You did good, Dan.”

In the lounge that evening, Elena, the tour manager, asked people what they’d thought of Calypso’s cave. I looked across at her. That morning, I had told her about my claustrophobia. “You really don’t have to go,” she had said. “A lot of people are staying aboard because for them it’s too difficult.” I’d felt a flood of relief so intense that it was vaguely shaming. But something stopped me from accepting the excuse she was offering: I didn’t want my father to see me afraid. Later that day, after we’d got back, I bumped into her on deck and told her what had happened: my panic attack, Daddy holding my hand. “Wonderful!” she had cried.

Now, as people recalled the excursion, she smiled at the two of us warmly. “See? You survived!”

“Survived?” someone asked.

I was searching for something to say, when my father cut in.

“We had a great time,” he said, loudly.

I tried to catch his eye, but he was leaning forward, facing into the ragged semicircle of armchairs like a teacher addressing a study group.

“I didn’t want to go,” my father said to them. “Hills are hard for me. I thought it would be too much for me physically. But Dan helped me, and I’m glad I went. After all, Odysseus spends seven-tenths of his adventures there!”

He paused, not looking at me, and said, “It was one of the more impressive things I’ve seen, actually.”

Elena murmured, “Your father is a very charming man.”

During our ten days at sea, we saw nearly everything we’d hoped to see, the strange new landscapes and the debris of the various civilizations that had occupied them. We saw Troy; we saw Nestor’s palace; we saw Calypso’s cave. We saw the elegantly severe columns of a Doric temple left unfinished, for reasons impossible to know, by some Greeks of the Classical era in Segesta, on Sicily, where Odysseus’ remaining crew ate the forbidden meat of the cattle that belonged to the sun god, Hyperion, the climatic instance of foolishness which got them all killed. We visited the desolate spot near Naples which, the ancients believed, was the entrance to Hades. We passed through the Strait of Messina—where Odysseus had to navigate between the man-eating monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis. And of course we saw the sea, always the sea, with its many faces, glass-smooth and stone-rough, at certain times blithely open and at others tightly inscrutable, sometimes a weak blue so clear that you could see straight down to the sea urchins at the bottom, spiked and expectant-looking, like mines left over from some war whose causes and combatants no one remembers, and sometimes an impenetrable purple, the color of the wine that we refer to as red but the Greeks call black.

We saw all those things during our travels, all those places, and learned a great deal about the peoples who had lived there. But we were unable to make the last stop on the itinerary. On the day before we were to start sailing to Ithaki, the captain announced that, because of nationwide strikes protesting the austerity measures being forced on Greece, the Corinth Canal was going to be closed. The canal was to have been our shortcut back to Athens from the Ionian Sea, on Greece’s west coast, where Ithaki lies; now, in order to get back to Athens in time to make our flights, two days later, we’d have to spend the next day and a half sailing all the way around the Peloponnesian peninsula.

And so we never reached Ithaca, never saw Odysseus’ home. But, then, the Odyssey itself, filled as it is with sudden mishaps and surprising detours, schools its hero in disappointment and teaches its audience to expect the unexpected. For this reason, I came to feel that our not reaching Ithaca may have been the most Odyssean aspect of the whole excursion. After we got back home—just before my father tripped in a parking lot and fell, the beginning of a chain of events that led, finally, to a massive stroke that left him helpless and unrecognizable, unable to breathe on his own, to open his eyes, to move, to speak—after we got home I would sometimes joke with Daddy that, because we had never reached our goal, our journey retracing the Odyssey could still be considered incomplete, could be thought of as ongoing.

But now, on the morning of the last full day of the cruise, we sat glumly on our balcony, thinking about Ithaca and drinking our coffees in silence as the ship strained toward Athens. At one point, trying to lighten the mood, I said, “It’s actually sort of cool, our not getting to Ithaca. It’s the infinitely receding destination!” But he shook his head and said, “It’s just a ten-day tour.”

A moment or two later, a steward knocked on the door of our cabin and handed me a note from the captain. It said that he was aware that I had recently published a translation of the works of the modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, who lived in Alexandria at the turn of the last century. One of Cavafy’s best-known poems is called “Ithaca,” and the captain wondered whether, since our destination had suddenly “disappeared,” as he put it, I would consider filling the void by giving a reading of the poem and perhaps a short lecture about it. This way, although we would miss the real Ithaca, we would at least visit it metaphorically.

This captain is smart, I thought. For although Cavafy’s poem is named after the most famous destination in world literature, it is about the virtues of not arriving.

This is why, just around the time we would have been visiting Ithaki, I stood at a lectern in front of a small group of passengers on a boat in the middle of the sea, talking about “Ithaca.” I started off by discussing the other poets who had taken the Odyssey’s hero and refashioned him for their own purposes. In Dante’s Inferno, Odysseus (given his Latin name, Ulysses) is damned for deceitfulness and madly sails over the edge of the world. In the nineteenth century, the character’s perpetual restlessness made him a Romantic hero. In 1833, the young Alfred Tennyson wrote a poem called “Ulysses,” a dramatic monologue spoken by the aging hero. Long since returned, the “idle king” reflects on a bitter irony: life back on Ithaca is not what he’d dreamed of during his years away. The homecoming is revealed as odious; it was in the adventuring, he realizes, that the meaning of his life had lain. “How dull it is to pause, to make an end,” he muses. In its much quoted final line, “Ulysses” sums up the very spirit of travel, of adventure: “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Cavafy knew Tennyson’s poem well. In his “Ithaca,” published in 1911, he reiterates the earlier poet’s wariness about getting where you think you want to go. “Hope that the road is a long one,” his anonymous speaker admonishes an addressee who may be Odysseus but may also be the reader. The poem then goes on to catalogue the riches that only travel can bring: harbors we have never seen before; fabulous treasure from foreign ports, amber and ebony and coral, exotic perfumes; and encounters with wise strangers. Of course, we must remember our destination, whatever that may be; but it becomes clear that life’s meaning derives from our progress through it, and what we make of it:

Always in your mind keep Ithaca.

To arrive there is your destiny.

But do not hurry your trip in any way.

Better that it last for many years;

that you drop anchor at the island an old man,

rich with all you’ve gotten on the way,

not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.

“Ithaca” articulates, at a high level of refinement, what has become a cliché of popular culture: that the journey is more important than the destination.

That evening, as we were packing our bags, my father said, “Well, clichés are clichés for a reason.” He’d spent the afternoon reading the Tennyson and the Cavafy on his iPad.

“Do you believe it?” I asked. “That stuff about journeys and destinations?”

“I think both are probably important,” he replied after a moment. “I mean, obviously I believe in results, in achieving things.”

I thought of how hard he’d pushed us to achieve when we were in school, and shot him an amused look, which he chose not to notice.

“So I guess that’s what people mean by the ‘destination’ part,” he went on. “Getting where you want, fulfilling your goals. I’m not so sure I believe that that’s not important. In life, you’re judged by what you accomplish.”

I’d heard this before.

“But I can see the other side, too,” he added. “You have to explore things, you have to try things . . .” He grew quiet. I thought of the visits we used to make, back in the sixties and seventies, to see his close friend Nino, a professor of mathematics, who loved to travel. After describing his latest trip to Italy, Nino would say, “But Jay, Jay! You should travel sometime!,” and my father would shake his head and say, “You don’t understand.” I wondered how many things my father had wanted to try and hadn’t, for one reason or another.

“Well, at least you’re trying things now!” My voice sounded brittle in my ears.

He looked mellow. “Yeah, Dan, this has been a great . . . ” He seemed to be on the verge of saying something else, but in the end was quiet.

“Now that I’m old,” he said presently, “I guess I can see the part about the importance of being out there and trying things even if you fail. You have to keep moving, at least. The worst thing is to go stale. Once that happens, you’re finished. So I guess I agree to some extent that the journey is something, too, if by ‘journey’ they just mean sticking in the game of life.”

After a moment, I said, “Then you do agree with Tennyson and Cavafy: to arrive at the destination means it’s all over, it’s a . . . an end.”

With a kind of embarrassment, I realized that I couldn’t bring myself to say the word “death.” But he knew what I meant.

“I think that they’re saying that for these guys to get back home is in some ways like dying. When they stop their travels and adventures, they’re foreclosing the possibility that other things will ever happen to them. So being home in familiar surroundings rules out something from their lives.”

He looked down at the bed.

“There’s no more . . . uncertainty,” he said after a minute, almost to himself. “There’s nothing left to know.”

“Uncertainty,” I repeated. I was surprised to hear a note of admiration in his voice as he’d said the word. It wasn’t one I’d have thought he approved of: what had his life been dedicated to, after all, but certainty—equations, formulas, the tools of quantification? I thought of his struggles over the past few years with ill health: a run-in with prostate cancer, a bout of shingles, an emergency appendectomy. He had endured these afflictions so quietly that it never occurred to me to wonder whether he’d begun to be afraid of what might be next. Did he lie awake at night working out some algorithm, some way of calculating his own chances?

“Daddy,” I said.

I took a breath. “Are you afraid of dying?”

I was surprised by how swiftly he answered. He frowned a little—not at me, but the way he did when confronted by some knotty problem, a crossword puzzle or a tax return or a set of instructions for assembling a piece of furniture which didn’t make sense to him.

“I’m not afraid of being dead,” he said. “At that point, there’s no consciousness. You’re out of the woods. It’s the lead-up to dying that I’m”—his voice trailed off, and I realized he didn’t like to say “afraid”—“concerned about. Falling apart, being diminished. Not being all there. You remember what my mother was like at the end.”

I remembered. Nanny Kay had had Alzheimer’s. I still remember the expression on my father’s face when, during what turned out to be her last visit to us, she looked at him and said, “And who are your parents?”

“I don’t want to get like that,” he went on. “Being dead itself can’t be bad. It’s just nothing. Zero. But what happened to your grandmother—that’s worse, as far as I’m concerned. Worse than zero.”

“A negative number?” I said, making a joke of it.

“Yeah,” he said, although he wasn’t smiling. Then he said, “So, yes, you want to keep going, keep doing things. But doing things as yourself , not as some kind of zombie.”

