Where was the land of Phaeacians? (Odyssey)

This is an extract from a small book of mine titled: “A brief and realistic approach to the wanderings of Odysseus”, which was published in 2023 in Greek:   https://www.politeianet.gr/books/9786185693046-metaxas-georgios-risos-mia-suntomi-kai-realistiki-proseggisi-stis-periplaniseis-tou-odussea-337605

A fundamental knowledge of Odyssey is necessary.

(Book numbers are always referring to Odyssey rhapsodies, except when Iliad is specifically mentioned).

Homeric texts taken from: http://johnstoniatexts.x10host.com/homer/odyssey5html.html

Odysseus in the land of Phaeacians

According to the common knowledge, when we talk about the land of Phaeacians, everyone has in mind the island of Corfu.

But Homer never mentions Corfu (a name that didn’ t exist at his time), nor uses any of the older names of this island (e.g. Drepane), actually he never says anything other than “land of Phaeacians”. In addition, there is a strong argument against this assumption (i.e that Corfu is the “island” of Phaeacians), and this is the relatively small distance of Corfu from Ithaca, the home of Odysseus (probably not contemporary Ithaca but rather the nearby island of Lefkas, but this is another story). Odysseus, as can be deducted from Odyssey (if we consider the poem as a reliable source for geography, distances, time intervals and human relations), didn’t know about Phaeacians who were living “far away from Ithaca”, as he personally states (book 9, 18) and more precisely “at the end of the Earth” according to Nafsika (book 6, 204).

But a man as much traveled around as Odysseus, would not consider Corfu as a “far away” land and for sure he could not ignore Phaeacians living so close to his domain which included most of the islands around Ithaca (book 1, 245-246), (Iliad book 2, 631-637). On the other hand, neither Phaeacians themselves knew him personally and they had only heard about his feats and bravery in the Trojan war.

For comparison, when the young and inexperienced son of Odysseus Telemachus borrows a small ship with 20 oarsmen (book 1, 280) to sail to Pylos seeking news about his father’s fate, at a distance about the same as from today’s Ithaca to Corfu (more, if we consider as Odysseus’ Ithaca, Lefkas), he does the trip with ease despite traveling mainly by night in both ways and in less than 24 hours for each leg. 

Also, in book 1, 183-184, Mentis a friend of Odysseus (actually Athena in disguise) tells Telemachus that he is sailing to Temesa to trade iron for copper. Whether it was Temesa in Calabria Italy or in Cyprus (this is no clear), that was anyway a long and perilous voyage, but no comment was made from either side, indicating an unusual feat.
The assumption that Phaeacians were living in Corfu came from the fact, that Homer strongly implies that the trip of Odysseus aboard the Phaeacian ship to his homeland took just one night (book 13, 29-30 and 93-95), something quite feasible from Corfu. So, much later (3^rd ce. BCE) Apollonius of Rhodes in his poem “Argonautica” which is obviously fictional and based on legends but tries to imitate Odyssey, names the present day Corfu (then Drepane) as the island of Phaeacians (Argonautica book 4, 982-991), although Homer always talks about the “land” of Phaeacians and never about an island!

As about Phaeacians themselves, it seems that there was something strange and mysterious about their ships, because from the description of their king Alcinous they seem to sail without a pilot or a helmsman and their ships could find their way all by themselves through mist and clouds, without any risk:

Tell me your country and your people,                     
your city, too, so ships can take you there,
using what they know to chart their passage.
Phaeacians have no pilots, no steering oar,
like other boats, for their ships on their own
can read men’s hearts and thoughts—they know
all men’s cities, their rich estates, as well,                                                         
and quickly skim across wide tracts of sea,
concealed in mist and clouds, without a fear
of shipwrecks or disaster.  

Book 8, 556-562

This description has given rise to various speculations, some so extreme as to imply  that Phaeacians possessed very advanced technology, similar to or even exceeding that of the present time! But in no less than in three occasions (for example book 7, 325-328) where the preparations for the trip of Odysseus to his homeland are described, the crew of the 52 oarsmen, the sails and the oars are all mentioned in a very conventional way.

Probably, the words of Alcinous, who as king was seeking to impress Odysseus (who’s true identity was not revealed yet, but he could guess Odysseus high status), could imply the knowledge of the compass, a secret that was lost later on, along with Phaeacians themselves. Actually the construction of a compass is very easy, by using just a bucket of water, a free floating piece of wood and an elongated piece of magnetic ore such as magnetite (picture 1).

