Odysseus Returns

Homer's poems are stuffed full with geographical information.

But actually, by the time that Homer was composing these poems, the Trojan War itself was already distant history, almost becoming myth.

The consensus is that Homer was a poet.

And being a poet, he's not a very reliable source.

But the Homeric text gives us plenty of information.

Every time somebody studies Homer, they discover something new.

In 1870 the German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann was looking for Troy.

And he found it.

A few years later, he found the city of Mycenae.

The capital of the Mycenaean empire, and the home of King Agamemnon.

And then in the 1930s archeologists uncovered the palace of King Nestor, at Pylos.

All of the locations that Homer describes in the Aegean, they check.

How come all these years we haven't found where Ithaca is?