The Odyssey is set in a fantasy world – but the ancient Greeks mapped it onto what they knew

Christopher Nolan's new Odyssey adaptation has sparked the same debate the ancient Greeks loved: Is Homer's tale historically accurate? The Conversation reports that when Homer composed The Odyssey around eight hundred BCE, much of Odysseus' voyage took place in a fantastical realm beyond the map. But as Greek city-states spread across the Mediterranean, scholars began asking: could these mythical places actually exist? And so they mapped them. Troy went to the Dardanelles, the lotus-eaters to North Africa, the Sirens to the Naples area, and Scylla and Charybdis to the Strait of Messina. When Greeks colonized Sicily and southern Italy, they claimed these new settlements were the very locations Homer described—instantly giving their homes ancient prestige. One skeptical geographer sardonically suggested you'd find Odysseus' route once you found the cobbler who sewed up the bag of winds he received. It never happened. Yet the impulse to pin myth to geography was irresistible, then and now.

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