Greek PantheonRealm
Ithaca
The island kingdom of Odysseus, whose twenty-year journey home from Troy is told in Homer's Odyssey.
About Ithaca
The island that is the point
Ithaca is Odysseus's small, rocky kingdom. The Odyssey spends more lines on getting there than on describing it: goats, a harbor, a palace full of suitors. Homeric geography and the modern Ionian island do not match cleanly; Strabo already worried. Cult of Odysseus is late and local. The poem needs a home small enough that a returning beggar can retake it in one night. Ithaca is a political scale, not a tourist map.
On the map
Ithaca among other places of the Greek Pantheon.
Sources and further reading
Source notes
These references are recorded in the catalog. Their passage wording and translation have not been checked, so quotations are not displayed here.
- Homer, Odyssey 9
About this entry
By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.
Coordinates mark where the myths place a site, or where the tradition locates it today. Mythic realms are left off the map or marked as symbolic placements.
Keep exploring
One myth a week, with its sources in a short email. The sign-up form is just below.