An Interactive Map of Odysseus’ 10-Year Journey in Homer’s Odyssey

The Odyssey, one of Home­r’s two great epics, nar­rates Odysseus’ long, strange trip home after the Tro­jan war. Dur­ing their ten-year jour­ney, Odysseus and his men had to over­come divine and nat­ur­al forces, from bat­ter­ing storms and winds to dif­fi­cult encoun­ters with the Cyclops Polyphe­mus, the can­ni­bal­is­tic Laestry­gones, the witch-god­dess Circe and the rest. And they took a most cir­cuitous route, bounc­ing all over the Mediter­ranean, mov­ing first down to Crete and Tunisia. Next over to Sici­ly, then off toward Spain, and back to Greece again.

If you’re look­ing for an easy way to visu­al­ize all of the twists and turns in The Odyssey, then we’d rec­om­mend spend­ing some time with the inter­ac­tive map cre­at­ed by Gisèle Moun­z­er“Odysseus’ Jour­ney” breaks down Odysseus’ voy­age into 14 key scenes and locates them on a mod­ern map designed by Esri, a com­pa­ny that cre­ates GIS map­ping soft­ware.

Mean­while, if you’re inter­est­ed in the whole con­cept of ancient trav­el, we’d sug­gest revis­it­ing one of our pre­vi­ous posts: Play Cae­sar: Trav­el Ancient Rome with Stanford’s Inter­ac­tive Map. It tells you all about ORBIS, a geospa­tial net­work mod­el, that lets you sim­u­late jour­neys in Ancient Roman. You pick the points of ori­gin and des­ti­na­tion for a trip, and ORBIS will recon­struct the dura­tion and finan­cial cost of mak­ing the ancient jour­ney.

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Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Decem­ber, 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Homer’s Ili­ad Read in the Orig­i­nal Ancient Greek

What Ancient Greek Music Sound­ed Like: Hear a Recon­struc­tion That is ‘100% Accu­rate’

Dis­cov­er the “Brazen Bull,” the Ancient Greek Tor­ture Machine That Dou­bled as a Musi­cal Instru­ment

Learn­ing Ancient His­to­ry for Free


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Comments (13)
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  • Philologist says:

    The name of the coun­try north of Mace­do­nia (i.e. the region of Greece) is North Mace­do­nia (Sev­er­na Make­doni­ja). Please, change your map accord­ing to the inter­na­tion­al agree­ments.

  • Chris Evans says:

    Not to worry…Macedonia is north of Greece..so is west,east,north and south Mace­do­nia.

  • Bill Gatzoulis says:

    No need to change any maps at this time as this fic­ti­tious coun­try will self-destruct and cease toex­ist in a very short time except as absorbed by its sur­round­ing coun­ties.

  • Omar says:

    Circe’s loca­tion is usu­al­ly thought to be Mount Circeo, south of Rome…never heard of it been iden­ti­fied with the Balear­es

  • Rowena Love says:

    I could­n’t get the map to load. It said it had a fatal error. :-(

  • Johnny says:

    Same prob­lem for me

  • tsener says:

    The link appears bro­ken, map fails with “Fatal error”, bit like in a Greek tragedy ..

  • Jonathan Gossage says:

    I also got a fatal error. Is the map pos­si­bly restrict­ed in which coun­tries it can be viewed?

  • greyson tubbs says:

    erm what the sig­ma

  • Jake Dorminey says:

    umm what the sig­ma

  • Sutton Delaney says:

    Urm what the sig­ma

  • Sutton Delaney says:

    nice guys always fin­ished last shouldve known that gave you my hear and you f around and broke that. so sad. girl yu played me did me so shady come on now let me be ruth­less

  • greyson tubbs says:

    Erm what the sig­ma ohio. I like goon­ing and munt­ing. I am the riz­zler, I would love to meet the ulti­mate skib­bi­di. He is my idol. I hope baby gronk breaks up with livy dunne so i can mog all of them. I love kai cenats big toe.

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