Sibyls and Sibylline oracles. 2. The Sibylline books

1. Sibyls | 2. Sibylline books | 3. Sibylline oracles | 4. The Renaissance

Once upon a time, in early Rome, a mysterious old woman came to king Tarquin to sell him a collection of books.

By the 1st century BCE the woman in the story was identified as the Cumaean Sibyl. We don’t know if that was always the case. But, based on that identification, the books were called the Sibyllini libri (Sibylline books) or Sibyllina oracula (Sibylline oracles). For clarity I’ll consistently call them the ‘Sibylline books’, as I explained in Part 1.

19th century illustration of the Capitoline and temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus in the Republican period. (Source: Friedrich Polack, Geschichtsbilder aus der allgemeinen und vaterländischen Geschichte, 1903 edition, fig. 61)

The story is a fable, but the books were real. Dionysios says they were held in a stone chest in the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus and curated by a body of priests — the decemviri sacris faciundis, ‘ten men appointed for sacred rites’.

There was a fire in 83 BCE, and the books were destroyed. A new temple was built. The Romans had new books made, and Sulla expanded the priests to fifteen — the quindecimviri. In 28 BCE the replacement books were rehoused in the newly built temple of Palatine Apollo. They continued to be used for several more centuries.

The Sibylline books weren’t primarily books of predictions: they were instructions for rituals, which also mentioned predictions in passing. The idea seems to have been that, when required, priests might choose a ritual from the books, then perform that ritual, to ensure purity, or ward off evil. Some extracts were made public, but a complete text wasn’t widely known.

The sale of the books

The most famous thing about the books is the story of how they were sold. Every version of the fable goes back to Varro’s book Antiquitates rerum divinarum, ‘Ancient matters concerning the gods’, written between 63 and 49 BCE (see Part 1).

Varro’s book is lost, but the story appears in Dionysios of Halikarnassos, who came to Rome around 30 BCE, and Dionysios attributes the story to Varro. Somewhat different versions appear in Aulus Gellius, Lactantius, and shorter allusions elsewhere.

Dionysios of Halikarnassos 4.62 (citing Varro); Aulus Gellius 1.19; Lactantius, Institutiones divinae 1.6. Further references: Varro, Antiquitates frs. 56–60 ed. Cardauns; Cicero, On divination 2.(54).110–112; Pliny, Natural history 13.(27).88; Phlegon of Tralles, FGrHist 257 F 36.10; Servius, commentary on Aeneid 6.72.

Here’s the gist, skipping over some variations.

An old woman comes to visit king Tarquin, carrying nine books of oracular instructions. But she asks for an incredible price, 300 gold philippics, so Tarquin just laughs. She promptly burns three of the books, and offers the remaining six at the same price. Tarquin laughs even harder, so she burns another three, and offers the last three again, still at the same exorbitant price. This time Tarquin realises it’s no joke, and he agrees to the sale. The old woman departs and is never seen again.

How much of this is real? Well, Tarquin was a real 6th century BCE king — though the sources vary on whether it’s Tarquinius Priscus or Tarquinius Superbus — but no real records from that period ever existed. The books were real, but they weren’t anything like as old as that. And the Sibyl is purely mythical.

Just in case you’re tempted to think there’s something to the story, bear in mind: the price the old woman asks for is in 4th century BCE Macedonian coinage. 6th century Rome didn’t have coinage.

After the original Sibylline books were burned in 83 BCE, the Romans had replacements made. Allegedly these were pieced together from many places, including cities in Italy, but especially from Erythrai in Anatolia.

The beginning of the sole surviving fragment of the Sibylline books, in cod. Heidelb. Palat. gr. 398, fol. 226r (image source: Universität Heidelberg library)

The surviving quotations

Later sources tell us that the Sibylline books were written in Greek hexameter verse, and they had acrostics: the first letters of each line also spell out hexameter verses. That’s what Cicero and Dionysios describe, and it’s also what we see in the surviving extracts.

An excerpt of Phlegon of Tralles’ On marvels (2nd century CE) quotes seventy lines from the Sibylline books. Phlegon doesn’t explain how the quotation came to be public knowledge. He treats it as a single quotation, but it’s clear that it’s actually two separate quotations, of 29 and 41 lines. The Greek text is most easily found in Jacoby’s Fragmente der griechischen Historiker.

FGrHist 257 F 36.10 = Hansen 1996: 40–43 (translation), 126–137 (commentary) = cod. Heidelb. Palatinus. gr. 398 fols. 226r–227r.

The first quotation (lines 1–29) gives instructions for rites to honour Demeter and Persephone. A public coin collection is to be made to fund a ritual sacrifice performed by women, with roles grouped by age (girls, married women, and old women). No alcohol is to be involved in the ritual. The duty of the married women is to carry torches, suggesting that the ritual is supposed to take place at night. The girls sacrifice bulls to Demeter and cows to Persephone, and the old women place the offerings in a fire.

The second quotation (30–70) describes further rituals, this time an expiatory rite to avert evil: an ox to be sacrificed to Demeter, Persephone, and Hades; a goat to Apollo; and a cow to Hera. Again, the text specifies that the ritual must not involve alcohol. The second half of this quotation is an ex eventu ‘prediction’ of the Greek colonisation of Cumae, and the arrival of Trojans in Italy — suggesting that the speaker should be understood as either the Cumaean or Cimmerian Sibyl.

The temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus as depicted in the TV series Rome (2005–2007)

The acrostics

The text has acrostics embedded in the first letter of each line, just as Cicero and Dionysios describe. Each acrostic spells out more hexameter verse. Some letters are missing in the acrostics, implying that the quotations have some lines missing. The first acrostic, in lines 1–29, goes:

<μ>οῖραν ὀπισθομα<θῶν, τίν’ ἔ>φυ πᾶς εἰς τόπον ἐλθ<εῖν>

Everyone learns too late their fate, the place they’re destined to go

This line doesn’t appear in the text Phlegon quotes: he starts with the line corresponding to the ο of <μ>οῖραν. Traditionally scholars have thought the acrostic should be understood as line 1, so that μοῖραν provides its own first letter (Hansen 1996: 129–130). It’s grammatically possible for the acrostic to act as line 1, but I have doubts: it isn’t how Cicero describes the acrostics (On divination 2.(54).112), and it isn’t what we see in the second quotation.

There, the first letters of each line are provided by lines that Phlegon quotes (though there are letters missing elsewhere):

ἵππωι ἀγαλλόμενος, πάλιν αὖ <κα>κὸν εἰς νέον ἥξει
αὐτά<ρ>. . .

Exulting in his horse, he will come back to a new evil,
then . . .

Lines 59 and 60 have to be swapped around to make the νε of νέον.