He looked down again. I knew he was thinking about his mother, what people had kept saying as her illness took its toll. Kay had been so clever, Kay had been so sharp! This wasn’t Kay, it was someone else. She’s not herself anymore. It was a kind of illness, I thought as I remembered this, that raises questions that are asked by the Odyssey, a poem about a hero who’s so good at lies, at deceits and disguises, that, once he finally gets home, he has a difficult time proving that he is who he says he is. What is the “self,” exactly? Do you remain “yourself” even after undergoing radical transformations, physical and mental? It was a question that I, too, would be asking, a few months later.

We stood there for a while, not saying anything. Finally, I said, “Anyway, I guess that’s what I meant earlier today when the captain made the announcement and I said I liked the idea of not getting to actually see Odysseus’ island. By not getting to see Odysseus’ home, we’ve kept the ending at bay. The story can go on and on.”

After a pause, he said, “So I was right all along.” His voice was sly; the sombre mood had evaporated.

“Right about what?”

“The poem actually is more real than the place!”

The next day, we flew home. ♦

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By T. Coraghessan Boyle

By Calvin Trillin

By Patricia Marx

By Lauren Collins

Encountering real life in Homer’s ‘Odyssey’

On the surface, Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey is a memoir about coming to know his father, Jay, framed through a close reading of Homer’s Odyssey .

I was, I admit, wary of the premise. I just spent a year living down the street from my own father in rural Virginia, where picking weeds between his silence and my 3-year-old son’s chattering prompted countless hours of meditation on fathers and sons. Did I really need more of that? And knowing references to The Odyssey couldn’t help but tilt the book toward the precious, I thought. Or was I being undeservedly possessive? I am something of an ersatz classicist, having attended St. John’s College in Maryland, with its “Great Books” curriculum and required courses in ancient Greek. My tattered Richard Lattimore translation of Homer’s Odyssey is still somewhere on the bookshelf; why not just reread the poem?

Knopf. 320p, $26.95

Lost in Translation

I was happily wrong. This book is much more than the sum of its parts; it is lucid textual analysis and a profound meditation on the inherent unknowability of the men who raise us. More than that, it is a moving portrait of the father Mendelsohn comes to know in the last years of his father’s life.

Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey is much more than the sum of its parts; it is lucid textual analysis and a profound meditation on the inherent unknowability of the men who raise us.

They have always been somewhat inscrutable to one another. Mendelsohn’s father, Jay, a mathematician, sees the world through an X is X lens. Only science is science. “That was when a song was a song.” He is baffled and discouraged by the fact that his son does not understand even simple math. Mendelsohn, who earned a Ph.D. in classics from Princeton and is now a professor at Bard College, takes refuge from numbers in the delights of ancient language, “each verb with its scarily metastasizing forms.”

This is not to overstate the case. Jay admires that his son has learned ancient Greek because learning Greek is so hard; that must mean it is worth doing. And when Mendelsohn comes out as gay to his parents in the late 1970s, Jay’s tender reaction comes as a shock from this flinty man.

Epic Journeys

An Odyssey comprises three interwoven threads: First, the year during which Jay, then 81 years old, sits in on his son’s undergraduate Odyssey seminar at Bard. (Amusingly, Jay steadfastly refuses to concede Odysseus’ heroism: “He’s not a hero because he cries. He’s not a hero because he cheats on his wife. He’s not a hero because he gets help from the gods!”) Then, that summer, the two embark on a cruise called “Journey of Odysseus: Retracing the Odyssey Through the Ancient Mediterranean.”

The second is Mendelsohn’s unpacking of The Odyssey itself, tackled both through re-creations of feisty conversations with his students and his own lucid and approachable scholarship. If I have any quibble with the book—and it is only a quibble—it is with the classroom scenes, which feel at times as if each student is cast in a role. Only one or two students emerge from the book as well-rounded characters in the same way Jay’s family and friends do. Yet I came away from even these passages with a renewed and deepened sense of the rewards found in a close reading of the poem, as well as a sense of the continuity of that long-running endeavor. When the class chases an interpretive rabbit down a misleading hole, Mendelsohn consults with his own undergraduate professor, now a friend, who resolves the matter decisively by returning to the poem: “The text is the text, it says what it says. The answers are there. You just have to read more closely.”

Lastly, what is certainly the beating heart of the book is Mendelsohn’s Telemachian quest to better understand his stubborn, undemonstrative father. Like Telemachus, Mendelsohn must come to know his father through the stories others tell of him, stories that reveal a side of Jay that Mendelsohn has only glimpsed. His father—so say his students, his father’s friends, the passengers on the cruise—is actually charming . The revelation is not without a touch of bitterness: "Children always imagine that their parents' truest selves are as parents; but why? ‘Who really knows his own begetting?’ Telemachus bitterly asks early in The Odyssey . Who indeed. Our parents are mysterious to us in ways that we can never quite be mysterious to them."

In the Middle of Things

In The Odyssey , Homer uses a storytelling device known as “ring composition” to circle backward and forward in time to give us more and more of Odysseus’ tale, all the while building toward moments of power and drama. Homer uses this device on several levels of scale in the poem: The voyage itself is told out of order; and within each of its episodes, Homer casts back and forth in time.

The Odyssey  endures 3,000 years after its composition because it is about life itself: marriage, fidelity, homecoming, fatherhood, sonship, duty, honor, love and, in true Greek style, preparation for death.

So, too, does An Odyssey . In this and in other ways, the book echoes the poem. One of its strengths is how deftly Mendelsohn navigates the waters between the Scylla and Charybdis of overdoing and underusing these echoes. In contrast to the poem, whose episodes are well known to many readers, one of the great pleasures of this book can be found in the slow, deliberate unfolding of Jay’s story. What Mendelsohn thinks he knows about his father—the upbringing in a Jewish enclave of the Bronx, his stint in the U.S. Army after the Second World War, his careers as an aerospace mathematician and later a professor of mathematics—is undone and reassembled (dare I make a joke about Penelope’s loom?), and in the process a richer portrait of his father emerges.

To encounter the poem, and to read it deeply, is to encounter ourselves. So it comes about that, standing before the ruins of Troy on a windswept hill in Turkey, Jay can smile crookedly at his son and confess: “But the poem feels more real than the ruins, Dan!”

Indeed. I think I will go find that Lattimore.

This article also appeared in print, under the headline “Following Homer on a great adventure ,” in the February 19, 2018 , issue.

Thomas Jacobs is a novelist and a graduate of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md. He was raised overseas, mostly in South America, Turkey and Spain.

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Lapham’s quarterly, the geography of the odyssey.

Or how to map a myth.

By Elizabeth Della Zazzera

Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Ulysses and the Sirens , by John William Waterhouse, 1891. Google Arts & Culture , National Gallery of Victoria.

All quotations from the Odyssey are taken from Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation.

T he Odyssey , if you strip away enough allegory and myth, might serve as a travel guide for the Aegean Sea: which islands to avoid if you hate escape rooms, which cruises to skip if you always forget to pack earplugs, where to get that beef that angers the gods. But how does Odysseus’ trek across the wine-dark sea map onto an actual map of the Mediterranean?

Homer fans have been trying to figure this out—and squabbling over their findings—for as long as the Odyssey has been in the canon. And for just as long other people have been calling efforts to map the Odyssey a complete waste of time. If no one can agree on its physical geography, Odysseus’ imaginary journey is easy to retrace.

In which we take a step back to relate Odysseus’ journey

The Odyssey ostensibly tells the story of Odysseus’ ten-year journey home from war, but much of the poem concerns his absence: his wife Penelope’s clever attempts to stave off aggressive suitors and their son Telemachus’ search for his lost father.

Most of Odysseus’ wanderings are related to us after the fact. When we meet Odysseus, he has been living with the nymph Calypso for seven years on her island, Ogygia. With a little help from the gods, he escapes and travels to Scheria, where the Phaeacians welcome him and invite him to a banquet. There he tells his story.

After fighting in the Trojan War, the conflict at the heart of the Iliad , Odysseus leaves the burning city of Troy to travel back to his home, Ithaca. His fleet of twelve ships is almost immediately blown off course. He and his men end up at Ismarus, where they attack the Cicones, destroy the town, and kidnap the Cicones’ wives. The Cicones kill seventy-six of Odysseus’ men. The remainder get back on course but not for long: at Malea, they are pushed away from Cythera and caught up in storms for ten days. Next they reach the land of the Lotus-eaters, where some of Odysseus’ men succumb to the temptation of eating the addictive flowers; he must force them back to the ship. They travel to the Island of the Cyclopes, where Odysseus fights and blinds Polyphemus, one of Poseidon’s sons. From there they go to Aeolia, a floating island, where King Aeolus gifts Odysseus the bag of winds. After leaving Aeolia they nearly reach Ithaca, only to be blown off course once again when Odysseus’ men open the bag. They row for seven days until they reach Lamos, where the Laestrygonians kill and eat most of Odysseus’ men. Only Odysseus’ ship escapes and travels to Aeaea, where the goddess Circe turns his crew to swine. Odysseus, protected by Hermes, stays a year with Circe, who finally tells him to seek out the prophet Tiresias. Unfortunately, Tiresias is dead, so Odysseus must gain entry to the Underworld, which he finds in the land of the Cimmerians. He speaks to Achilles, Agammemnon, Ajax, and eventually Tiresias, who tells him how to return to Ithaca. Heeding Circe’s warning that they should avoid listening to the Sirens, Odysseus has his men, returned to human form, block their ears with wax and tie him to the mast of the ship, so that he might hear the strange sounds of the Sirens but remain unable to succumb to their magic. From there they navigate a narrow strait between rocky Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis, arriving at the land of Helios. Odysseus tells his men not to eat the cattle they come across, but they do not listen and are punished by Zeus. Only Odysseus survives, floating to Calypso’s island, where he remains trapped for the next seven years. After the gods help him escape Calypso and he tells his story at the banquet, the Phaeacians take Odysseus back to Ithaca. And while the story does not end there, our maps of it do.

In which we debate whether mapping the Odyssey is possible or advisable

In 140 bc , about six hundred years after the Odyssey ’s composition, the Greek scholar Polybius wrote in his Histories that he could not agree with Eratosthenes’ quip that “you will find the scene of the wanderings of Odysseus when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of the winds.” Neither Polybius nor Eratosthenes knew of a cobbler outside the world of epic poetry capable of sewing a bag that could contain the power of the wind, but for Polybius and for many others who came after him, the Odyssey was a true story with some fantastical elements thrown in for color, not the reverse.

