WHY I DON'T AGREE

There are many difficulties with this type of interpretation of the story. To me one of the most serious is that the Mycenaeans knew the Mediterranean. They had trading posts, if not actual colonies, in Sicily, in Italy, and it seems as far away as Spain. On the Mediterranean hypothesis, most of the distances we have given for the various episodes are about as close, or closer, than Odysseus' kingdom of Ithaca was to Troy. And as told by Homer, Odysseus at one point in a "lying story" to deceive people at Ithaca into thinking he's not Odysseus, says he comes from Crete, and that about a month after his homecoming from the Trojan war he sailed to Egypt, which he reached in 5 days and that they travelled up the Nile river. Then he says he was captured and taken on a seafaring trip to Libya.

As the distance to the nearest point on the Nile from Ithaca is over 800 miles, you can see from the map (map 3A) this is considerably further than most of the voyaging he is supposed to have been involved in around the central Mediterranean. And he knew enough about Crete to pass himself off as a Cretan.

Now let's pick up the story according to my hypothesis, where we left him on the coast of Morocco:

"From there", says Odysseus, "we sailed on further

along, and reached the country of the lawless, outrageous

Cyclopes. ---

These people have no institutions, no meetings for counsels;

rather they make their habitations in caverns hollowed

among the peaks of the high mountains, and each one is the law

for his own wives and children, and cares nothing about the others."

"There is a wooded island that spreads away from the harbour ---

forested; wild goats beyond number breed there."

I suggest Odysseus sailed south along the coast from Morocco picking up the favourable Canary Current on the way, and landed at one of the major Canary Islands. These have small outlying islands teeming with wild goats as recently as our own century.

Odysseus describes the territory in some detail. They sailed ashore and beached. Next morning they feasted on the goats. Odysseus with his ship alone wanted to meet the inhabitants. He tells us he had 7 talents of gold and 12 jars of wine. The Attic talent weighed about 57.76 lbs. With gold worth, say, $300 US per troy ounce today, Odysseus was carrying over $1.7 million US in gold with him.

He and some of his men found a cave filled with baskets of cheeses, pens holding lambs and kids, sorted by size, milk pails and pans, and so on. Then the huge Cyclops whose name was Polyphemus arrived and asked,

"Strangers, who are you? From where do you come ---?

Is it on some business or are you recklessly roving

as pirates do ---?"

The Cyclopes were not men, they were Immortals. Nowhere does Homer say they have one eye, the text mentions the eyebrows of Polyphemus and mortals only have one eyebrow per eye. Odysseus in fact puts out -- very vividly described -- one eye, and it seems that afterwards Polyphemus cannot see Odysseus and his men properly.

Polyphemus kills and eats 6 of his companions before they escape from there, but Odysseus cannot help calling out,

"(I am) Odysseus, sacker of cities,--- (who) makes his home in Ithaca".

The Cyclops in prayer raises his hands upwards

"Hear me, Poseidon ---If truly

I am your son ---

grant that Odysseus, sacker of cities, ---

who makes his home in Ithaca, may never reach that home."

Poseidon was the god of the seas and oceans.

PROBLEMS WITH HOMER'S TEXT

From there Odysseus says

"We sailed on further along...

"We came next to the Aiolian Island, where Aiolos

lived, ...beloved by the Immortal Gods...

"He gave me a bag made of the skin taken off a nine-year

ox, stuffed full inside with the courses of all the blowing

winds, ...

"He stowed it away in the hollow ship, tied fast with a silver

string, ... we sailed on, night and day, for nine days,

and on the tenth at last appeared the land of our fathers...

"But then the sweet sleep came upon me, for I was worn out...

"My companions...

said that I was bringing silver and gold home with me, ...

"...Let us look quickly inside and see what is in there,...

"...They opened the bag and the winds all burst out...

"...All were carried on the evil blast of the stormwind

back to the Aiolian Island."

There is some common sense behind all this. What Odysseus was given was the courses of the blowing winds, not the winds themselves. What Aiolos gave him was a series of ancient equivalents of navigational charts showing prevailing winds and probably surface currents. That means Odysseus didn't sail nine days back or get blown nine days out again. All that was added in by some person or persons who didn't understand the purpose of the king's gift to Odysseus. So the text we have from Homer is very garbled, but this incident of the winds shows us it was a practical piece of history to begin with.

The text may have been cobbled together from various tales, or more gratuitous additions made; for example, what happened to the wives captured when they sacked Ismaros. These are never again mentioned but would have had an effect on the subsequent voyaging, even if only causing lack of space on board ship without decks when the crew was rowing or ship handling in heavy weather.