For now, at least, I’ll entertain the possibility that there’s a line missing for the μ of <μ>οῖραν. So the quoted text and the missing lines are as follows, using Jacoby’s line numbers (and my additions in parentheses). Quotation 1:

• line 1a: the first acrostic
• (line 1b: a missing line corresponding to μ in the first acrostic?)
• 1–13, as quoted by Phlegon
• 13a–g: seven lines missing, corresponding to the missing -θωντινε- in the first acrostic
• 14–29, as quoted
• 29a–c: three lines missing, corresponding to -ειν in the first acrostic

And quotation 2:

• (lines 29d–e: the second acrostic; Jacoby prints it only in the critical apparatus)
• lines 30–52, as quoted
• 52a–b: two lines missing, corresponding to κα- in the second acrostic
• 53–70, as quoted
• an unknown number of lines missing, starting with the ρ of αὐτά<ρ>

Which Sibylline books?

Phlegon says the quotation comes from an occasion in 125 BCE when the senate commanded the hieromnēmones — ‘rite officials’, presumably the decemviri — to consult the Sibylline books on the occasion of the birth of an intersex baby (androgynos). If that’s right, the quotation is from the pre-83 BCE books.

Modern scholars have taken Phlegon at his word. But their focus has been on showing that the quotation is close to 125 BCE because it’s much later than the Roman regal period. It used to need argument to show that it’s Hellenistic. That isn’t a matter for debate these days.

Diels 1890: 77–103; Parke 1988: 137–138; Hansen 1996: 126–127; McInerney 2016.

But I don’t know that there’s been any consideration of the possibility that the quotations are from the replacement books that were compiled after 83 BCE. On balance I don’t think a post-83 date is compelling. But there are good reasons to take it seriously:

• When we’re told that the books were in hexameter, that they contained acrostics, and that they were in Greek, all of that information comes from post-Varro sources.
• No source other than Phlegon claims to describe the pre-83 BCE books.
• Dionysios — who cites Varro — explicitly states that the acrostics are a feature of the replacement books, and that acrostics are a sign that a passage isn’t an ‘interpolation’.
• When Dionysios describes the compilation of the replacement books, he doesn’t claim that they replicated the originals, or that replication was even the goal.
• The quotations are very clearly not from the 6th century BCE. That’s been obvious since Diels, who dated both of them to the last decade of the 200s BCE, based on language, historical context, and metrical features. Some modern studies have considered dates as late as 83.

Just to emphasise: there are no sources telling us what the original books looked like, and there’s no real reason to assume that they looked anything like the replacement books that Varro talked about. It’s perfectly imaginable that Phlegon linked them to an incident of an intersex baby born in 125 BCE solely because lines 4–5 refer to an intersex baby.

The profile of metrical irregularities points to a date no earlier than the 200s BCE:

• 8 cases of ‘Attic’ correption (short syllable before a mute + liquid), 5× word-internal: 10 ἀθροίσας, 34 πάτραι, 44 ἴδρις, 51 πατρίοισι, 56 πατρίοισι; 3× at word-boundary: 48 Παιήονα κρᾶτα, 54 Κυμαίδα πρόφρονες, 68 ὔμμι χρόνος
• 1 violation of Meyer’s First Law (avoidance of a word starting in beats 1–2 and ending in beat 4a or 4b): 33
• 7 violations of Meyer’s Second Law (avoidance of a word with the rhythm ⏑ – in beats 4b–5): 29, 40, 52, 54, 56, 63, 65
• 5 violations of Meyer’s Third Law (avoidance of a word/phrase with the rhythm ⏕ – ⏕ – in beats 6–9): 0a, 27, 36, 41, 66
• 2 violations of Hermann’s Bridge (avoidance of a word/phrase with the rhythm ⏑ – ⏕ – × at line-end, i.e. in beats 8b–12): 41, 51
• 1 violation of Varro’s Bridge (avoidance of a word ending in beat 6 unless it is a monosyllable – or disyllable ⏑⏑): 32
• 1 violation of Tiedke-Meyer’s Law (avoidance of a word/phrase with the rhythm – ⏕ – in beats 7–9): 44
• (no violations of Wernicke’s Law)

I omit irregularities involving a word boundary preceded by a monosyllable, and those involving a word boundary followed by an enclitic.

A closer look at Attic correption shows that the rate of lengthening before mute + liquid consonant clusters is relatively high at word boundaries (16.7%), but considerably lower than most other poets within a word (50.0%). I haven’t been able to track down figures for hexameter poets, but among elegiac poets the closest fit is Mnasalkes (3rd century BCE).

For figures on the incidence of word-initial and word-internal Attic correption in elegiac poets see Slings 1993.

This profile of metrical irregularities would be as unsurprising in a 1st century BCE poet as in the 3rd century. So I think a more compelling fact pointing to a slightly earlier date is the use of iota adscript. I don’t mean iota subscripts in the Phlegon manuscript — that’s 9th century CE — but in the acrostics: the second acrostic depends on iota adscript for its first word, ἵππωι.

That still isn’t conclusive, but it does create a weak presumption in favour of a pre-83 BCE date. Prior to 200 BCE, extant papyri are consistent about including the iota in ωι, ηι, and ᾱι; later, they start to be irregular. So Phlegon’s quotation looks like something dating to the 3rd or 2nd century BCE.

The evidence is compatible with a post-83 BCE date, but I don’t see an orthographic or metrical reason to prefer a post-83 BCE date. For the record I’d quite like to assign a later date! But the evidence isn’t enough to overturn Phlegon’s statement that the quotations were used in 125 BCE.

References

• Cardauns, B. 1976. M. Terentius Varro. Antiquitates rerum divinarum. Teil I: die Fragmente. Wiesbaden.
• Diels, H. 1890. Sibyllinische Blätter. Berlin. [Internet Archive]
• Hansen, W. 1996. Phlegon of Tralles’ Book of marvels. Exeter.
• McInerney, J. 2016. ‘Phlegon of Tralles (257).’ In: Worthington, I. (ed.) New Jacoby. BNJ 257.
• Parke, H. W. 1988. Sibyls and sibylline prophecy in classical antiquity. London/New York.
• Slings, S. R. 1993. ‘Hermesianax and the Tattoo Elegy (P.Brux. inv. E 8934 and P.Sorb. inv. 2254).’ Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 98: 29-37. [JSTOR]

Sibyls and Sibylline oracles. 1. The Sibyls

1. Sibyls | 2. Sibylline books | 3. Sibylline oracles | 4. The Renaissance

The Sistine Chapel ceiling at the Vatican has paintings of seven ancient Hebrew prophets, but also of five Sibyls — non-Christian prophetic figures. How and why did pagan prophets come to have such a place of honour in the centre of western Christianity?

Central part of the Sistine Chapel ceiling (Michelangelo, 1508–1512)

The full answer is surprisingly long. We have to consider genres of ancient Greek poetry; Roman myth and ritual; ancient Jewish and Christian poems about the end of the world; and also music by a 16th century Dutch composer.

The short answer

An answer that focuses just on the Sistine Chapel looks like this. A 4th century Christian writer, Lactantius, wrote about a canon of ten Sibyls: ancient seers lost in the mists of time. They were pagan, Lactantius says, but they accurately predicted the coming of Christ, so you could say they were ‘virtuous pagans’.