Polybius noted that Homer’s descriptions of fishing near Scylla corresponded directly with Sicilian fishing practices in Polybius’ time. Homer therefore must have imagined Scylla in a real location, and that location must be off the coast of Sicily.

For every Polybius working to read geographic detail in the text of an epic, there is at least one Eratosthenes denouncing the whole endeavor. In the 1980s, in a review of a book on the mapping of Homer’s Odyssey , the classicist Peter V. Jones remarked, “With books on this subject one heaves a sigh of relief to find decent spelling and the pages in the right order.”

In which many individuals try to geolocate Odysseus’ journey

Geographers of the Odyssey often built on the work of their predecessors. In his 7 bc Geographia , Strabo took his cues from Polybius, agreeing that the Odyssey was not a myth and that Homer clearly left clues placing the Odyssey ’s setting near Sicily. The famed geographer and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy included longitude and latitude for some of the places in the Odyssey in his own Geographia , an atlas, gazetteer, and treatise on cartography he wrote around 150. He included Lotophagitis (the land of the Lotus-eaters), Circaeum Promontorium (Aeaea, Circe’s realm), Sirenusae Insulae (the island of the Sirens), Scylaeum Promontorium (Scylla) as if they were any other town or geographical feature. Although Ptolemy did not draw any charts of these locations, maps created from his calculations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries place Lotophagitis in Africa, Circaeum Promontorium near Terracina, Sirenusae Insulae off Campagna, and Scylaeum Promontorium in the Strait of Messina. It is very difficult to transpose Ptolemy’s longitude and latitude figures into our modern conventions. His calculation of longitude begins at a different zero degree than ours, and he used an incorrect circumference of the Earth that distorted his projections and produced longitudinal distances generally one and a half times greater than they should be.

In 1597 the cartographer Abraham Ortelius became the first person to draw a map of Odysseus’ travels. Like many Homeric geographers, Ortelius identifies Scheria, home of the Phaeacians, with Corcyra (now known as Corfu) because of a passage from Thucydides ’ History of the Peloponnesian War claiming the Phaeacians were the previous inhabitants of that island. While widely accepted, this identification of Scheria with Corcyra creates a problem. Homer clearly places Calypso’s island west of Scheria, but there is no island in the Ionian Sea west of Corcyra. Ortelius, following in the footsteps of Pliny, mapped a nonexistent island off southern Italy and called it the home of Calypso. The imaginary island appeared on maps through the mid-nineteenth century, and individuals continued to search for it into the twentieth. (Perhaps it had sunk into the sea?)

Future British prime minister William E. Gladstone saw Homer’s world as a combination of actual and imagined geography. In volume three of his Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age , he included a “Map of the World According to Homer” where a fictional landscape that includes places both real and imagined surrounds the geography of the Aegean Sea. Writing in 1858, Gladstone seems to side with Eratosthenes when he cautions, “Do not let us engage in the vain attempt to construct the geography of the Odyssey upon the basis of the actual distribution of the earth’s surface. Such a process can lead to no satisfactory result.” But Gladstone still found some value in locating Homer’s geographic and topographic references in the real world whenever possible; in doing so, he explained, we understand the extent and nature of Homer’s worldview, the physical reach of his knowledge. While Homer describes territories that are easily recognizable as Greek isles with geographic accuracy, according to Gladstone many other recognizable geographic features—the southern coast of Italy, the Caspian Sea, the Persian Gulf—are fragmentary, transposed, or (often) both. Gladstone argues that these fragmentary and transposed locations, described without precise features or travel times, were likely known to Homer only indirectly, so he could rearrange them to suit his whims. Gladstone also identified parts of Homer’s world that could never be found on a map of the Earth: the transcendent (the Underworld), as well as the merely mythical (Odysseus’ journey from the land of the Lotus-eaters to Scheria, inclusive).

Later in the nineteenth century, the novelist and translator Samuel Butler relied primarily on topography to map Odysseus’ world, identifying specific locales from descriptions of forests, mountains, and coasts. Based on a close reading of the language and themes of the Odyssey , Butler concluded that “Homer” was a young, headstrong, unmarried woman from Sicily, specifically the region in and around Trapani on its west coast, and that area should be considered Ithaca. His cartographic reconstructions formed a significant part of his evidence for this argument; the descriptions of Ithaca were too specific to point to anything other than Trapani, he insisted, and the author’s familiarity with the region suggested that she lived there. He believed that Scheria was based on Trapani and its environs as well, specifically because of Book Thirteen, “in which passage Neptune turns the Phaeacian ship into a rock at the entrance of the Scherian harbor, I felt sure that an actual feature was being drawn from, and made a note that no place, however much it might lie between two harbors, would do for Scheria, unless at the end of one of them there was a small half sunken rock.” He searched for this sunken rock and other specific features (a nearby mountain, a town jutting out into the sea) and found them at Trapani. Based on those discoveries he insisted that the bulk of Odysseus’ journey took place in and around Sicily. This theory opens up some issues for Butler. If the Cyclopes live on Mt. Erice, the mountain visible from Trapani, and Trapani is Ithaca, then why did Odysseus not recognize how close he was to home when he fought Polyphemus? How did Odysseus travel from Scheria to Ithaca if they are both Trapani? Butler seems to have believed that much of the geographical information in the poem was simply artistic license, which allows him to ignore some details while relying on others as definitive evidence, a useful tactic in case-building that has appealed to argumentative humans throughout history.

Victor Bérard also made use of topography as evidence for his interpretation of Homeric geography. Bérard, a French diplomat and politician, took a voyage around the Mediterranean in 1912, following in Odysseus’ footsteps, taking photographs and gathering information. In 1933 his posthumously published book of photographs from the journey, Dans le sillage d’Ulysse ( In the Wake of Odysseus ) drew direct parallels between the world of the Odyssey and the world of the twentieth century. His map of Odysseus’ travels, published in his four-volume work Les navigations d’Ulysse ( The Navigations of Odysseus ) (1927–29), placed Calypso’s cave on an island near Gibraltar, his own particular innovation in the field of Odyssey geography. Gibraltar is certainly west of Corcyra. Bérard’s work spread widely in France and beyond, especially in schoolbooks; it formed the basis of the map published in the popular 1959 textbook Atlas of the Classical World , edited by A.A.M. Van Der Heyden and H.H. Scullard.

In which we ask the question, “But where is Ithaca, anyway?”

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean. —C.F. Cavafy, “Ithaka”

The geographical descriptions in the Odyssey are never as detailed or as specific as a cartographer might like. Odysseus himself describes Ithaca’s geography and topography only briefly, saying

My fame extends to heaven, but I live in Ithaca, where shaking forest hides Mount Neriton. Close by are other islands: Dulichium, and wooded Zacynthus and Same. All the others face the dawn; my Ithaca is set apart, most distant, facing the dark. It is a rugged land, but good at raising children; to my eyes no country could be sweeter.

So Ithaca is one of a group of four islands, with smaller islands nearby, but it faces west while the others face east. (What does it mean for an island to face a direction?) It has forests and at least one mountain, and it is a good place for raising children. That isn’t much to go on.

But it is enough for some. From antiquity onward many have assumed that Homer’s Ithaca was the island Ithaca (sometimes called Ithaki or Ithaka) in the Ionian Sea. Some disagreed, pointing out discrepancies between Homer’s descriptions and the reality of the island. Others wanted to find proof to support this long-held supposition. In 1868 the famous amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann conducted some minor excavations of what he claimed to be Odysseus’ palace on the isthmus Aetos, on Ithaca. In the few urns he uncovered Schliemann claimed to have found Odysseus’ and Penelope’s ashes, or at the very least those of their children. Schliemann, more famous for his later excavations of Troy at Hisarlik, said that he immediately recognized Ithaca from Homer’s descriptions. He was following growing scholarly consensus about the location of Odysseus’ Ithaca.

In 1920, Frank Brewster insisted that the passages describing Ithaca place the Homeric islands off the west coast of Greece. Brewster therefore identifies these with the Ionian Islands, and places Ithaca on the island of Ithaca, because it is, as Homer describes it, the least suitable of the four islands for chariot racing. Brewster points out that many have disagreed with this conclusion, however, with some contending that another of the islands more closely resembles Homer’s description of Ithaca and others insisting that the Ionian Islands are not Homer’s islands at all. The latter objection developed in part because one of the so-called islands, Leucas, may actually be a peninsula instead. On one side only a shallow marsh or lagoon separates Leucas from the mainland, not the deep water required for naval navigation.

What is an island, anyway? Does it need only be land surrounded by water, or does it have to be water that can be crossed only by boat or by swimming for the land to be truly “surrounded”? How deep was the water around Leucas in the time of Homer? Is it even possible to rely on topography and geographic descriptions to find locations subject to thousands of years of coastal erosion and human tampering? What is it about this story that makes people so eager to locate the exploits of gods, nymphs, and sea monsters in the real world?

In which we examine the potential value of locating sea monsters in your backyard

Unlike Middle Earth or the Hundred Acre Wood, which are arrayed in detailed maps at the beginning of the books that built them, the Homeric world—which wasn’t even constructed out of ink in the first place—does not come with its own pictorial guide. Because no one drew us a fictional landscape and told us it was the site of Odysseus’ voyage, we are left to hope, imagine, assert that his world is also ours. We can demand that Cyclopes and sirens coexist with the geographic specificity of Sicily and Corcyra. Attempts to map the Odyssey seem different from other attempts to locate the sites of famous myths and legends. Atlantis was the site of a wondrous civilization, Troy the landscape for an epic battle; finding them in the real world would mean discovering rich sources of evidence about past cultures. El Dorado’s location seems to have been coveted mainly for the lost city’s purported riches, Bimini for its rumored fountain of youth. But what do we gain by knowing where Helios kept his cows? Or which rocky, uninhabitable cave a kidnapping nymph called home?

In the ancient world, imaginative reconstructions of Homeric and other mythic geographies went beyond mere exercises in intellectual curiosity. Communities wrote themselves into the Homeric world by claiming that their city’s founder had made his way home, like Odysseus, from the Trojan War. Virgil ’s Aeneid , in which Aeneas travels from Troy to Italy to sire the people who will one day be the Romans, is the most famous of these. As the scholar Irad Malkin argues in his book The Returns of Odysseus , there was political value in connecting one’s community to such lofty origins.

