Researchers suggest Homer’s Ithaca was a peninsula rather than an island

James Diggle of Cambridge and John Underhill of the University of Aberdeen published a paper suggesting that the Ithaca described in Homer’s Odyssey was not the Greek island of the same name.

The authors argue that the geographical descriptions in the epic do not align with the physical characteristics of the modern island of Ithaki. The researchers built upon a theory first proposed in 2005 by Robert Bittlestone.

Bittlestone suggested that the setting was actually Paliki, a peninsula located on the western edge of Kefalonia, a Greek island. Diggle and Underhill provided new geological and textual evidence to support this claim. They noted that Homer never explicitly describes Ithaca as an island or uses the specific geographical terms he applies to other known islands in his work. Honor Cargill-Martin, a classicist and novelist, observed that the modern island of Ithaki features mountains rising directly from the sea.

This contradicts Homer’s text, which describes lowlands surrounding a single central peak. The new research indicates that the setting in the Odyssey may have been a peninsula, which would better match the literary descriptions provided by the poet.