Lactantius’ virtuous Sibyls became influential in 15th century Italy, the so-called Quattrocento, around the time of the introduction of the printing press. They appeared in many artworks and books: they’re a major feature of the floor decorations in Siena Cathedral, for example (1480s). They were a well established motif by the time Michelangelo came to his own fresco painting in the first decade of the 1500s. This is why he included Sibyls alongside Hebrew prophets: they were all considered to be pre-Christian prophets of Christ.

And if that’s all you came here for, great! You’re done now. But there’s a lot more to it ...

The start of a longer answer

We have to distinguish four distinct meanings of ‘Sibyls’. A difficulty with Sibylline things is that when people talk about any of these four meanings, they tend to mix them up. One is just a list of names; one refers to a group of texts that is now lost; two of them refer to real texts that still exist today.

1. The Sibyls themselves: originally there was one mythical woman named Sibylla, but more Sibyls appeared as time went on. In the 1st century BCE Varro drew up a canon of ten Sibyls: the Erythraian Sibyl, the Persian Sibyl, the Cumaean Sibyl, and so on.
2. The Sibylline books. These were real sacred texts in pagan Rome, now lost except for two long quotations. They were used for rituals by an important body of priests, the decemviri, or later the quindecimviri.
3. The Sibylline oracles. These texts still exist today, but they’re not pagan. They’re two collections of Jewish and Christian poems, ranging from the 1st century BCE to the 7th century CE, on a range of religious themes, in ancient Greek hexameter verse.
4. The prophetiae Sibyllarum (‘prophecies of the Sibyls’). This is a set of twelve neo-Latin epigrams written in the Sibyls’ wave of popularity in the Quattrocento, possibly for a theatrical production. They’d be forgotten today if not for a stunning musical setting by Roland de Lassus, for an unaccompanied four-part choir (ca. 1558).

There’s some overlap, so for clarity I’ll consistently use the labels in bold.

Lactantius mixed up the first three meanings. He had a copy of nine of the Sibylline oracles (the Jewish and Christian poems); he thought they must be the same thing as the Sibylline books (the Roman ritual texts); and he attributed each poem to one of the Sibyls in Varro’s canon. This is how he came to the conclusion that the ‘real’ Sibyls genuinely foretold the coming of Christ.

Modern scholars sometimes make similar mistakes. But in terms of origins, these four meanings are quite distinct.

The Erythraian Sibyl as she appears on the pavimento of Siena Cathedral (ca. 1480)

1. The ten Sibyls (or one, or three, or eleven)

Once upon a time, in sixth century BCE Greece, there was a genre of oracular poems that dealt with things like directions on performing rituals, enigmatic animal imagery, and foretelling the future. These are the so-called ‘oracle collectors’, or chresmologoi (χρησμολόγοι).

The poems were real, but the oracle collectors were fictional personas. Real poets would adopt a persona, ‘becoming’ Abaris or Orpheus or Epimenides, and incorporate the character and their fictional biography into real poems. Think of them as stage acts, a bit like Ziggy Stardust or Slim Shady. Except a persona wasn’t the personal property of a specific real poet: different poets in different periods could ‘be’ Orpheus or Linos. We hear of one poet, Onomakritos, getting into trouble for adopting the persona of Mousaios. The personas were both men and women — men like Bakis, Epimenides, and Euklos; women like Phemonoe, Boio, and Sibylla.

Herodotos 7.6. Herodotos doesn’t understand that Onomakritos is taking on the role of Mousaios: he represents him as adding an interpolation into the text of Mousaios.

That is, ‘Sibylla’ started out as a specific person. A fictional person, but still, a single individual. References to Sibylla — as a name, not ‘the’ Sibyl — appear in Herakleitos (500s BCE), Aristophanes (400s), and Plato (300s).

But a few decades after Plato, Philitas of Kos wrote that there were three Sibyls: one from Delphi (central Greece), one from Erythrai (East Ionia, in Anatolia), and one from Sardeis (Lydia).

There were three Sibyls. One of them was Apollo’s sister, as she says in her own poem. The second was the Erythraian. The third was from Sardeis. In the same way there were three Bakises: one from Eleon in Boiotia, one Athenian, and one Arkadian.

From this point on, Sibylla was no longer a specific person. Instead, Sibyls were a class of prophetic women.

Herakleitos, 22 B 92 Diels-Kranz (= Plutarch, Moralia 397a); Aristophanes, Knights 61, Peace 1095, 1115–1116; Plato, Phaidros 244b; (pseudo-?)Plato, Theages 124d; Philitas of Kos reported in schol. Aristophanes, Birds 962 (cited as ‘Philetas of Ephesos’).

The next we hear of Sibyls is in the 1st century BCE. At some point between 64 and 49 BCE, the great Roman scholar Varro wrote a book called Ancient matters concerning the gods (Antiquitates rerum divinarum). The text is lost, but a few hundred fragments survive.

Edition: Cardauns 1976. For the date: Varro dedicated the book to Julius Caesar as pontifex maximus: so it is later than Caesar’s appointment to that role in 64 BCE, and most likely before his appointment as dictator and the outbreak of civil war in 49 BCE.

Fragments 56a–60 deal with a canon of ten Sibyls, distinguished by where they were based. Varro’s interest wasn’t purely antiquarian: he was writing not long after the loss of the so-called ‘Sibylline books’ in a fire in 83 BCE — we’ll come back to them in Part 2 — and the Romans farmed out the job of replacing the burnt books to a number of oracular institutions all over the place.

In that context, it makes sense that a canon of Sibyls would be quite important to real religious practice. It also explains why Varro’s canon is organised by where each Sibyl was based. Varro cited his sources too — though the sources are all lost, just like Varro’s own book, and our source doesn’t repeat all of Varro’s citations.

The fact that he cited a different source for each Sibyl indicates that they each had a distinct backstory — they started out as independent characters. They weren’t all named ‘Sibylla’: Varro reports personal names for several of them, and we hear of other names elsewhere. So Varro says the Cumaean Sibyl was named either Amaltheia, Herophile, or Demophile; another list of the ten calls her Taraxandra, Vergil calls her Deiphobe, pseudo-Aristotle calls her Melankraira. Take your pick.

Several later sources report Varro’s canon of ten Sibyls. The following is a synopsis.