The desire to feel connected to the story and to bring it into the world we inhabit remains. Homer enthusiasts can even trace Odysseus’ journey on a cruise ship. In 2009, Columbia University’s alumni association held a Journey of Odysseus cruise, which took passengers from Istanbul to Athens, via a loop of the Mediterranean, stopping at several important sites from the poem, including the supposed locations of Calypso’s cave (Valetta); the Phlegraean field where Odysseus battled Polyphemus (Pompeii); Lamos, where the Laestrygonians ate Odysseus’ men (Trapani); and Scylla and Charybdis (Taormina, on the Strait of Messina). Part entertainment, part education, the tour included guided reading of the poem and lectures from experts in the field.

Created for a course on Greek and Roman mythology in 2000, the classicist Peter T. Struck ’s online interactive map of Odyssean geography is intended to give his students a general sense of Odysseus’ journey, while recognizing the uncertainty that accompanies any attempt to definitively map Homer’s locations. Struck provided his own interpretation while asking students to read the Odyssey for geographic clues and develop their own. Many of the locations Struck provides are broadly agreed upon (Troy, Ismarus), but he also locates quite a bit of the poem’s action in the western Mediterranean. Struck’s map is one of the few to chart Odysseus’ almost successful return to Ithaca, thwarted by the bag of winds, and he very clearly shows Odysseus traveling in circles.

Contributor

Elizabeth Della Zazzera

Elizabeth Della Zazzera is a historian of modern Europe and a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. She was formerly the digital producer and Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow at Lapham’s Quarterly .

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BOLDER THE WORLD OVER

Odyssey of the seas.

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There’s never been a cruise ship that maxes out memory making like Odyssey of the Seas℠. Whether you’re taming waves on the FlowRider®*, kicking back at the totally reimagined pool deck, savoring bold global flavors onboard, or turning up the party vibes late at night — you’ll never run out of things to do onboard Odyssey of the Seas℠. 

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WHAT TO KNOW BEFORE YOU GO Onboard the region’s first-ever Quantum Ultra Class cruise ship.

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A POETIC CRUISE

In Odysseus Footsteps

"Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s secret citadel. Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of, many the pains he suffered on his spirit on the wide sea, struggling for his own life and the homecoming of his companions". ​ THE ODYSSEY

BRINGING LEGENDS TO LIFE

Odysseus’ travels lasted ten years in the Odyssey and ever since Homer wrote his beautiful epic poem in the 8th century BC, scholars and explorers have tried to recreate Odysseus' journey. From the fiction of Homer’s poetry to reality, this is what we achieved with this sumptuous cruise through the Mediterranean in search of cyclops, sirens, giants and more.

“Men are so quick to blame the gods: they say that we devise their misery. But they themselves- in their depravity- design grief greater than the griefs that fate assigns.” 

Homer 

The Odyssey

"Bringing Legends To Life"

We created this poetic cruise in the Mediterranean for a couple, one of their daughters and their granddaughter, to discover Odyssey's journeys back to Ithaca. At first, it was all about history and visiting incredible ancient sites, but soon, we challenged everything and came up with the perfect idea. One that was way more ambitious and magical.

The trip started in London with a once in a lifetime visit to the British Library to see an incredible treasure: some of Homer's surviving papyrus manuscripts. From there, we reached the British Museum for a private visit to hear all the tales of Odyssey's journeys and how Homer's poem has been inspiring artists ever since.

After London, we flew to Turkey to visit the ancient city of Troy, where our tale began. Here, in the middle of the ancient ruins, we saw the archaeological digs with a team of archaeologists working on-site to understand what the real Troy was and how it inspired Homer.

Then, two helicopters flew everyone to the couple's superyacht, and we sailed west like Odysseus did centuries before. 

From Turkey to Greece, Tunisia to Malta, Spain and Italy (including Sicily and Sardinia), our cruise took them to visit incredible natural and mythological sites and see and explore the most beautiful ancient ruins around the Mediterranean. We cross paths with artists such as James Joyce and historical figures such as Alexander the Great and Empress Elizabeth (Sissi) in Corfu.

We explored some of the legends Homer writes about and some other Greek legends during our journey. But the most incredible part of our journey was all the magical encounters we created with mythology. We followed Odysseus to the Underworld where Hades reigns to learn Tiresias' fate, opened Agamemnon's burial chamber, explored the cave of the Minotaur and even saw "by accident" a real mermaid during an exploration around Capri on board a submarine.

It was two weeks of marvels and epic tales where we brought the ancient gods and mythological heroes back to life while exploring some of the most beautiful ancient sites of the Mediterranean. A trip that created some unforgettable memories and showed magic does exist.

WHEN MYTHOLOGY MEETS REALITY

When we started creating this Homeric cruise, we had in mind something more traditional that focused on history, gastronomy and relaxing moments. But from the moment we presented our first draft to the grandparents, everything changed. We then imagined exploring some legends of Greek mythology; in no time, they were enthusiastic with the idea or fully recreating them. Even more, we suggested bringing mythological creatures to life for the pleasure of their granddaughter.

This is how we embarked on a journey to make the impossible possible and achieved one of our most magical creations at that time. Does minotaurs, centaurs, mermaids and nymph exist? Now they do, and the whole family can attest they do. A camera was always closely filming everything without being seen.

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12-Day Journey in the Footsteps of Odysseus and Penelope

Athens, Greece

We're sorry, but this package is not currently available. Please use our search tool

Take a journey 3,000 years back in time, across Homer’s wine-dark sea. Discover the legends of Heroes and Heroines, Gods and Goddesses and connect with the mythic power of the ancients. From the heart of Athens to Odysseus’ home island of Ithaka, embark on an unforgettable tour with lifelong researcher, seeker and storyteller Phil Cousineau.

With teachings from his books, films and studies, Phil takes you on a voyage through the history of civilizations that flourished in the distant past. With wisdom and wonder to be discovered at every turn, this 12-day tour with Sacred Earth Journeys is one you’ll remember forever.

Join author-filmmaker-mythologist Phil Cousineau on a tour of ancient Greece visiting many significant sites associated with two of Homer’s greatest heroes, Odysseus and Penelope.

• Travel with author, teacher and filmmaker, Phil Cousineau
• Insightful group discussions and “Long Conversations”
• Escorted tour of the Paleokastritsa in Corfu
• Local English-speaking guide in Olympia
• Guide from the Odyssean Studies Center in Ithaka
• Visits to ancient sites associated with Homer’s the Odyssey
• Group readings of poems, stories and passages associated with the sites we visit
• Invited guest speakers (TBC)

Monday, April 18th

You will be met at Athens International Airport and transferred to your hotel in the heart of Athens. Depending on your arrival time, you may have an opportunity to explore this ancient city on your own. Athens, the capital and largest city in Greece, dominates the Attica periphery. One of the world’s oldest cities, it is full of myths, mysteries and legends. Steeped with a rich history that spans around 3,400 years, the city is home to many sacred ancient sites, monuments and landmarks. A fusion of old and new, Athens is also a cosmopolitan metropolis buzzing with lively activity and vibrancy. If you arrive early enough, they recommend a visit to the National Archaeological Museum, founded at the end of the 19th century to house and protect antiquities from all over Greece, thus displaying their historical, cultural and artistic value. The museum features many artifacts associated with the Homeric epics, such as the golden Mask of Agamemnon, the bust of the Minotaur and the Aphrodite of Cnidus.

In the evening, you will gather at the hotel for a welcome drink before walking as a group to the Plaka district for the Welcome Dinner. It will be held at the Palia taverna Kritikou with its splendid view of the Acropolis and Lycabettus. You will get to know your tour leader and fellow travelers as you savor traditional Greek cuisine and admire the stunning views of ancient Athens.

(Overnight in Athens at the Hotel Hermes or similar.)

Tuesday, April 19th

Enjoy a traditional Greek breakfast followed by the first of the Long Conversations: “Epic Storytelling in Classical Athens.” Afterward, the coach will take you to the Peloponnesus, crossing the astonishing architectural marvel of the Corinth Canal, begun by the Roman emperor Nero, who abandoned the project, which was finally resumed in 1881 and completed in 1893. After a short stop at the canal, you will visit the ancient citadel of Mycenae and its neighboring museum, with its cyclopean walls and history of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Here, you will spend the morning exploring the archaeological site with a very special guest, Agamemnon Dasis, the great-great-grandson of the man who lodged the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (discoverer of Troy) when he excavated Mycenae in 1876.

After your tour of the citadel you will visit the nearby tholos or beehive huts, then lunch at Agamemnon’s restaurant and hotel, La Belle Helene, named after Helen of Troy. Over the years many luminaries have stayed here, including André Malraux, Stephen Spender, Jack Kerouac, Rebecca West, Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, Virginia Woolf, Carl Jung, Freya Stark, and J. K. Rowling.

Breakfast and lunch are included today.

(Overnight in Sparta at the Menelaion Hotel or similar.)

Wednesday, April 20th

After breakfast at the hotel, you will gather for a morning discussion based on Phil’s book, Who Stole the Arms of the Venus de Milo? The famous statue was inspired by the story of the torrid love affair between Paris, the prince of Troy and Helen of Sparta. It's a tale that has inspired more art than any other one from classical times. The conversation will prepare you for your visit today to the ruins of the palace she shared with King Menelaus. For it was here that the Trojan prince Paris, enchanted by the goddess of love, Aphrodite, came to seek out Helen, regarded as the most beautiful woman in the world, who was likewise under Aphrodite’s love spell. To catch a glimpse of the importance of these mythic figures, you will visit one of the most unusual sites in Greece, the strange pyramid-shaped Sanctuary of Menelaus and Helen, where they were worshipped as gods for centuries, and according to Pausanius, were buried there. 

You will enjoy a traditional lunch either in Sparta or Gytheion, depending on timing. After your intriguing morning, you will visit Gytheion, the ancient seaport for the war-hardened Spartans—a beautifully preserved town—then, you'll visit the Kranai islet. According to legend, this was the port from which Helen and Paris sailed for Troy, their tryst igniting the most famous war in history.

Thursday, April 21st

After breakfast at the hotel, the group will gather for a morning discussion about the curious relationship in the ancient world between athletics and warfare, as embodied at Ancient Olympia. Considered a national shrine for the ancient Greeks, the site housed many treasures and works of art ranging from temples, monuments, sacred altars, theatres and statues. Recent findings have pushed the origins of the competitions there from the traditional 776 B.C.E. to around 1250 B.C.E. Your visit will enrich your understanding of the role of athletics in Homer, who is often regarded as the first sportswriter in the world because of his intricate description of the so-called Funeral Games for the fallen hero Patroclus.