Picture 1. Medieval compass from the book of the 17^th century: «Magnes sive de arte Magnetica», of German Jesuit priest and scientist Athanasius Kircher. All necessary material were available at the time of Odysseus, as well. (Source: quora.com)

Such a piece of magnetic ore (hematite) about 4 cm (1.6 in) long, was found in 1967 among other objects of the pre-Columbian culture of Olmecs in central Mexico, and was dated between 1400 and 1000 BCE. American astronomer I. B. Carlson in 1975 theorised that the artefact was part of a compass made by Olmecs 1000 years earlier than the Chinese, i.e. at the era of the Odyssey (circa 1200 BCE). So if there is evidence of the use of a magnetic ore as a compass in one part of the world, it is plausible that this same could have happened in its opposite side as well.

According to an article of the Greek archaeologist Teresa Mitsopoulou in 1988 titled “The little fish on the bow”, this really could have happened, as implied by the presence of a fish on the bow of ships depicted on the bottom of Cycladic frying pans (2800 – 2300 BCE). Of course there are alternative hypotheses, that it is about a wind direction indicator or even just an emblem.

Picture 2. Author’s impression of how the rudders of a Phaeacian ship may look like, concealing their existence and on the same time being much more efficient that the typical external oar-like rudder(s) of that era. The rudder is lowered into a box like “well” that prevents the sea entering the ship and its shaft is secured by a removable plank. By taking the plank out, the rudder can be withdrawn through the box into the ship, to enable the crew to drag the ship on the beach and/or to conceal the principle. A similar system is used today for the removable keels of the small Optimist sailing boats, but without the function of a rudder.

With a compass, a ship obtains all the qualities Alcinous was boasting about, i.e. the capability for an apparently “blind” navigation. As about the absence of a rudder, it could well have been just not visible, quite like a contemporary one (picture 2), while in the ships of the time of Odyssey it looked more like a big oar (later two oars). It is also curious and straightforward suspicious, that the trip started at sunset, something extremely dangerous for that era, while Odysseus was kept apparently drugged throughout it.

Once they leaned back and stirred the water with their oars,
a calming sleep fell on his eyelids, undisturbed
and very sweet, something very similar to death. 

Book 13, 78-80

A “sleep” so deep, that the Phaeacian sailors had to carry him out of the boat and laid him by an olive tree, still “sleeping”!  And despite the fact that the ship had landed on the shore with such momentum, that half of it came out of the water! (book 13, 114-115).

Just for comparison, about 10 years earlier in the beginning of his wanderings, when Odysseus sailed from the island of Aeolus to Ithaka with his crew, he was so eager to see his homeland that he stayed sleepless for nine days and nights in a row! (book 10, 28-31).

Interestingly, Alcinous himself had foretold Odysseus that he will make the trip while sleeping (book 7, 318), even if he had to be taken further than Euboea, that lays, as they say, at the end of the world (book 7, 322).

Apparently, Phaeacians wanted to protect their valuable secret (the compass) that made them rulers at sea, but they were also “advertising” their navigation skills by returning the shipwrecked sailors to their homes extremely fast, as they were making them believe, while in reality they were just keeping them drugged.

As an interesting note, in the 1977 movie “The Odyssey” starring Armant Assante, that quite successfully tries to present realistically that era (save for gods and monsters), the deep sleep of Odysseus is justified as a result of drugging him but for different reasons (to help him get some rest).

So where was the land of Phaeacians?

As most probable location seems today’s Trapani, a main harbor in west Sicily, on which from Google Earth two harbors are outlined (only the northern one in use today) as Homer describes (book 6, 262-263). There, Phaeacians should have settled after been ousted from the area of a volcano, probably Etna in east Sicily (book 6, 4-5), by their villain neighbors, Cyclops. Their new land was named Scheria, and interestingly enough, in antiquity there was a certain town named Schera in west Sicily. (picture 5).

Cyclops usually were related to metallurgy and volcanoes, especially Etna, where they supposedly had constructed Zeus thunderbolts. It is more than obvious that the word “Trapani” originates from the word “Drepani” (the Greek word for sickle), a name that Apollonius of Rhodes relates to the land of Phaeacians because of their knowledge of growing cereals (Argonautica book 4, 988-991). But Apollonius thought the place was Corfu because it was also named Drepane probably thanks to the shape of its southern part in the form of a sickle. Sicily, by the way, was the main cereal provider for the Mediterranean region in the antiquity.