1. Persian Sibyl (or Chaldaian, or in two lists, Hebrew); recorded by Nikanor (= FGrHist 146 F 1b). Most reports (not Lactantius) give her name as Sambethe.
2. Libyan Sibyl; mentioned in the prologue of Euripides’ play Lamia (= play description w/o no. ed. Kannicht). In this usage, ‘Libya’ refers to the whole of the Maghreb from Morocco to modern Libya.
3. Delphic Sibyl; recorded by the Stoic philosopher Chrysippos in his book On Divination (= Stoicorum veterum fragmenta ii.1216).
4. Cimmerian Sibyl (in Italy); recorded in Naevius’ Punic War (= fr. 17 ed. Warmington) and Calpurnius Piso’s Annals (= FRomHist 9 F 2). ‘Cimmerian’ in this context means a priestly group attached to the nekyomanteion of Lake Avernus in Campania, near Cumae. We don’t know whether Varro imagined this to imply a connection to the Cumaean Sibyl. The Cimmerian Sibyl is stated to be the mother of Evander in two lists.
5. Erythraian Sibyl (in Asia Minor); recorded by Apollodoros of Erythrai (= FGrHist 422 F 1).
6. Samian Sibyl; named Phoito (spelled Phyto in most sources, but Phoito is the older spelling: see Tibullus 2.5.68. Note that these spellings were homophonous by the 1st century BCE); recorded by Eratosthenes (= FGrHist 241 F 26a).
7. Cumaean Sibyl; named either Amaltheia (or Amalthia), Herophile (or Hierophile), Demophile (only in Lactantius), or Taraxandra; alternatively Deiphobe (Vergil) or Melankraira (ps.-Aristotle). This is reputedly the Sibyl that sold the Sibylline books to the king of Rome (see Part 2).
8. Hellespontian Sibyl (or Gergithian); recorded by Herakleides of Pontos (= fr. 131a ed. Wehrli). She allegedly lived at the time of Solon and Cyrus.
9. Phrygian Sibyl.
10. Tiburtine Sibyl (at Tibur, now Tivoli); named Albunea or Abounaia.

The lists: Lactantius, Institutiones divinae 1.6.7–12 (= Varro, Antiquitates rerum divinarum fr. 56a ed. Cardauns); Souda σ.361; Sibylline oracles prolegomena 32–50 ed. Geffcken; schol. Plato Phaidros 244b; Theosophia 3.A.1.3 ed. Beatrice (≈ Tubingensis epitome 75–77 ed. Erbse); John Lydus, De mensibus 4.47.3 (Lydus adds an eleventh Judaean Sibyl, named Chaldis). Various Souda articles deal with individual Sibyls or alternative lists: β.354 (Delphic and Chaldaian); γ.355 (Erythraian, Sicilian, Leukanian, Sardinian, Gergithian, Rhodian, Libyan, and Samian); ε.357 (Kolophonian, apparently identified with Herophile in Pausanias 10.12.5); ζ.358 (Thessalian, named Manto, another famous chresmologic persona); η.359 (Phrygian, named Sarysis, Kassandra, or Taraxandra); and θ.360 (Cumaean and Thesprotian). Cf. also Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 1.21.108.1–3, referring to Phrygian/Delphic, Erythraian, Egyptian, and Italian Sibyls (the first two = Herakleides of Pontos fr. 130 ed. Wehrli); and 1.21.132.3, with a list of nine: Samian Sibyl, Kolophonian Sibyl, Cumaean Sibyl, Erythraian Sibyl, Phyto, Taraxandra, Macedonian Sibyl, Thessalian Sibyl, Thesprotian Sibyl. Pseudo-Aristotle, Mirabilia 838a,5–10, states that Sibylla (or ‘the’ Sibyl?) was a chresmologos at Cumae, and that she was also called Melankraira; pseudo-Aristotle, Problemata 954a,34–38 refers to ‘Bakises’ and ‘Sibyls’ collectively.

If you read all of the note in the textbox above, you’ll see that there’s a mass of material: it isn’t very consistent, and over time there were major shifts in how people described the Sibyls.

One important thing to emphasise is that there are no stories or myths about the Sibyls collectively. A couple of them have stories about them. The Cumaean Sibyl is important in the origin story of the Sibylline books (see Part 2); some like Phoito have an independent existence to an extent.

The confusion of names probably comes from attempts to harmonise multiple disparate traditions. The separate listing of the Cimmerian and Cumaean Sibyls is always going to be a bit puzzling, given that they’re both based at Cumae.

One source, Pausanias (10.12.1–6), tries to resolve some of the multiplicity of Sibyls by identifying Herophile as the Sibyl, and saying that she moved around — from Samos to Kolophon, Delos, Delphi, and the Troad — and that Erythrai also laid claim to her. As a result, in Pausanias, Herophile accounts for at least four of Varro’s Sibyls (Samian, Delphic, Hellespontian or Phrygian, and Erythraian).

The only ones that seem to have an irresolvably separate existence are the Persian, Libyan, and Tiburtine Sibyls — and there are probably sources out there that I haven’t found who identify them with someone else. The Tiburtine Sibyl seems to be the safest: her name looks suspiciously Latin — Abunaea or Albunea or something of the sort — which tends to shield her from the harmonising we see in Greek-language sources.

In Part 2 we’ll turn to the Sibylline books, and what’s known about them. In the meantime, for further reading on chresmologoi and the Sibyls, Parke’s (1988) book on Sibyls is excellent (if a bit overwhelming).

References

• Beatrice, P. F. 2001. Anonymi monophysitae Theosophia. An attempt at reconstruction. Leiden.
• Cardauns, B. 1976. M. Terentius Varro. Antiquitates rerum divinarum. Teil I: die Fragmente. Wiesbaden.
• Diels, H.; Kranz, W. 1960 [1903]. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (6th ed.), 3 vols. Berlin. [Internet Archive]
• Geffcken, J. 1902. Die oracula Sibyllina. Leipzig. [Internet Archive]
• Parke, H. W. 1988. Sibyls and sibylline prophecy in classical antiquity. London/New York.
• Warmington, E. H. 1936. Remains of old Latin, vol. 2. Cambridge (MA). [Internet Archive]
• Wehrli, F. 1953. Die Schule von Aristoteles. Texte und Kommentar. Herakleides Pontikos. Basel.

Odysseus’ wanderings

Odysseus’ wanderings are the most famous sequence in Homer’s Odyssey. The Cyclops, the Lotus-eaters, and Circe are some of the epic’s most memorable parts, even though the wanderings as a whole occupy only one sixth of the poem.

On one level, they’re pretty clearly envisaged as taking place in an Otherworld, like a portal fantasy or isekai. On another level, they have strong links to real geographical locations. The Otherworld isn’t totally unreal. But the real places aren’t anything like how the Odyssey describes them. (For one thing, Sicily doesn’t have real Cyclopes.)

Real places, mythical footprints

The most straightforward example is Circe, the sorceress who uses magic potions to turn sailors into pigs. In Odyssey 10, Circe lives on an island in some indefinite location. But throughout antiquity, Circe’s home was always imagined to be at Monte Circeo in Italy, 90 km southeast of Rome.

Monte Circeo as seen from Terracina (image source: Wikimedia)

An epilogue to the Hesiodic Theogony has Circe and her family there ruling over the Tyrrhenians (a general Greek term for the people of western Italy); in the 500s BCE Rome founded a colony at Monte Circeo named after her, Circeii; a fragment of Aeschylus’ poetry refers to the Tyrrhenians as a ‘pharmakon-making race’, referring to Circe’s potions.

Hesiod: Theogony 1011–1016. Circeii: Livy 1.56.3; Dionysius of Halicarnassus 4.63.1. Aeschylus: eleg. fr. 2 West2.

Circe leaves footprints on the real place, even though she’s mythical. Her association with the area never faded: Apollonius again has her living in Italy in the Argonautica, she and her descendents are linked to founding legends for several cities in the area, and a Roman-era folktale gives her an Italian apprentice named Hals (‘sea’) who ends up turning Odysseus into a horse for the rest of his life.