Together, you will make your way to the ancient gymnasium and the palaestra (wrestling forum), the Temple of Zeus, one of the original Seven Wonders of the World, the Temple of Hera, where the Olympic Torch is ignited for every modern Olympics, and the wondrous Archaeological Museum, which features the astounding statue of Hermes by Praxiteles. You will then walk through an old olive grove for a visit to the Olympics Museum, which features a collection of Olympic torches, medals and memorabilia of the Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the visionary who revived the Modern Olympic Games in the belief it would revive the spirit of the well-lived life.

This evening, Phil will lead a late evening discussion based on his book, The Olympic Odyssey, followed by a visit to a local taverna for some traditional music (at own expense).

(Overnight in Olympia at the Hotel Antonios or similar.)

Friday, April 22nd

Following your hotel breakfast, there will be a discussion about the symbolic power of Ithaka in mythology, psychology, poetry and the arts. After the talk, you will take the coach to the port of Patras, where you will catch a four-hour ferry to Pisaetos Harbor, Ithaka, then on to the nearby beautiful harbor town of Vathi. Tonight you will enjoy a fabulous meal and traditional Greek music together.

Breakfast and dinner are included today.

(Overnight in Ithaka at the Mentor Hotel or similar.)

Saturday, April 23rd

After breakfast, there will be a group reading of passages from the Odyssey that are set in Ithaka. You'll discuss the way the translations have shape-shifted over the centuries. You will also explore the centuries-long debate, which dates back to the 3rd century BCE, about the specific location of Homer’s Ithaka. 

After lunch, you will be guided by Spyros Couvaras, a member of the Odyssean Studies Center to the town square of the beautiful village of Stavros to see a scale model of ancient Ithaka, and the small but important Archaeological Museum of Stavros, where you will see fragments of twelve bronze ceremonial tripods in honor of Odysseus found in the nearby Polis caves. One is famously inscribed: EYXHN ODYCCEI, a reference to the gift of Alcinoos, King of Phaecia, to Odysseus. Then you will take a short drive by coach to the reputed ruins of Odysseus and Penelope’s palace that is referred to locally as Homer’s School. Archaeologists date it back to the 8th century. The most recent excavations, culminating in 2010, have fueled the controversy about the existence of a real Odysseus, reminiscent of Heinrich Schliemann’s digs at Troy, in Turkey, which many believe provides a historical basis for the Trojan War. After your visit to these haunting ruins, you will visit the actual Polis Cave, where the “Odysseus cult” was ritually celebrated for eight centuries. Time permitting, you will end your visits with a drive to the peak of Pilata Hill, which overlooks the Three Seas that Homer describes are visible from Odysseus’ Ithaka, and finally to the Homeric “Melanydros Fountain.”

Breakfast and lunch are included.

Sunday, April 24th

Today, you'll enjoy a morning of storytelling and discussion about the Iliad and the Odyssey, including recent mythopoetic renderings of Homer’s myths, including Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, and Madeline Miller’s Circe, and today’s theme of “Ithaka After Odysseus.”

After the “Long Conversation”, there will be an attempt to visit the Archaeological Museum of Vathi to see its beautiful collection of rare vases from the so-called “Dark Ages,” as well as vases from the Geometric Period and striking Ithacan bronze coins from Classical times. Some coins have the very face of King Odysseus. As it is Easter Sunday, they are not sure if the museum can be opened for the group, but they will try using their local contacts.

Next, you are in for a real treat! Enjoy a traditional Easter lunch in a picturesque setting with lamb on the spit, Greek music and dancing!

Monday, April 25th

After breakfast, you will leave Odysseus' home island for the mainland. You will board an early morning ferry bound for the port of Astakos on the west coast of the mainland, arriving at noon. You will enjoy a brief lunch in the port and then take the coach to Nicopolis, "the Victory City," named after the goddess Nike, where the great Epictetus founded his school of philosophy. Nicopolis was founded in 29 BCE to commemorate the nearby Battle of Actium, where Octavian's army overwhelmed Cleopatra and Marc Antony. It is considered the largest ancient city, size-wise, in all of Greece.

Dinner and overnight in Preveza with its glorious beaches.

(Overnight in Preveza at the Margarona Royal or similar.)

Tuesday, April 26th

After breakfast, the group will drive to Necromanteio of Acheron, a candidate for both the strangest ancient site in Greece and the least visited of the Homeric sites. For millennia, this temple marked the entrance to Hades, where a religious cult developed to celebrate the mysteries of Hades and Persephone. Pilgrims gathered here from all over the ancient world to honor the recently dead and also to be led by the resident Oracle of the Dead down into subterranean chambers, where it's believed they experienced a ritual death and rebirth. In Book Eleven of The Odyssey, Homer portrays the sorceress Circe as the inspiration for Odysseus to descend from here down to the Halls of Hades. On his nekyia, or underworld journey, the hero asked the soothsayer Tiresias for advice on how he could reach home again and be reunited with Penelope after twenty years.

Next, you'll continue along the beautiful western coast of Greece to Igoumenitsa to catch the ferry for Corfu. Upon arrival in the main port, you'll check into their luxurious hotel in Corfu town. Designed by the famous architect Sakelarios, the Corfu Palace is considered a classic, and is a much-loved hotel by locals and visitors alike.

Corfu town is a UNESCO World Heritage site, famed for its cobbled streets, Venetian architecture and eclectic galleries and restaurants. This picturesque town also has stunning views over the Ionian Sea.

(Overnight in Corfu at the Corfu Palace Hotel or similar.)

Wednesday, April 27th

Today, you'll enjoy the hotel breakfast and then set out by coach to the breathtakingly beautiful, high-cliffed Palaiokastritsa Beach, from where you'll journey by local boat to “Nausicaa’s Cave.” There, you will enjoy a seaside lunch and have an opportunity to swim.

According to long tradition, this is the site where the shipwrecked Odysseus was rescued by the princess Naussica and taken, in an extraordinary act of xenia, Greek hospitality, to the palace where she lived with her royal parents, King Alkinoos and Queen Arete. After listening to Odysseus’ heartbreaking stories about his twenty-year-long adventure, they built him a magical ship designed to carry him on his final journey back to Ithaka.

Thursday, April 28th

After your traditional sumptuous Greek breakfast, you will engage in your final “Long Conversation” at their hotel, which will be based on the shape-shifting nature of the tale of Odysseus and Penelope, one of the most durable and charismatic stories in human history. The discussion will range from the early Greek plays of Sophokles and Euripides to Ovid’s renderings, Monteverdi’s opera, Joyce’s Ulysses, the Coen brother’s O, Brother, Where art Thou?, to the recent feminist versions of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad and Madeline Miller’s Circe, and even the influence on video games such as “Odyssey: The Search for Ulysses.”

You will then board the coach for a drive to the nearby village of Gastouri, where you will seize the opportunity to visit the Achilleion Palace, which was constructed for the Empress, Elizabeth of Austria, as an expression of her passionate admiration for Greek culture. The villa offers a magnificent panoramic vista of the Ionian Sea and reveals a modern vision of King Alcinoos and Queen Arete’s mythical Phaecian palace.

Your final afternoon will be free for wandering the cobbled streets of Corfu town, shopping or journaling. In the early evening, the group will meet for a Farewell Banquet at a seaside taverna in Corfu town.

Friday, April 29th

After breakfast this morning, you'll say a fond farewell to your newfound friends and tour leader as your time together in Greece comes to an end. You will travel home with incredible memories and a deeper understanding of the importance of the sites visited and their role in Homer’s Odyssey.

After check-out, you will be transferred to Corfu International Airport for onwards flights home.

Breakfast is included today.

• Airfare to Athens and return from Corfu
• Cancellation & Medical Insurance (ask us for a quote)
• Meals and drinks not specified
• Cost to obtain valid passport
• Tips and gratuities to guides, drivers, hotel staff
• Any items of a personal nature such as laundry, drinks and telephone calls. Any item that is not specifically detailed on our website or in the final
• retreat itinerary

Phil Cousineau is a writer, teacher, editor, independent scholar, documentary filmmaker, travel leader and storyteller. His life-long fascination with art, literature, and history of culture has taken him on many journeys around the world. He lectures frequently on a wide range of topics from mythology, film and writing to beauty, creativity, travel and sports. He has published over 30 non-fiction books and has more than 20 scriptwriting credits to his name. Currently, he is the host of the much-acclaimed “inner travel” television series, Global Spirit, on Link TV.

Phil's books include his international bestseller, The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred, which has been translated into ten languages; The Book of Roads: Stories from Michigan; the recently released The Meaning of Tea; Stoking the Creative Fires: Nine Ways to Rekindle Passion and Imagination; The Olympic Odyssey, which was selected by the US Olympic Committee as a gift to the athletes at the 2004 Athens, Greece Olympics; Soul: An Archaeology: Readings from Socrates to Ray Charles; The Soul of the World: A Modern Book of Hours; and The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work. Cousineau also worked with the drummer John Densmore on his bestselling autobiography, Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and the Doors. Cousineau is also a contributor to more than 50 other books. 

Phil’s screenwriting credits in documentary films, which have won more than 25 international awards, include: A Seat at the Table; Ecological Design: Inventing the Future; Wayfinders: A Pacific Odyssey; Humble Serpent: The Life of Reuben Snake; Wiping the Tears of Seven Generations; Eritrea: March to Freedom; The Presence of the Goddess; The Hero’s Journey: The World of Joseph Campbell; and the 1991 Academy Award-nominated Forever Activists: Stories from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. His most recent work was story consultant and on-camera interviewee for Stealing Home: Tiger Stadium, Detroit’s Field of Dream, which was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2016. An expert on mythology and film and the “hero journey” structure of screenplays, Cousineau also consults on many types of films and projects, including at Warner Brothers, Twentieth-Century Fox studios, and Pixar Studios.

