Homer’s Iliad tells of gods, heroes and a ten-year war, yet many of the places named in the epic are real sites that travellers in Greece can still explore.
A new guide by TheCollector lists ten such locations. Seven of them lie in Greece, from the gold-rich citadel of Agamemnon to the island home of Odysseus.
Mycenae, the Iliad’s city “rich in gold”
In the Iliad, Mycenae is the stronghold of Agamemnon, commander of the Greek forces. Homer twice calls it “rich in gold”, according to the Perseus text of the poem.
Heinrich Schliemann proved the phrase apt in 1876, when he opened the shaft graves of Grave Circle A. Their treasures included the famous gold funeral mask now called the Mask of Agamemnon, although it predates any Trojan War.
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Visitors can still walk beneath the Lion Gate and along the “Cyclopean” walls. Later Greeks believed only the giant Cyclopes could have lifted such stones. Many of the finds now sit in Athens, where a major Mycenaean exhibition has drawn crowds.
Nearby Tiryns, “the walled” city of the hero Diomedes, is even more imposing. Its corbelled galleries run through ramparts several metres thick. UNESCO lists Mycenae and Tiryns together as a single World Heritage site.
Nestor’s Pylos and Menelaus’s Sparta
King Nestor, the oldest and wisest of the Achaean leaders, rules “sandy Pylos” in the Iliad. In 1939, American archaeologist Carl Blegen found a Mycenaean palace at Epano Englianos in the southwest Peloponnese.
His team also uncovered clay tablets in Linear B, the earliest written form of Greek. As a result, the site is often called the Palace of Nestor.
In 2015, Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker of the University of Cincinnati found an untouched grave nearby. The Griffin Warrior, buried around 1450 BC, lay with bronze weapons, gold rings and a superb carved sealstone known as the Pylos Combat Agate.
Further east, in the Iliad, Menelaus rules Lacedaemon, the land around Sparta. At Therapne, just outside the modern town, archaeologists found Mycenaean remains and the Menelaion, a shrine to Menelaus and Helen.
Spartans worshipped the couple there from the 8th century BC. During the 1970s, excavations by the British School at Athens recovered offerings dedicated to the legendary king and queen.
Crete, Olympus and the gods above the battle
The Iliad calls Crete the island “of the hundred cities”. Under the warrior-king Idomeneus, it sends 80 ships to Troy, one of the largest fleets in the Catalogue of Ships.
Before the Mycenaean takeover in the 15th century BC, the island was home to the Minoan civilisation. At Knossos, Sir Arthur Evans excavated a vast palace in the early 20th century, along with Linear B tablets.
The palace’s maze-like plan also suggested a link to the labyrinth of the Minotaur. Some traces of the Linear B language even survive in Homer’s vocabulary.
Then there is Mount Olympus, the home of the gods. In the Iliad, Zeus gathers the immortals “upon the topmost peak of many-ridged Olympus” while the war rages below.
At 2,918 metres, it is the highest mountain in Greece, rising on the border of Thessaly and Macedonia. Its often cloud-wrapped summit made it a natural home for the gods, and the massif is now a national park popular with hikers.
Most walkers start from Litochoro, the town at the foot of the mountain. From there, marked trails climb through pine and beech forest towards the summit ridge.
The puzzle of Odysseus’s Ithaca
In the Iliad, Odysseus sails to Troy from Ithaca, and most readers identify his kingdom with the present-day island of Ithaki. However, Homer describes his home as the lowest-lying and furthest west of its island group, which mountainous Ithaki does not quite fit.
Some scholars favour the Paliki peninsula of Kefalonia, which may once have been a separate island. Others argue for Lefkada, further north. The debate remains one of the great puzzles of Homeric geography.
The remaining three sites on the list lie across the Aegean in Turkey. They include the mound of Hisarlik, widely accepted as Troy, as well as Mount Ida and the Scamander river, where Achilles fights the river god in Book 21.
For travellers in Greece, however, the Iliad is easiest to trace at home. A day in the Argolid covers Mycenae and Tiryns, while finds such as the intact Mycenaean tomb at Aigio keep adding to the story.
Source: TheCollector