Apollonius: Argonautica 3.310–313. Foundation legends: Telegonus as founder of Tusculum and ancestor of the gens Mamilia (Dionysius of Halicarnassus 4.45.1; Horace, Epistles 1.29–30; Livy 1.49.9; etc. etc.) and, in isolated sources, Praeneste (Aristokles, FGrHist 831 F2) and Caere (Servius on Aeneid 8.479); Telemachus as founder of Clusium (Servius on Aeneid 10.167). Hals turning Odysseus into a horse: Ptolemaios Chennos, in Photius’ Myriobiblon 190, 150.i.12–19 ed. Bekker; Sextus Empiricus, adversus Mathematicos 1.267; Servius auctus on Aeneid 2.44; schol. V on Odyssey 11.134.

So, an Otherworld, but also not. It's more like an imaginary prehistory: like Tolkien’s legendarium, or Robert E. Howard’s ‘Hyborian Age’ — except that Homer doesn’t redraw the coastlines of entire continents. He limits himself to relatively minor things like imagining that Monte Circeo was once an island.

‘Localisations’ baked into the Odyssey ... sort of

Similar things apply to the other stopovers in Odysseus’ wanderings. It’s just that they aren’t so well attested, or attested so early. There was some variation in where ancient people imagined each stopover as taking place, but many of them are pretty consistent:

• (book 9) Kikones — Thrace.
• Cape Malea, Kythera (specified by name in the Odyssey).
• Lotus-eaters — usually localised in Djerba (Tunisia).
• Cyclops — Sicily.
• (book 10) Aeolus — Isole Eolie (islands north of Sicily).
• Laestrygonians — Sicily.
• Circe (Aia) — Monte Circeo, Lazio.
• (book 11) soul-summoning, Nekyia, or ‘land of the dead’ — doublet: stated in the text to be beyond Oceanus among the Cimmerians, but soul-summoning was historically practised at Lake Averno, Campania, and Ephorus located the final home of the Cimmerians in Campania.
• (book 12) Sirens — Li Galli (islets south of Sorrento).
• Scylla and Charybdis — Strait of Messina.
• Cattle of the Sun (Thrinakia) — apparently Sicily (Thucydides gives Trinakria, ‘three-cornered’, as an old name for Sicily)
• Calypso (Ogygia) — various; sometimes localised in Atlantic Ocean

Sources: Kikones: Ismaros (Od. 9.39–40) is named for Lake Ismaris, Thrace. Malea and Kythera: Odyssey 9.79–81. Lotus-eaters: Polybius apud Strabo 1.2.17. Cyclops, Laestrygonians: Thucydides 6.2.1, etc. Aeolus: Thucydides 3.88. Circe: see main text. Nekyia beyond Oceanus: Od. 10.511, 11.13–22, 11.638–12.1. Nekyia among Cimmerians: Od. 11.14. Nekyia at Averno, in Campania among Cimmerians: Ephorus FGrHist 70 F 134a = Strabo 5.4.5; see further Ogden 2001: 23–24, 61–74. Sirens in Tyrrhenian Sea: Hesiod fr. 27 M-W (schol. on Apollonios Argonautika 4.892 states that Apollonios localises the Sirens on the same island as Hesiod), calling their island ‘Anthemoessa’. Sirens at ‘Seirenoussai’ (= Li Galli): Strabo 1.2.12, etc. Scylla and Charybdis at ‘Scyllaeum’, i.e. Strait of Messina: Polybius apud Strabo 1.2.15 (see further Phillips 1953: 59 n.66). Thrinacia: Sicily = Trinakria, Thucydides 6.2.2.

Odyssean Italy. In red: real Greek colonies that existed by ca. 650 BCE, around the time the Odyssey was composed (pale colour denotes doubtful cases). Blue: sites of Odyssean significance, either associated with the wanderings in the Odyssey, or linked to foundation legends involving Odysseus’ and Circe’s children.

Scholars tend to take the position that in the Odyssey itself, the wanderings are set in a purely imaginary Otherworld, and localisations for Odysseus’ stopovers are later developments. That's the position taken by Jonathan Burgess in his 2025 book The travels of Odysseus.

I mostly disagree. But in a nuanced way. To Greek colonists in Italy and Sicily, the ‘localisations’ of Odysseus’ wanderings felt very real. If you superimpose them on a map of Greek colonies that existed at the time, the wanderings look like a checklist of Greek colonies (in red, in the figure above) and trading partners (further north, especially in Etruria).

But this needs nuance. It’s instructive to look at Strabo’s long discussion of the geography of the Odyssey (Geography 1.2.7–33), and how it was treated by earlier scholars like Eratosthenes. It’s no good to say Homer’s geography is wholly fictional, as Eratosthenes did; but is equally wrong to say it’s strictly realist, as Strabo does.

You will find where Odysseus wandered when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of winds.

Eratosthenes, Geographica F5 Roller (= Strabo 1.2.15)

Eratosthenes is right to the extent that Homer’s geographical knowledge is poor, so poor that it barely counts as real. The myths are mythical. But they still echo real places.

First, as we’ve just seen, Circe was always placed at Monte Circeo. The setting for the Sirens is early too: from the 9th to the 5th centuries BCE, the Greek colony of what is now Naples was named Parthenope. Either Parthenope was considered to be one of the Sirens all along, or she became identified as a Siren sometime within that period.

The ‘localisations came later’ position is true in the sense that the Odyssey is mostly ignorant of the real geography. But it’s a bit like Dan Brown writing about Paris in The Da Vinci Code: the landmarks are real, but ... they’re wrong. Contemporary Greek colonists knew their way around Italy and Sicily; some sailors made it as far as Gibraltar. The epic knows these places exist. But it doesn’t have a clear idea of where they are or what they’re like. It doesn’t even know Ithaki!

Some of the Ionian islands as seen in Google Earth, looking westward (annotations in large type are mine). The real Ithaki is in the middle of the group; by contrast, the Odyssey thinks that Ithakē ‘lies furthest out in the sea towards the sunset, and the other islands are towards the dawn and the sun’ (9.25–26). If you think Homer’s geographical information is realist and accurate, you might want to instead localise ‘Ithakē’ on the Paliki peninsula of Kefalonia, as Marinatos did. But the Odyssey is an epic, not a carefully-researched geographical survey.

The colonists who lived in these places couldn’t help but find the story real — just as Homer’s Ithaca, even with its wild inaccuracies, feels real to the people who live on Ithaki today. Modern tourism maps of Ithaki are studded with Odyssey-themed locations.

In that nuanced sense, the localisations were baked in right from the start. The Odyssey isn’t clear on where Monte Circeo is, but it knows Circe lived somewhere along the Italian coast. It doesn’t know the Bay of Naples, but it knows that soul-summoning was practised at a lake near Cumae. It doesn’t know the layout of Sicily, but it knows that there are Greek colonists living on an island called Trinakria ‘three-cornered’ (or Thrinakia, adjusted to make it fit into dactylic hexameter).