Cousineau has been the keynote speaker at major conferences as diverse as the Ansel Adams Centennial Celebration in Yosemite National Park, The European Unitarian Universalist’s Fall Retreat in the Netherlands, and the Red Bull Conference on Creativity in 2015. He has been invited to lecture at distinguished venues including the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford University, Pacifica Graduate Institute, the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago, the Swedenbourg Library, Syracuse University, Bard College, and the University of Tennessee. He recently gave a prestigious TEDx talk about mentorship and creativity called “The Passionate Life.” 

He has collaborated and appeared with many of the great thinkers and philosophers of our time including mentors, Joseph Campbell and Huston Smith, John O’Donohue, Karen Armstrong, Robert Thurman, Robert A. Johnson, James Hillman, Brian Swimme, Robert Bly, Brother David Steindl Rast, Marija Gimbutas, Angeles Arrien, Baseball Hall of Fame announcer Ernie Harwell, and many others. He enjoys collaborating with musicians and artists such as John Densmore, drummer for The Doors, Mickey Hart and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, cellist David Darling, songwriter R.B. Morris, Cliff Aerie and Chris Bakriges of the Oikos Ensemble, movie producer Jeff “The Dude” Dowd, and painter Gregg Chadwick. For the Global Spirit series he interviewed Carlos Santana and his wife Cindy Blackman Santana.

• Travel with like-minded people and forge lifelong friendships
• Escape from daily stresses, restore balance and rejuvenate the body, mind and spirit
• Learn about ancient cultures and traditions and explore their significant sites
• Travel safely with the comfort of a small group and an experienced, passionate tour leader
• Enjoy daily discussions, contemplations and life-changing conversations
• Develop more understanding and compassion for yourself and others
• Enjoy an itinerary that is extensively researched and infused with personal contacts and resources
• Connect with ancient spiritual energies and power places at carefully chosen sacred sites
• Strengthen your connection to the rest of the world and deepen your knowledge of other traditions

Tour operated by Sacred Earth Journeys. Sacred Earth Journeys is a registered & licensed Travel Agent in British Columbia (B.C. Reg 28465). All participants on our trips are covered by the terms of the British Columbia Travel Agents Act.

A deposit of $500 per person is required if booking more than 70 days before your departure date. Payment is due immediately in full within 70 days of departure. If you pay a deposit, the remainder is due 70 days before you depart. If the balance is not paid in full by the due date, we will regard the booking as canceled. Payments made less than 30 days before departure must be made with a certified cheque, money order, or credit card. All payments are non-refundable and we strongly suggest you purchase Cancellation Insurance to protect your investment.

Minimum Number of People

The advertised cost for each tour is based on an established minimum level of participation. Should the group for any tour fall below this number, each traveler may be assessed a surcharge dependent upon the number of persons traveling (usually between USD $100 and USD $300 per person). Sacred Earth Journeys will make every effort to keep the surcharge as small as possible. If assessed a surcharge, you will be notified of the amount at least two weeks before the departure date. Payment is due upon notification. Instead, in the event that there are not the minimum number of participants,  Sacred Earth Journeys reserves the right to either add a 10% small group surcharge or cancel the tour. In either case, you will be notified as soon as possible. In the event of a tour cancellation, you will receive a full refund or you may transfer to another trip.

Single Supplement

A single supplement is available for an additional cost ($980 USD per person for Greece; $850 per person for Mexico). The single supplement is for those who would like to secure a private room throughout the tour, at the indicated additional price. If you are not traveling with anyone you know and would like to share a room, please indicate your preference for a roommate above. We will be happy to work to find you a suitable roommate.

We strongly recommend purchasing Travel Insurance (Cancellation and Medical Insurance) to protect against cancellation fees and additional travel expenses that may incur before, after, or during the trip. All payments are non-refundable and we strongly suggest you purchase Cancellation Insurance to protect your investment.

Tour costs and what they include are listed on the itinerary for each tour. Unless indicated otherwise on the tour itinerary, the tour fee includes accommodations in double occupancy, meals as indicated (any foods or beverages not included in the program and purchased by you will be at additional cost. Tour price includes only foods and beverages that are provided to the entire group), all transportation during the tour, sightseeing as specified in the itinerary, entrance fees for parks and other areas, and services of a tour leader. The tour operator reserves the right to substitute hotels of similar category. Tour costs are based on group rates and no refunds will be given for unutilized services. Items not included in costs: visa and passport charges, departure taxes, gratuities (some tours require gratuities be pre-paid), extra meals not included in the itinerary, items of a personal nature (i.e. laundry, drinks, telephone calls, personal clothing), emergency evacuation, personal travel insurance, any item that is not specified as being included.

A valid passport must be held by each passenger traveling internationally. Some countries require that your passport is valid for 6 months from your return date. Visas are required for entry into some countries. Please check with your local Embassy or Consulate of the country being visited, to learn about Visa requirements for your Nationality. Obtaining Visas is at the passenger's own expense.

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Odyssey ">An Interactive Map of Odysseus’ 10-Year Journey in Homer’s Odyssey

in Literature , Maps | June 13th, 2019 8 Comments

The Odyssey , one of Home­r’s two great epics, nar­rates Odysseus’ long, strange trip home after the Tro­jan war . Dur­ing their ten-year jour­ney, Odysseus and his men had to over­come divine and nat­ur­al forces, from bat­ter­ing storms and winds to dif­fi­cult encoun­ters with the Cyclops Polyphe­mus, the can­ni­bal­is­tic Laestry­gones, the witch-god­dess Circe and the rest. And they took a most cir­cuitous route, bounc­ing all over the Mediter­ranean, mov­ing first down to Crete and Tunisia. Next over to Sici­ly, then off toward Spain, and back to Greece again.

If you’re look­ing for an easy way to visu­al­ize all of the twists and turns in  The Odyssey , then we’d rec­om­mend spend­ing some time with the  inter­ac­tive map cre­at­ed by Gisèle Moun­z­er .  “Odysseus’ Jour­ney”  breaks down Odysseus’ voy­age into 14 key scenes and locates them on a mod­ern map designed by Esri, a com­pa­ny that cre­ates GIS map­ping soft­ware.

Mean­while, if you’re inter­est­ed in the whole con­cept of ancient trav­el, we’d sug­gest revis­it­ing one of our pre­vi­ous posts:  Play Cae­sar: Trav­el Ancient Rome with Stanford’s Inter­ac­tive Map . It tells you all about  ORBIS , a geospa­tial net­work mod­el, that lets you sim­u­late jour­neys in Ancient Roman. You pick the points of ori­gin and des­ti­na­tion for a trip, and ORBIS will recon­struct the dura­tion and finan­cial cost of mak­ing the ancient jour­ney.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter,  please find it here . Or fol­low our posts on Threads , Face­book , BlueSky or Mastodon .

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site . It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal , Patre­on , and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Decem­ber, 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Homer’s Ili­ad Read in the Orig­i­nal Ancient Greek

What Ancient Greek Music Sound­ed Like: Hear a Recon­struc­tion That is ‘100% Accu­rate’

Dis­cov­er the “Brazen Bull,” the Ancient Greek Tor­ture Machine That Dou­bled as a Musi­cal Instru­ment

Learn­ing Ancient His­to­ry for Free

by OC | Permalink | Comments (8) |

Related posts:

Comments (8), 8 comments so far.

The name of the coun­try north of Mace­do­nia (i.e. the region of Greece) is North Mace­do­nia (Sev­er­na Make­doni­ja). Please, change your map accord­ing to the inter­na­tion­al agree­ments.

Not to worry…Macedonia is north of Greece..so is west,east,north and south Mace­do­nia.

No need to change any maps at this time as this fic­ti­tious coun­try will self-destruct and cease toex­ist in a very short time except as absorbed by its sur­round­ing coun­ties.

Circe’s loca­tion is usu­al­ly thought to be Mount Circeo, south of Rome…never heard of it been iden­ti­fied with the Balear­es

I could­n’t get the map to load. It said it had a fatal error. :-(

Same prob­lem for me

The link appears bro­ken, map fails with “Fatal error”, bit like in a Greek tragedy ..

I also got a fatal error. Is the map pos­si­bly restrict­ed in which coun­tries it can be viewed?

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The Greek Odyssey Tour: Vacation to Greece & Turkey

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• Trip Overview

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Countries Visited

Places visited, suggested duration.

Follow the path of Odysseus on this custom tailored tour of Greece and Turkey meant to give you the most amazing adventure through antiquity. From the ancient steps of the Parthenon to the sensational crumbled walls of Troy, you will stand with legends and gods, sailing through the incredible waters of the Mediterranean, and wandering along the path of history. Every adventure starts with that first step; come take it.

Customizable Itinerary

Athens - greetings to athena.

Arrive in the grand city of Athens, where the marbled world of the ages shines in the mid-morning sun. The scent of marble and olive oil mixes for a rich and creamy allure along the old streets of the city. From the airport you will have a private transfer to your hotel where, after check-in, the entire city of Athens can be explored at your leisure. You can see Acropolis hill rising above the center of the metropolis with prestige. Stroll along the Plaka , one of the oldest streets in the city, where ancient mansions continue to line the cobblestone lanes and the scent of traditional dishes drift through the air.

What's Included:

Athens - Where Odysseys Begin

The rich aroma of Greek coffee calls you from your bed. The sun drifts over the pillars of the Acropolis giving them a pink sheen in the morning light. Venture out into the city on a tour to see the famed history of Athens, from ancient to contemporary. The Temple of the Olympian Zeus continues to sit proud against the backdrop of the Acropolis. Hadrian’s Arch frames the temple behind it, built by the Roman emperor Hadrian and connoting the city as an unofficial second capital of Rome during his reign. The pillars of the temple continue to form a solid frame around part of the foundation, giving you a sense of wonderment at its size and the intricate detail carved into the tops of the Corinthian columns like ornate leaves.

Your journey through history brings you to the steps of the Acropolis where the polished marble runs from beneath your feet and into the sky. Step in front of the Propylaea, the elaborate entrance gate that glimmers and intimidates. Once through the gate you will step into the grace of Athena, within the reach of the Parthenon. Each pillar helps project an image of perfection along the structure where once a large statue of the goddess of wisdom could be seen. The metopes continue to display myths of wars, from Giants to the Amazonians, and more. There is a wash of awe that comes from being that close to such an elegant temple that has watched over the city for thousands of years.