About 15 km (9.5 miles) northeast of Trapani there is Rio Forgia, an area where a small river (mostly dry today) flows to the sea, and this is the only sandy area in an otherwise rocky coast. It was probably there where Nafsika, daughter of king Alcinous, went to wash cloths with some other maidens “far from the city” (book 6, 40) and there she was met with the shipwrecked (rather raftwrecked) Odysseus.

Also, the name of Phaeacians (in Greek ”phaeos” means “ash color”) is probably related to the ash of a volcano (Etna?) that periodically may have covered their original land. Sometimes in the volcanic rock basalt, magnetite can be found as well, an ore essential to make a compass.

Of course, the trip from Trapani to Ithaca (be that Lefkas or today’s Ithaca) should have lasted about 3.5 days at a mean speed of 5.5 knots with a well trained crew, rowing in shifts. This is of course incompatible with the one night trip Homer implies, but as the only witness was profoundly asleep (or rather drugged for 3.5 days) it cannot be taken at face value.

Another indication that Sicily was in fact the land of Phaeacians is that it is big enough not to be called an island by Homer, and the same happens even with the smaller Crete, which Homer calls also a land, not an island.

Picture 3. Trapani in west Sicily, with the active harbor at the upper part of the picture. The second port of Phaeacians should be the shallow bay (now rather a marsh) to the south. The “petrified ship” corresponds to the elongated rock near the entrance of the harbor, as indicated by the arrow. (Source: Google Earth).

Is it also a coincidence that near the entrance of the harbor of Trapani there is a long rock evoking the “petrified ship” of Phaeacians? This rock could have given Homer the inspiration to “create” a prophecy, according to which Poseidon would petrify one of their ships as punishment for helping the sailors that the god himself had decided to make suffer (book 13, 155-166 and 163-164).

Finally, approaching Trapani from northwest, as Odysseus should have done with his raft, he was looking at the low and rather flat mountain Erice at the northeast of Trapani that really looks like a shield, as Homer characteristically describes (book 5, 279-281), (picture 4).

Picture 4. “some shadowy hills appeared, where the land of the Phaeacians, like a shield riding on the misty sea, lay very close to him” book 5, 279-281 Trapani from west. (Source: italiapozaszlakiem.com)

The Greeks at the time of Odysseus certainly knew about Sicily, as his father Laertes had a Sicilian housekeeper (book 12, 209-210). But the Greeks were mostly in contact with Sicilians living on the east coast (picture 5), while on the west coast were living Elymians who had probably an Aegean origin. Maybe the later were refugees from Thera (Santorini) and their “problems” with the Cyclops were in fact an allegory for the imminent eruption of the volcano of Thera (circa 1600 BCE), so eventually they may were living in Thera and not near Etna.

The lack of human remains (unlike Pompei) in the area of Akrotiri Thera, where a town buried under the ash was unearthed practically intact in 1967, suggests that there was enough warning before the main eruption, so most of the people managed to flee by the sea and probably to the west, in the opposite direction of the proven path of the ash. If Phaeacians were indeed Thera’s refugees, that could explain their urge to move as far away as possible from another active volcano, that of Etna.

Today, near the town of Erice (ancient Eryx) at an elevation of 750 m (2500 ft), just a few kilometers northeast of Trapani, there are cyclopean walls that are considered the works of either Elymians, Phoenicians or even Trojans (Wikipedia).

Maybe the Phaeacians after the passage of Odysseus were forced to move at higher ground for safety, as their sea activities and wealth may have drawn unwanted attention, and perhaps this was the meaning of the second part of the prophesy mentioned before:

He claimed that one day, as a splendid ship
of the Phaeacians was returning home,
after a convoy on the misty seas,
Poseidon would strike her and then throw up
a huge mountain range around our city.

Book 13, 175-177

It is also evident that Phaeacians didn’t like to socialize with foreigners, as Nafsika had stated:

...and we live far off in the surging sea,
the most remote of people. Other men
never interact with us. 

Book 6, 204-205

and goddess Athena (disguised as a young girl) also confirms later on:

The people here are not fond of strangers—
they don’t extend a friendly welcome
to those from other lands

Book 7, 32-33

Phaeacians knew that their peaceful nature wouldn’t allow them to successfully resist invaders. So perhaps the “Phaeacians” was not the real name of these people but an alias, if we accept the principle that the main events in Odyssey are true and the initial source of information was Odysseus himself, who was probably willing to return the favor and conceal Phaeacians' identity. For the same reason, the true duration of the final leg of the trip of Odysseus may have been purposefully shortened.