Modern Odysseus-hunters love to come up with their own localisations, of course. That kind of mindframe takes a realist reading of the Odyssey, confident that every geographic detail is literally true — well, except the inconvenient details, naturally. I recommend against engaging with them (unless it’s to plunder them for citations of ancient geographical sources).

Lycophron’s Odyssey

The Odyssey’s understanding of Italian geography is shaky, but the 3rd century BCE poet Lycophron has much more detailed knowledge.

Lycophron’s Alexandra is a 1474-line mythological poem in iambic trimeter. It’s framed as a prophecy uttered by Cassandra about the horrible fates that await the Greeks who are going to destroy Troy. Lines 648 to 819 deal with Odysseus’ wanderings and his death.

For commentaries on the Odyssean part of the poem, see Schade 1999; Hurst 2008: 190–228; Hornblower 2015: 273–317. On Odysseus’ attachments to Italy more generally, see Phillips 1953.

The Alexandra is framed in obscure language, and densely packed with outrageously esoteric allusions. Here’s a taster, the bit about Odysseus’ death at the hands of Telegonus:

Finally, like a bird running on the waves,
worn down by brine on all sides like a shellfish,
finding his wealth squandered in the feasting of the Pronians
along with the fiercely raging Lacaenian woman,
wrinkled after escaping the sea’s shelter, he will die
with weapons, a crow, near Neritonian groves.
A deadly point will strike his side and kill him
with the sting of a Sardinian fish, impossible to heal.
His offspring will be called his father’s butcher,
the maternal cousin of Achilleus’ bride.

Lykophron, Alexandra 789–798

There are many obscurities to explain here:

• ‘Pronians’: Penelope’s Cephallenian suitors. The Prōnnoi were the people of a city on Cephallenia (Thucydides 2.30).
• ‘Lacaenian woman’: Penelope as Laconian. Her father Icarius was the brother of Tyndareus of Sparta.
• ‘fiercely raging’: in some non-Homeric variants, Penelope actively colluded with the suitors, or even had sex with all of them (thereby engendering the god Pan).
• ‘escaping the sea’s shelter’: a kenning for a ship; i.e. escaping a life at sea.
• ‘crow’: emblematic of extreme old age.
• ‘Neritonian groves’: Mt Neriton, on Ithaca. This line seems to presuppose a story that Odysseus is warned by an oracle or a dream that his son will kill him, and he goes into hiding in the hills (this story appears explicitly in ‘Dictys of Crete’ 6.14, 1st/2nd century CE).
• ‘sting of a Sardinian fish’: Telegonus uses a spear tipped with the venomous sting of a ray. Other sources don’t discuss the ray’s origin. ‘Sardinian’ (across the Tyrrhenian Sea from Lazio) evokes a story that the Sardinians allegedly euthanised their elderly, using a poison that produced a rictus grin known popularly as the ‘Sardonic smile’.
• ‘His offspring’: Telegonus, son of Odysseus and Circe.
• ‘maternal cousin of Achilleus’ bride’: cousin of Medea. Medea is in fact Circe’s niece, and in some traditions she marries Achilleus in the afterlife. (This translation interprets αὐτανέψιος as ‘maternal cousin’ by analogy with αὐτοκασίγνητος and αὐτάδελφος, ‘brother by the same mother’.)

As you can imagine, this is a poem that really needs accompanying notes.

It’s also controversial whether it’s really by Lycophron, and whether it’s the work of a single poet or a synthesis written in multiple periods. To my eyes, most of the doubts are motivated by a refusal to accept that Odysseus’ wanderings were deeply embedded in the Italian landscape all along.

Lycophron’s version of the wanderings covers most of the same ground as the ‘standard’ localisations above, though in a different sequence:

• Alexandra 648. Lotus-eaters: Odysseus will visit Syrtis (Gabès, near Djerba) and ‘the plains of Libya’ (not the modern country but the ancient Greek name for all of northern Africa).
• 649–652. Scylla: the ‘hybrid’ at the ‘Tyrrhenian strait’ (Strait of Messina).
• 653. Sirens, the ‘harpy-limbed nightingales’ on their rocks.
• 659–661. The Cyclops, the ‘fierce one-eye’ who will drink Odysseus’ wine.
• 662–665. Laestrygonians, the ‘remnant’ left unslain by Heracles.
• 666–672. Further references to Charybdis, Scylla, and the Sirens.
• 681–693. Consultation of the dead, set close to Ischia (‘the island that crushed the back of the Giants’) and the Greek colony at Pithecusae (where Zeus put ‘a race of apes’, pithēkoi).
• 694–711. Baiae, Cumae, and Lake Averno. Odysseus passes the tomb of his steersman Baius; the ‘Cimmerians’ (placed at Cumae also by Strabo, Geography 5.4.5); and the ‘Acherousian waters’, i.e. lakeside oracle of the dead, at Aornos, the Greek name for Averno.
• 712–737. The death of the Sirens, throwing themselves into the Tyrrhenian Sea. Parthenope washes ashore near the river Clanio (north of Naples) and receives cult honours from the Neapolitans; Leucosia washes ashore at ‘the rock that bears her name’, i.e. Licosa, south of Paestum; Ligeia washes ashore at Terina, an ancient city near the coast, west of Catanzaro.
• 738–748. Calypso, the ‘daughtter of Atlas’. Location not specified; but the relationship with Atlas implies somewhere near or beyond the Atlas mountains and Gibraltar.
• 749–761. A non-Homeric interlude where Odysseus visits the sea god Glaucus. Location not specified, but Glaucus has links of his own to Italy.
• 761–765. Cercyra (often regarded as a localisation of Homeric Scheria, the land of the Phaeacians): the ‘isle of the sickle’.
• 766–788. Return to Ithaca: the events of Odyssey 13–24.
• 789–798. Odysseus’ death at the hands of his and Circe’s son Telegonus.
• 799–811. Odysseus in both northwest Greece and Italy: he receives cult honours among the Eurytanians and Trampya (Aetolia and Thesprotia, in Greece), and is buried at ‘the hill of the Tyrrhenians in Gortynaia’ (Cortona, in Italy). This geographical duality mirrors a similar duality in the lost Telegony, whose first part was set in Thesprotia, with the second part beginning and ending at Circe's home in Italy.

Later in the poem at lines 1236–1245 there’s also a scene where Aeneas encounters Odysseus while travelling in Etruria, and they combine forces. This alludes to an eccentric tradition attested in fragments of Hellanicus and Damastes that the two of them founded Rome together (New Jacoby 4 F 84, 5 F 3). The context for these fragments is obscure, but sits well with the other foundation legends associated with Telemachus and Telegonus dotted around Latium and Etruria.