Athens - The City is Yours

The city of Athens is yours, given to your whim, and at your leisure. Whether you wish to explore the modern streets of Kolonaki, where the honeyed baklava beckons to passersby, or you wish to explore more of Athens’ sensational past with a visit to the Agora; like Odysseus, you could let fate guide you. You have the option of journeying to Delphi for the day to meet with the great Oracle that once advised Greece for millennia, from kings to politicians and more. Ancient Delphi was dedicated to the sun god Apollo, inhabited since Mycenaean times. You can imagine the lavish temples that once stretched across the upper echelons of the site, where now pillars and statues remain. A cool breeze brushes along the mountaintops. The scent of pine rushes through the meandering stones of the city. The ruins of the Apollo temple look out over the valley and the rolling mountains beyond. Five pillars stand in salute to the grandeur that once housed the power and beauty of Apollo, where every part of the world that was touched by light was said to be graced by the sun god.

Mykonos - The Odyssey Begins

Today you will wave goodbye to the city of Athens, where the Parthenon continues to be a beacon of knowledge for the empowerment of history and the future. Your transfer will bring you to the port district of Piraeus where you will board your luxurious cruise ship and venture along the ornate Mediterranean waters to Mykonos. The island is famed for its cosmopolitan lifestyle and pristine beaches. Five windmills run along the beachside by the port with white walls and thatched roofs. They look as though they guard the city, the wheels spinning in the light breeze repelling worries away. Whether you wish to explore the hundreds of Cycladic chapels that decorate the island or would prefer to dip your toes along the warm, glassy water of Super Paradise Beach, the day is yours to see the famed splendor of Mykonos.

Rhodes - The Only Rhodes

The morning rises over the ship and brings with it a new city to explore. Rhodes sits along the splendid waters of the Mediterranean like a storybook, where the history of Greece overlooks the architecture of Venetian, Ottoman, and Italian occupiers. Disembark from the ship and step into a city that looks almost like a dream. Let the island be your guide, giving you the opportunity to stand over the sea and look out over the apex of the horizon while on the Acropolis of Lindos. Or you could wander through the medieval streets of Rhodes City. A large castle continues to wrap around the coastline near the harbor. The old city sits inside the belly of the castle, one of the oldest inhabited medieval towns in Europe, where turrets rise around the open square, and a charming fountain rests as the centerpiece. The rich aroma of meliasti , feta cheese wrapped in filo and topped with honey and sesame, is too luscious to pass up. Venetian buildings that give way to pointed arches and ornate tile decorations are a reminder of the eclectic culture of the island and the ottoman’s rule. The Colossus of Rhodes may no longer stand along the shores of the port but the city itself is as much of a spectacle to be seen and enjoyed.

Kusadasi - Revelation and One of Wonder

In the morning you arrive on the shores of the island of Patmos. In the hills over the city you can see whitewashed buildings climbing the slopes beneath an imposing stone monastery. History claims that this is the island where St. John the Divine wrote the Book of Revelations. Whether you prefer to stroll through the city, lounge on the beach, or tour the ancient, religious sites of the island, Patmos is there for you to experience. The town’s stone streets wind along the stretch of cozy white buildings that shine in the morning sun. The lovely fragrance of bougainvillea and sweet honey drift along the paths. Within the monastery walls it feels like you have stepped into a medieval castle. The arches within the central garden support the outer walls but also add a sense of serene fragility to the interior of a fortification that from the outside looked impenetrable. Look over the hard walls and the entirety of Patmos Town that reaches to the lower hills, the harbor, and the sea.

Step onto the island of Kusadasi where the famous city of Ephesus waits for your arrival. Where one of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World once stood, the ruins of the Temple of Artemis remain. The Odeon is shaped like a small theater, rising over the hill, used as both a concert hall and for the senate. The stone benches offer a stunning look into the acoustics of the ancient theater. The Fountain of Trajan continues to inspire awe in visitors with stacked pillars and porticos. The pool was over 60 feet long by 30 feet wide and surrounded by columns and statues. The marble continues to uphold some of its original integrity, with a backdrop of the hillside and strong protruding ledges. It is easy to imagine the magnitude and grandeur of Ephesus, how impressive it may have been because it still impresses people today.

Kusadasi - Along the Walls of Troy

Rising along the seaside of Izmir continues the wondrous history of the Mediterranean and beyond. Outside of the city of Izmir, where the turquoise water rushes against the shores, brings you to the ancient city of Pergamum and the steps of the Asclepion. The colonnaded pathway guides you from the entrance to the sanctuary. The base column is carved with snakes, the symbol of Asclepius, the god of medicine. The essence of the ruin gives you a sense of how the ancient people of the city lived and functioned. The Corinthian pillars continue to decorate the sky, stretched along what remains of their luxuriant past, where once doctors thrived and citizens were healed.

In the midst of the day you will arrive at the fabled walls of Troy, where Odysseus once fought, and a wooden horse gained tremendous fame; the city is known by the world within the celebrated poem of Homer, the Iliad . The uncovered layers of the city bring you to the rich depths of thousands upon thousands of years of resettlement and ruins. The base of the legendary wall continues to wrap around the city. The stone and arid landscape brings an earthen perfume to the air. Although the real Trojan horse does not stand outside of the city walls, a replica has been placed at the gates to give visitors a sense of the enormity of not only the walls but the horse and the impending united army.

Istanbul - In the Shadows of Worlds at War

From the Trojan War to WWI, the mountains and valleys of Turkey are filled with historic battles that bring legends and commemoration throughout time. A brief ferryboat ride brings you across the Dardanelles and onto the front-line of the WWI battlefield of Gallipoli, notorious especially in Australia and commemorated on their national holiday of Anzac Day. A walk around the battlefield takes you to a variety of locations, beginning at North Beach; a plateau rises on the right hand side and Walker’s Ridge on the left. The water is a pristine blue; the grass is manicured and lush. The history of Gallipoli is a troubled one but the site is as inspiring for a sense of contemporary history, as the Acropolis is for a taste of the ancient past. Later in the day you will arrive in Istanbul, considered the gateway to the East.

Istanbul - Formerly Constantinople

Istanbul was once the capital of Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire, an eclectic mix of the west and the east, where the cultures of continents collide. Today you will embark on a tour through the sensational city that will bring you within steps of Hagia Sophia Church. The church almost towers over the city, its dome vibrant and complex. What was once the largest church in the world is now a museum where the moment you step inside you can feel the immensity of history wrapped up within the breathtaking dome, vibrant frescos, and the understanding of this pinnacle of Byzantine architecture. Stand beneath the dome of the church and look up into the swirling colors and frescos of the ceiling. You are almost overcome with a sense of vertigo, from the height and the illusion of movement. The light is soft and the sound is a gentle echo of the whispers and footsteps of history.

The continuation of the tour brings you to another famous site of Istanbul, the Blue Mosque. Built to rival the Hagia Sophia, the flurry of domes and minarets immediately captivates you. It’s as if they carved a palace out of a mountain and turned it into a mosque. The variety of blues shimmers in the sunlight, giving a warm radiance against the open sky. Inside of the mosque you can hear the gentle prayers rising to the upper echelons of the dome. The colorful mosaics that decorate the interior swing into life with the shifting sunlight. The majesty of Istanbul is compelling and nothing less than magnificent.

Istanbul - Beneath the Brilliant Light

The gentle morning light flickers off of the Blue Mosque giving a wonderful cobalt hue to the day. Spend your time along the streets of Istanbul experiencing the city in whichever way you prefer. The city is alive with local flavors and customs unlike any other place in the world. Stroll along Galata Bridge where you can watch men of various ages fishing. Their fishing poles rest along the light blue rails waiting for a catch. The scent of pretzels covered in sesame seeds reaches down the way. Meander through the Grand Bazaar, one of the most famous market places in the world due to its incredible size. The boisterousness of bargaining cascades through the streets. The colorful textures of textiles are prominently displayed. Light shines through the varieties of Ottoman stained glass lamps. It feels as though the illustriousness of the bazaar will never end, filled with the most vibrant spices you have ever seen in addition to stunning woven rugs and ceramic dishes. It is almost enough to be overwhelmed by the colors and the delightful aromas of fresh flavors.

Istanbul - Odysseys and Endings

Even Odysseus’s odyssey ended, as will yours on your final day in Turkey. You will have a private transfer to the airport where you will meet your flight and venture back home. Like Odysseus, you traveled through the Mediterranean on a quest that brought you to the pillars of Athens, the walls of Troy, and the rippling domes of the Blue Mosque. Your time along the lands of Greece and Turkey may have ended but, like the Odyssey, the stories will never be forgotten.

Trip Highlights

• Journey along the footsteps of Athenian history and see the Parthenon
• Visit the Oracle of Delphi and listen to the legends that she created
• Dip your toes into the perfect beaches of Mykonos
• Venture through the medieval and ancient history of Rhodes that make you feel like you have stepped into a storybook
• Witness the grand monastery that hovers over the cave where St. John the Baptist wrote the Book of Revelations
• Explore the ancient ruins of the city of Ephesus
• See the remains of the legendary walls of Troy
• Discover the breathtaking sensation of the Hagia Sophia Church and the Blue Mosque

Detailed Description

Experience a true odyssey on this 12-day adventure through Mediterranean antiquity. Best visited within the months of April – October, cruise through the lush waters and rich history of Greece and Turkey, where the marvels aren’t just in the past but all around you. Step within the beauty of ancient pillars and the breathtaking art of Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. Listen to the whispers of legends told by the earth and the ruins. Let yourself be part of the adventure and follow in the path of Odysseus.

Your odyssey begins with your arrival in Athens. The ancient steps of the city lead to the Acropolis where the Parthenon watches over the city with pride as it has for thousands of years. Tour through the contemporary and ancient history of Athens, from the modern Olympic stadium to the marbled sensation of the Acropolis. Spend a day at leisure within Athens exploring its majesty at your own pace and, if you prefer, venturing out to Delphi to visit the famed remains of the oracle. The following day you will board your cruise ship and arrive on the unparalleled shores of Mykonos, with immaculate beaches and pristine architecture showing you the classic white of the Cyclades. Along the island of Rhodes you will be able to step back in time, whether within the old city wrapped within an extraordinary castle or along the ancient hilltop where the Acropolis of Lindos stands.

