History versus the Homeric Iliad : A View from the Ionian Islands

I. Introducing the Problem: Homer, Odysseus, and the Catalogue of Ships

[Homer] is every Mycenaean scholar's passion . . . but if one thing is more certain than another in dealing with Greece, it is that every generation, let alone century or millennium, saw changes more profound than the simple classicist likes to acknowledge. It seems more honest, even refreshing, not to invoke Homer as decoration or instruction.¹

Four decades since Emily Vermeule made this cautious remark in the preface to her Greece in the Bronze Age (1964), we may acknowledge the fact that Homer is still an object of passion for most endeavors into the Mycenaean world. The debate over the historicity of Homer (whether the poems attributed to him reflect certain historical conditions and when these can be dated) has not ceased to absorb scholarly thought. It is a fact that an attempt to interpret and confirm Homer as a historical work was a major driving force in Aegean prehistoric research during the pre-World War II years.

In tracing patterns of connection between the world of the poems and that documented by archaeological data, some scholars have attempted to examine differences and similarities between habitation patterns revealed by archaeological surveys or regional studies and relevant information stated or implied in various sections of the epic, most notably the so-called "Catalogue of Ships" (Κατάλογος, Il. 2.483-760).² Following this line of thought, the present study examines the nature of the connection between the Ionian Islands, homeland and kingdom of Odysseus, as pictured in Homer, and the Ionian Islands during the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, as revealed in the archaeological record.

A main point I will focus on is the contradictory information included in the Catalogue and in the rest of the epic. That the Catalogue differs significantly from the rest of the Iliad (and the Odyssey) and that the information it includes is often incompatible with it are recognized facts.³ The point is how to interpret this situation. It is overly simplistic to consider this as a "right or wrong" query, as Walter Leaf did.⁴ It is true that one can find throughout Homer a number of minor inconsistencies that have been interpreted as evidence for the "multiple authorship" of the poems,⁵ emphasized by the Analytical School of Homeric studies. Yet, the Catalogue is by far the largest and densest concentration of such inconsistencies on major issues, such as the status of leaders and the extent of their kingdoms. Certain morphological features of the Catalogue, most notably the fact that it is introduced by a προοίμιον of its own (Il. 2.484-493), have been long observed and add to the general impression that this passage must have originally been an independent work, added to the Iliad only after the latter had been basically formulated.

Every attempt to examine the "historicity" of these poems must, at least, take into consideration this major inconsistency. Throughout this article, I will base arguments only on significant contradictions, such as omitting the status (or even the existence) of kings and kingdoms, and I will refrain from focusing on trivial details, which has been a source of just criticism of certain Analytic arguments. ⁶ The most significant effect of this Catalogue/Iliad incompatibility on the methodology of "Homeric archaeology" should be, in my opinion, to warn us against making chronological statements which assume Homer is a single work; the case of the Catalogue, in other words, must make us very suspicious of the conceptual (and, therefore, chronological) unity of the Homeric text. It seems a safer method to consider certain passages and issues separately so that chronologies refer only to specific passages, not to the epic altogether. For instance, the famous passage of Myrione 's "boar-tusk helmet" in the Iliad (10.260-271), which is undoubtedly a Bronze Age artifact, is no guarantee that Homer as a whole, or even the Iliad, has a Bronze Age background; it can only provide clues for the specific passage in which the object is described. I thus argue that one...