References

• Burgess, J. 2025. The travels of Odysseus. Oxford. [DOI]
• Hornblower, S. 2015. Lykophron. Alexandra. Greek text, translation, commentary, and introduction. Oxford.
• —— 2018. Lykophron's Alexandra, Rome, and the Hellenistic world. Oxford.
• Hurst, A. 2008. Lycophron. Alexandra. Paris.
• Ogden, D. 2001. Greek and Roman necromancy. Princeton.
• Phillips, E. D. 1953. ‘Odysseus in Italy.’ Journal of Hellenic Studies 73: 53–67. [JSTOR]
• Schade, G. 1999. Lykophrons ‘Odyssee’. Alexandra 648–819. Berlin. [DOI]

History and the Odyssey

The Odyssey is coming out soon, a feature film starring Matt Damon, and directed and written by Christopher Nolan.

Various online pundits have already criticised it, focusing on historical authenticity — faithfulness to some preconceived idea of how the world in the film ought to look. Why isn’t Odysseus’ armour consistent with Bronze Age armour? Why does his ship look like a viking longship? And above all, how dare they cast some actors of non-northern-European extraction!

Odysseus and his men blinding the Cyclops. If you use Homer’s Odyssey as the one true measuring stick, you will find multiple ‘anachronisms’ and ‘inauthenticities’: (1) the tool used to blind the Cyclops is a metal implement (either a forked cooking spit or a spear with a leaf-shaped blade), not the sharpened log used in Odyssey 9; (2) the drinking cup that the Cyclops is holding is a precursor to the Type A kylix, which only came into use in the 500s BCE; (3) Odysseus is helped by only two men instead of four (Od. 9.334–335). (Protoattic amphora, Eleusis Museum, ca. 650–625 BCE; figures are about 42 cm high)

Two kinds of response:

1. There’s no sense in which the Odyssey is set in the Bronze Age. It is set at some indefinite point in a fictional past, but it’s totally flooded with classical-era motifs and preoccupations, with a smattering of archaic touches for decoration.
2. Myths are always tailored to contemporary audiences. They always have been — including Homer. There’s no canon of how things and characters ought to look: Homer wasn’t ‘authentic’ in that sense, and if Homer isn’t, no one is.

1. There’s nothing Bronze Age about the Odyssey

Recently a popular religious historian on Youtube said: ‘the Odyssey is set at the end of the Bronze Age, around 1200 BCE’ (Henry 2026). Andrew Henry is a deeply knowledgeable scholar, but for this point he made the mistake of relying on common wisdom.

Many people are taught that Homer ‘remembers’ a story that was repeated over generations. There was an Odyssey tradition: a story transmitted orally for centuries, containing a fossilised core of Bronze Age elements.

The trouble is, there’s no actual evidence to suggest that. It’s entirely based on an analogy with the metrical formulaic system. The formulaic system did indeed exist for some period before 700 BCE: the style of language reflects a tradition more than a hundred years old at the time, possibly a lot older. But the same thing doesn’t automatically apply to the story.

There’s nothing Bronze-Age-specific about the Odyssey. By contrast, there’s a torrent of material that is 8th/7th-century-specific. So I don’t just mean it’s Iron Age: it’s classical era. There are reasons to think the story is a bit older than the Odyssey itself, but probably not by much: some aspects of the Trojan War myth presuppose the existence of the 8th century BCE Greek colony at Troy.

Note. For clarity: here ‘classical era’, with a small c, means the historical era, starting in the early 700s BCE with the development of the classical alphabet. This includes the Archaic period (traditionally 776–480 BCE) as well as the Classical period proper (480 BCE onwards).

Even if we granted the idea of a long-standing ‘Odyssey tradition’, no material can be shown to have entered that tradition earlier than the late 700s BCE. The Iliad does have a handful of Bronze Age motifs — the Odyssey has none at all — but even in the Iliad cases, we can be extremely confident that those motifs entered a purported ‘Iliad tradition’ at a late date.

The most famous example is a boar’s tusk helmet described in Iliad 10.261–265. Boar’s tusk helmets are a real Bronze Age thing, associated especially with the 15th–14th centuries BCE. But Iliad 10 was inserted into the Iliad after the rest of the epic was already in place, probably in the decades on either side of 600 BCE. This Mycenaean boar’s tusk helmet is in the latest part of the Iliad. And because it’s an insertion, it tells us nothing at all about the setting of Iliad 1–9 and 11–24.

Note. See e.g. West 2011: 233–235. Recently I covered a bunch of other supposedly Bronze Age elements in the Iliad in more detail.

How to make sense of a Mycenaean artefact in that context? Well, there’s a conversation to be had about that, but here and now, the point is this. However that artefact or that description was transmitted, it wasn’t as part of an Iliad tradition. There are no elements that can be shown to have entered an Iliad tradition at an early date.

The Odyssey has no notion of what the Mycenaean palace culture was, nor of a Bronze Age. (‘Bronze Age’ is a modern periodisation: it was invented in the early 1800s CE.) But it is stuffed with story elements, cultural trends, and preoccupations that are firmly embedded in the classical era.

• The story of Penelope and the Suitors dramatises a problem with classical-era inheritance law, specifically a practice that Athenians called the epiklerate. When a man died without a male heir, his wife would become epikleros (‘attached to the estate’) so that the estate could be passed on by marrying her off to a male relative. The Odyssey creates an intractable legal situation by closing off all standard inheritance scenarios. Telemachos cannot inherit because he’s a minor (or treated as one), so Penelope becomes epikleros. But Odysseus has no brothers or male uncles that Penelope can be married off to (Od. 16.116–120). The Suitors are the only people available to marry her: and they’re unrelated to the household, and vicious thieving murderers. But because there’s no alternative, Penelope’s father and brothers want her to marry one of the Suitors (Od. 15.16). The standard inheritance model is only salvaged by Odysseus’ surprise return.
• Metal artefacts in the Odyssey are normally made of iron (axes, weapons, arrowheads, ploughs, shepherds’ tools, etc.). The exceptions are a handful of prestige items. A couple of passages in the Odyssey treat the iron trade as commonplace, and describe aspects of iron production processes.
• Bronze, by contrast, is a prestige material. And it’s only in the centuries after 900 BCE that both of the following were true: (a) bronze was a prestige material, and (b) iron was not a prestige material. For fuller details, and for a full listing of references to iron, see this piece, in the section ‘Bronze weapons and armour’.
• Frequent references to Phoenician traders require a setting after 800 BCE, after the rise of Phoenician trading dominance and Greek-Phoenician trading relations. Trade in the Odyssey generally has a colonisation-era look and feel.
• The assembly plays a key role in civic life and government, meeting in the agora: see especially Odyssey 2.1–259, 8.4–25, 16.361–406, 20.144–146 (there are also multiple assemblies in front of Odysseus’ house). The assembly and agora are distinctively classical-era political features.
• In Odysseus’ wanderings, most stopovers are envisaged as fictional prehistoric versions of Greek colonies founded in the 700s and 600s, notably in Sicily and up the west coast of Italy. This has the effect of making Odysseus an archetype for real colonists, paving a mythical path for them.

John Waterhouse, ‘Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses’ (1891; image source: Wikimedia). This too is not a Bronze Age scene: the cup is a Type C kylix, no earlier than the 400s BCE; glass mirrors didn’t begin to come into use in the Mediterranean world until the 1st century CE; Doric columns put us in the Archaic period or later (700s BCE onwards).