Before you reach the Turkish waters you will disembark in Patmos where a fortress-like monastery towers over the island atop the cave where St. John the Divine wrote the Book of Revelation. Continue on to a Turkish shore at the island of Kusadasi. Where the remarkable Temple of Artemis once stood now only stand the remains of the powerful port city of Ephesus. Wander through the ancient city of Pergamum where the steps of the Asclepion lay, a city known for its dedication to medicine. Stand alongside the walls of Troy and see where the Trojan horse once brought down an entire city. Along the coastline of Turkey brings you to Gallipoli, one of the most well known battlefields of the First World War. Your final days in Turkey find you in Istanbul, touring through the majesty of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. From Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, to the modern beauty and the enormity of the bazaar, you will not only travel along the footsteps of Odysseus, you will see what he saw and understand the majesty of the Mediterranean.

Zicasso offers a variety of Greece vacation packages .   Be sure to also browse the reviews for Greece travel agencies . You can read about what other travelers experienced while in Greece, and also see why travelers continue to rely on Zicasso for their customized Greek vacations.

Starting Price

$3,647  per person (excluding international flights)

Your Zicasso trip is fully customizable, and this sample itinerary is a starting place for your travel plans. Actual costs are dynamic, and your selection of accommodations and activities, your season of travel, and other such variables will bring this budget guideline up or down. Throughout your planning experience with your Zicasso specialist, your itinerary is designed around your budget. You can book your trip when you are satisfied with every detail. Planning your trip with a Zicasso travel specialist is a free service.

What's Included

• Accommodations
• In-country transportation
• Some or all activities and tours
• Expert trip planning
• 24x7 support during your trip

Your final trip cost will vary based on your selected accommodations, activities, meals, and other trip elements that you opt to include.

Reviews of Zicasso's Referral Service

4.9 stars based on 60 reviews.

Reviewed By  Randolph W.

Reviewed By  Jeff K.

Reviewed By  Shinjini M.

Reviewed By  Kathryn M.

Reviewed By  Sandra M.

Reviewed By  Ray M.

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The Odyssey

Film details, brief synopsis, cast & crew, john s hendricks, daniel boorstin, irene papas, bernard knox, savantis symoneoglou, technical specs.

Documentary exploring Homer's tale of the incredible journey of Odysseus, the Trojan war hero, back to his family and kingdom in Ithaca. Through clips from the movie "Ulysses," NASA footage of the disastrous Apollo 13 mission and interviews, the special relives Odysseus' extraordinary journey, links it to modern experience, and shows how the images and events portrayed in the story continue to resonate in literature, philosophy and the visual arts. The special also looks at archeologists on the island of Ithaca.

James Lovell

Diana buitron, judith martin.

Donald Sutherland

Steve tracy, alicia billings, art binkowski, walter cronkite, david ewing, terry hopkins, david hurley, richard kane, nancy lebrun, michael moore, karen thomas, jonathan ward, brett wiley.

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Welcome to Your Alum Network

The time you spent at Smith was formative, and life after Smith can be just as valuable. Now you can bask in the perks that come with being a member of the college’s network. As you make your way in the world, and make the change you want to see in the world, you’ll have 53,000 Smithies rooting for you and supporting you along the way. You can count on Smith for access to groundbreaking events and speakers, opportunities to make new memories, and career advice and connections. While being a Smith alum is a joy, it’s also a responsibility. Your experience at Smith rests on the shoulders of alums who came before you and who gave before you, and now it’s your chance to help the next generation have four formative years—and then some.

”At every step, Smithies have been on the front lines of tremendous change, of progress. They have started some of our most enduring social and cultural movements that changed the course of history. Smithies get things done.“

Find Your Friends

Download  The Network app ,   Smith’s easy-to-use alum directory, to update your contact information, get in touch with classmates and students, volunteer, and make new connections. You can also volunteer as a mentor and help Smith students get a career head start.

Stay Engaged

Events & Programs

SAQ & Other Media

Classes, Clubs, & Groups

Alums & Your Impact

Your Association

Staff & Alum Directory

Sip Sip, Hooray!

Put the kettle on, Smithies—the custom Smith tea blends are now for sale online, in the bookstore, and at the Campus Center Café. Initially debuted during the inauguration festivities of President Sarah Willie-LeBreton, the two blends are sustainably made and packaged, in keeping with Smith’s values.

If you can’t make it to Northampton, order some online and have a cup of Smith spirit with you wherever you may be.

Investing in Our Students

In the fall of 2022, Smith College eliminated loans from undergraduate financial aid packages for students receiving need-based institutional grants and replaced the loan amount with grants from the college.

This ongoing initiative—to ensure no student is barred from a Smith education because of finances—is something we continue to fundraise for. Join us today in supporting future generations of Smithies.

”This move has implications far beyond the financial. Decisions like this are essential in fostering a diverse community of students with different backgrounds and perspectives. Every step taken to make Smith more affordable means that students like myself have more time and energy to focus on our studies, our passions, and our futures.“

The Smith Fund

As a donor to The Smith Fund , you can open up a world of opportunities and help transform lives. Donations at regular intervals make a big difference. Smith Fund donations never go to the endowment—the funds are spent in the year in which they are received. You are the source of Smith’s power.

Here for Every Voice

Smith College has launched an ambitious initiative to raise $200 million in endowed funds for scholarship aid. With your partnership, Here for Every Voice will open Smith’s gates to the best minds and create opportunities that didn’t exist before. We will educate the next generation of women who will use their voices to lift communities, change policies, disrupt convention and create a more just and equitable world.

Other Opportunities

• Office for the Arts
• Endowed Professorships
• Career Development
• Neilson Library

“When I arrived on campus as a first year student nearly 40 years ago, I was told that I would make friends for life, which as a 17 year old I found difficult to imagine, never mind believe. Today, I can attest that those college friends are truly life-long sister-friends who have accompanied me through all of life's trials and tribulations.”

Notable Numbers

Alums in 119 countries

Active Smith clubs worldwide

Alum volunteers

Smith’s annual commitment to financial aid

Percentage of students who receive financial aid from Smith

Total gifts of $100 or less in 2022

Honoring Exceptional Alums

The Smith College Medal is awarded annually to those alums who, in the judgment of the trustees of the college, exemplify the true purpose of a liberal arts education through both their work and their lives.

Where Smithies Find Joy

The Grécourt Gates never looked so good! Thank you to all the alums who sent pictures to honor the inauguration of Sarah Willie-LeBreton. Explore the digital interactive mosaic and discover where Smithies find joy.

Come Work With Us!

See the latest job listings in the Alumnae Relations and Development Office.

Contact Alumnae Relations & Development

Alumnae House 33 Elm Street Smith College Northampton, MA 01060

Phone: 800-526-2023 or 413-585-2020

Staff Directory

Get in Touch! Share your story, brag about a classmate or let us know how we are doing. Send us an email .

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• / Destinations

DIVE INTO THE SARONIC GULF

• Cultural Sailing Cruise to Epidavros
• Destinations
• Half Day Sunset Cruises
• Odysseus Cruises – Sailing tours in Saronic Gulf
• Private Sailing Tours in Saronic Gulf

YACHT CRUISES BY

Get known with Odysseus A, your gateway to unforgettable sailing adventures in the stunning Saronic Gulf. Embark on a journey that combines luxury, exploration, and cultural immersion as we take you to the hidden gems of Greece’s coastal treasures.

Odysseus A Sailing Tour

Odysseus Cruises A is a premier sailing tours company that specializes in creating unforgettable experiences in the stunning Saronic Gulf. Whether you prefer a shared tour or a private excursion, they offer tailor-made itineraries to cater to your specific preferences. Embark on a remarkable journey aboard their luxury yachts, as you explore the hidden gems of the Greek islands.

Explore breathtaking waters

Through a unique combination of engineering, construction and design disciplines and expertise, Concor delivers world class infrastructure solutions to customers and stakeholders across a broad range of industry sectors.

Our Cruises Highlights

Epidaurus - metopi - aponisos - moni - perdika.

Sail through the wonders of Epidaurus with Odysseus Cruises as we present an unparalleled destination option for your journey. Embark on an extraordinary adventure through the Saronic Gulf, where you can immerse yourself in the breathtaking landscapes and rich cultural heritage of Epidaurus. Dive into the crystal-clear waters of Metopi Island, indulge in the serene ambiance of Aponisos Island, and uncover the untouched beauty of Moni Island. Complete your experience with a culinary delight at a local tavern in Perdika, Aegina, savoring authentic Greek flavors. With Odysseus Cruises, your voyage promises a perfect blend of exploration, relaxation, and gastronomic pleasures, offering an unforgettable journey through the treasures of Epidaurus and the Saronic Gulf.

LET'S SAIL TOGETHER

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to embark on a remarkable sailing adventure with Odysseus Cruises. Book now and secure your spot on our luxury yacht, as we navigate the captivating waters of the Saronic Gulf.

OUR CLIENTS TESTIMONIALS

"My experience with Odysseus A and their cruises to the Saronic Gulf was absolutely incredible. From the moment we stepped on board, we were greeted with warm hospitality and a sense of luxury. The itinerary was perfectly crafted, taking us to breathtaking destinations such as Metopi Island and Aponisos Island. The crystal-clear waters and serene beaches were simply mesmerizing. The crew was attentive and knowledgeable, ensuring that every aspect of our journey was seamless. I can't recommend Odysseus A enough for anyone seeking a truly unforgettable sailing experience in the Saronic Gulf."

"Odysseus A exceeded all my expectations during our sailing tour to the Saronic Gulf. The private cruise was tailored to our preferences, allowing us to explore hidden gems such as Moni Island and Perdika in Aegina. The beauty of the Greek islands is unparalleled, and Odysseus A provided the perfect vessel for us to immerse ourselves in the stunning surroundings. The stops for swimming, particularly at Aponisos Island, were a highlight. The crew's attention to detail and their dedication to creating a memorable experience made this journey truly exceptional. I would book with Odysseus A again in a heartbeat."

"Odysseus A provided an unforgettable adventure through the Saronic Gulf. The shared sailing tour was a fantastic way to meet fellow travelers and enjoy the beauty of Greece together. The itinerary was well-planned, with stops at picturesque locations like Metopi Island and Perdika in Aegina. The opportunity to taste traditional Greek cuisine at a local tavern was a delightful cultural experience. The crew was friendly, professional, and went above and beyond to ensure our comfort and enjoyment. I can't thank Odysseus A enough for creating lasting memories and an exceptional sailing tour. I highly recommend them to anyone seeking an authentic Greek island experience."

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