All the same, the names of the Phaeacian people (book 8, 110-119) sound like “made up” as they are all related to sea activities, and even (the names) show a certain lack of imagination.

About Elymians, there is the record of Thucydides (book VI, 2) that they have been descendants of Trojans, an opinion shared with Virgil (Aeneid, book V) who was eager to prove the Trojan (i.e. heroic) origin of the Roman people. Homer himself had “prophesied” that Aeneas would become the new leader of Trojans and that eventually happened not in Ilion (Troy) that was destroyed, but in western Italy. There arrived as refugees many Trojans sailing around Sicily to avoid the Straits of Messina with their terrifying reputation and some of them settled in the area of Trapani, as Virgil says. In that case, the Trojans arrived in Trapani well before Odysseus who, because of his wanderings (he had spent also idle one year with Circe and seven and half more years with Calypso) arrived to Phaeacians ten years after the fall of Troy.

So, even if Alcinous didn’t mention anything about Trojan refugees to Odysseus (at least Homer doesn’t say so), the blind poet and singer in the Phaeacian court Demodocus sang about the fall of Troy in such a way, that Odysseus commended:

...as if you yourself were there
or heard the story from a man who was.

Book 8, 490

And the man who “was there” was probably a Trojan. That’s why the descriptions Demodocus makes, especially the thoughts of Trojans about the Trojan Horse, are from their point of view! (book 8, 504-509). He even knew incorrectly the protagonists of the quarrel between the Greek leaders, naming Odysseus and Achilles, when of course they were Agamemnon and Achilles and the cause was different (book 8, 74-76), as quite logically the Trojans didn’t know the details of the famous quarrel that was the beginning of their end (and the main subject of Iliad).

So probably Trojan refugees settled at Erice or at Egesta (later Segesta), both places been near Trapani (picture 5) and eventually merged, with the Phaeacians becoming Elymians, or just merged with the Elymians if the Phaeacians never really existed. 
It is also a curious coincidence that the people of Thera and the Phaeacians were always involved in peaceful activities (a rarity for that era) and both were very capable seamen, a contrast to the claim of the Phaeacians been relatives to the savage, brutal and hillbilly Cyclops (book 7, 205-206, book 9, 122-123). Of course, there is no mystery if we consider that the “Cyclops” were the volcanoes of Thera, Etna or any of the volcanic Aeolian islands at northeast of Sicily.

Picture 5. The three main group of people in early antiquity in Sicily . In book 24 Odysseus says initially to his father a fake story, that he had arrived in Ithaca from Sicania (book 24, 302-303). Sicanians were living in the centre of Sicily, while Sicilians were living in the east and Elymians to the west. The arrow indicates the town Schera (Scheria was the name of the land of Phaeacians), later destroyed by Carthagenians, very close to the present town of Corleone (not shown), better known from the movies “Godfather”. Drepano is the modern day Trapani. (Source: sicilia arcaica.jpg)

The Greek origin of Phaeacians can also be deduced from the long talks and detailed  narrations between Odysseus and Phaeacians, even when ordinary people were involved. That makes a clear contrast with previous cases when Odysseus and his men encountered strange people in their long wanderings, where their interaction was elementary.

As about Homer, he was rather a close relative to Odysseus and probably his grandson, as the oracle of Delphi according tο a legend pronounced, answering an enquiry of  Roman emperor Hadrian. If this is the case, it is no wonder that Homer knew all the details of Odysseus’ adventures firsthand, at least as Odysseus wanted to be remembered by the next generations. And as about how Homer would like others to think about himself, may be reflected in the words of Odysseus to the blind poet Demodocus when the later sang about the sack of Troy, as mentioned above:

...as if you yourself were there
or heard the story from a man who was.

Book 8, 490

Finally, a last word about the name of Homer, that has fueled so many theories and controversies. “Homer” (Όμηρος) in Greek means “guarantor” (dictionary of ancient Greek Liddell and Scott). So this is perhaps the name that he has chosen for himself to be known, as he would guarantee that the feats of Odysseus (and the sack of Troy) would live for eternity. And he concealed his relation to Odysseus to add credibility to his narration.

G. Metaxas