WE MEET ODYSSEUS

With his fast black ship, all Odysseus had to do was to go from Troy City, which he and the other Greeks had finally sacked, to the island of Ithaca, where he was king. That's roughly 600 miles. He should have been home in about a week. But he took ten years.

So what went wrong? And why has there been such a mystery over it for the last 2,800 years?

Until about 100 years ago it was generally said to be all myth. But then Heinrich Schliemann, a German businessman turned archaeologist, found Troy City from clues in Homer's Odyssey, the epic that tells the story.

People now say Schliemann dug right through the Troy of Odysseus' time, and that he should have stopped at level 7A, when the city was obviously torched. But as a result, it's generally accepted that there was a Trojan War and Odysseus probably lived about 1200 BCE (before Common, or Christian, era).

Shortly after the time of Odysseus the Mycenaean civilization in which he lived came to an end. Then there was a "dark age of Greece" for over 400 years, about which we know little or nothing. Homer began writing at the beginning of the next Greek civilization about 750 BCE. His two masterpieces were The Iliad on the Trojan War, and the Odyssey on the 10-year homecoming of Odysseus.

Odysseus was called cunning, devious, resourceful, wise, wily and grasping for profit. He was the one who caused the downfall of Troy. Disguised as a beggar he slipped into the city. Then after leaving he designed the Wooden Horse and had it filled with Greek fighting men. The Greeks sailed away. The Trojans rejoiced and dragged the horse into their city. In the night the Greek soldiers crept out of the wooden horse, slaughtered the Trojan guards, opened the gates and the Greeks (who had sailed back) poured into the city and destroyed it, all thanks to Odysseus.

It was supposed to be the beautiful Helen of Troy, "the face that launched a thousand ships" that started the Trojan war in the first place. She was the wife of Menelaos, a Mycenaean Greek king, but she eloped with young Paris of Troy City. The Greeks went to get her back. But when you look at a map (map 1) you can see Troy City controlled the entrance to the Black Sea where the Mycenaean Greeks wanted to do business.

There were no slaves on Odysseus' ship. They were all free men, joint venturers. Odysseus calls them his companions. The Mycenaean Greeks were the Vikings of their time in the Mediterranean, plundering one day and trading the next. If you were an innocent coastal villager, or a small-towns person, over 3,000 years ago, what chance of survival would you have had if a group of warships that looked like this came from the sea on to the beach without warning:

This is only a much smaller later version of what Odysseus had, as we shall soon see. In case it hadn't occurred to you, it sailed from right to left. There was some confusion among modern scholars about this until quite recently. That's why this article by Paul Johnstone had the title it did as late as 1973:

"STERN FIRST IN THE STONE AGE?"

It was published in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology and Underwater Exploration.

What kind of people are we dealing with here? Look at what happens next in the story. Odysseus and his companions are supposed to be on their way home after a ten-year war. But this is what Homer has Odysseus say (we are using Richmond Lattimore's modern translation):

"From Ilium (Troy) the wind took me and drove me ashore at Ismaros

by the Kikonians. I sacked their city and killed their people,

and out of their city taking their wives and many possessions

we shared them out, so none might go cheated of his proper

portion...."

Odysseus was all for leaving at once, but the others were slaughtering sheep on the beach and drinking wine. They wouldn't listen. The Kikonians got reinforcements and attacked. Odysseus says he lost six men from each of his ships before they escaped out to sea. We need to remember this loss of six men from his ship. It's an important clue later on.

And this city of Ismaros that Odysseus sacked on the way home: many people say it was on the north shore of the Aegean Sea, somewhere in Thrace, because they think the Mycenaeans liked to hug the coastline when they sailed.

But if you look at a map of ancient times you can see there's not much there in Thrace (map 1). On the way back to Greece, further south from Troy, is a very ancient city, the city of Smyrna, or Izmir, which looks suspiciously like the Ismaros of Odysseus (map 2 - lower right).

Who was Odysseus? He was a great grandson of Zeus, the ancient Greek God, chief of the Greek Immortals. Odysseus wasn't an Immortal himself. Zeus and Maia were Immortals but there were mortal-Immortal matings along the way, down to Odysseus.

Whenever these mixed marriages took place, the offspring were always mortals. The adventures and voyaging of Odysseus were criss-crossed with encounters with Immortals, some good and some bad.

There are very few human beings involved in the Odyssey -- just a few kings and one or two of his companions are mentioned. The rest is a struggle against the elements and interaction with Immortals. The other ships under his command are soon lost and never really enter into the story.

Now that we know something about who we're dealing with, let's pick up the story again. Odysseus with his twelve ships is swept along down the Aegean, then delayed by bad weather. He sets sail again:

"And now I would have come home unscathed to the land of my fathers,

"but as I turned the Hook of Maleia the sea and current

and the north wind beat me off course, and drove me on past Kythera,---"

We can find the "Hook of Maleia" and Kythera on a map of Greece today (map 1).

"Nine days then I was swept along by the force of the hostile

winds on the fishy sea, but on the tenth day we landed

in the country of the Lotus-Eaters..."

We're really getting into the thick of the mystery now and it would be easy to become lost in it very quickly.