Now, there are archaising elements too. But the archaification is mostly artificial.

Imagine it’s 2026 and you’re watching a fantasy movie set in a quasi-mediaeval past. You don’t expect to see authentic mediaeval warfare, because film-makers have no idea what that looked like. You don’t expect to see 2026-style warfare either, because drones blowing things up would ruin the atmosphere. What you expect is warfare that’s archaic in flavour, without being authentic; but which is still cool according to 2026 tastes.

And that’s exactly what Homer provides. A faux archaic flavour, but completely framed around contemporary practices and motifs.

Naturally this creates lots of anachronism. In book 2, when Telemachos presents his case against the Suitors before the assembly, he’s taking part in a 7th century political process, with heralds and standardised seating arrangements. But in book 3 when he goes on a voyage in search of his father, the idea is that we’re in ‘olde times’: there are no modern mechanisms for travelling between cities or finding housing in a different city. The story transitions back and forth between the contemporary and the purely mythical.

The world-building is comparable to that of Game of Thrones. They’re both versions of an imaginary past, but the archaism is inconsistent, anachronistic, and there’s a hefty dose of fantasy. (Except Homer is the more unreal of the two — George R. R. Martin at least had the option of being more ‘authentic’, if he felt like picking up a book about the Wars of the Roses.)

2. Myths are always contemporary

A myth is a story with a purpose. It has to be contemporary. If it isn’t, if it has no contemporary purpose, then it’s just a sterile relic behind glass.

Every iteration of the story of Odysseus has always looked wildly different, and has been tailored to the time the story was being told. There have been between 25 and 30 previous onscreen versions of the story of Odysseus, ranging from Georges Méliès’ L’île de Calypso (1905) to Uberto Pasolini’s The Return (2024). Some reproduce aspects of the epic relatively literally, like the Italian TV series L’Odissea (1968), and the US TV movie The Odyssey (1997). Others transplant it into a different setting, like the anime series Ulysses 31 (1981–1982) and season 5 of Prison Break (2017). Some take a metaphorical approach, alluding to Homer’s epic in a metatheatrical way, like Godard’s Le mépris (1963) and the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). Then there are the musical versions, like Rivera-Herrans’ Epic: the Musical (2022–2024), Symphony X’s The Odyssey (2002), and a bunch of classical operas.

Not even the most literal of these is ‘faithful’ by the standards of 2026 pundits. The thing is, even Homer isn’t ‘faithful’, in the sense of being historically realistic. It’s turtles all the way down.

Isabella Rosselini in two Odyssean roles: left, as Athena in The Odyssey (1997); right as Hyacinth, a Penelope analogue, in Keyhole (2012).

Every iteration has looked wildly different. As the Homer scholar Joel Christensen pointed out earlier this year, in Euripides there’s a Helen made of clouds; in the 6th century BCE poet Stesichoros, Helen is a pornographic painting, which Paris used to ‘assuage his passion’.

Stesichorus in his poetry tells that when Alexander had seized Helen and was making his way through Pharos [in Egypt] he was robbed of her by Proteus and received from him her portrait [eidōlon] painted on a panel, so that he could assuage his passion by looking at it.

Note: Euripides, Helen 29–36; Stesichoros, Palinode fr. 192 ed. and tr. Campbell (= scholion on Aelius Aristides, Oration 1.128; iii.150 ed. Dindorf).

Homer’s Helen is human, but she too is a contemporary figure. She’s tailored to a 7th-century-BCE story about inheritance law. Her marriage with Menelaos holds up a mirror to Odysseus’ household: Odysseus’ estate is in legal limbo because of a lack of heirs, but when we first see Helen’s and Menelaos’ family in the Odyssey, they’re celebrating their daughter’s wedding — they’re ensuring continuity to the next generation. There will be someone to inherit their estate. This is a very classical-era preoccupation: it’s contemporary. There’s no such thing as ‘historical Homer’ (as Christensen also pointed out).

Exactly the same is true in all the modern treatments. None of them adheres strictly to Homer. In O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), Poseidon is a ruthless American sheriff. In Ulysses’ Gaze (1995), the Cyclops is a statue of Lenin carried up the Danube on a barge. In The Odyssey (1997), Teiresias is Christopher Lee sitting in a fiery cave next to a river of lava. In Keyhole (2012), the Suitors are ghosts that haunt Odysseus’ house. In Epic the Musical (2022–2024) Aiolos lives on a floating island, but it’s floating in the sky. In Fauré’s Pénélope (1913), Penelope is friends with Eumaios, and Eumaios is a shepherd.

None of these is faithful. And that’s fine. That’s in spite of the fact that these variations are more significant than the kinds of axes that 2026 pundits like to grind.

No treatment could, or should, try to reproduce Homer with complete fidelity. That’d be crazy. Even if they wanted to, what should they emulate? Which period? You need to find a period when Phoenician merchants dominated international trade, when implements were standardly made of iron, Greek sailors were venturing as far as the Atlantic Ocean, and Greek cities were governed by assemblies. That’ll be in the 600s BCE, then. So no Bronze Age gear please, and Troy had better look like the 7th-century-BCE Greek colony. (Which is what the Iliad envisages, anyway: it has the Greek cult of Athena Ilias.)

Does it also have to be a period when there are monsters and cannibals traipsing about in Sicily, mermaid-monsters lurking on the islands off the coast of Campania, and witches turning people into pigs in Lazio? That’ll be a little trickier.

The upshot is that, even when an artist puts a high priority on authenticity — and most of the time, that isn’t the case — even then, the choice of where authenticity is most important is entirely an artistic choice. And every artistic choice is motivated by contemporary priorities. Certain 2026 pundits really really want everyone’s top priority to be skin colour, because that’s the thing they care about. Fortunately, there are plenty of artists out there with more diverse ideas about how old stories can become relateable to a contemporary audience.

References

• Henry, A. 2026. ‘What the Odyssey gets wrong about Bronze Age Greek religion.’ ReligionForBreakfast. [Youtube]

For further references to support the claims made here, see this two-parter from April.

Problems with Cline on The Trojan War. Ch. 4 ‘The Hittite texts’

Eric Cline’s book The Trojan War: a very short introduction (Oxford, 2013) argues that the classical Greek myth of the Trojan War is based on a historical conflict. Previously we looked at chapter 3, where Cline argues that the Homeric Iliad portrays Bronze Age events in a Bronze Age setting. As we saw, all the claims cited as evidence turned out to be unrepresentative, baseless, or simply untrue.

Chapter 4, ‘The Hittite texts: Assuwa, Ahhiyawa, and Alaksandu of Wilusa’, looks at Bronze Age evidence to argue that Mycenaean Greeks were involved in armed conflict in Anatolia in the 15th century BCE. Cline thinks this is the historical conflict that led to the Trojan War myth. This chapter is deeply flawed too, but in a less straightforward way. Cline doesn’t present outright falsehoods as fact here: but he takes a selective approach, keeping silent about some inconvenient points, and distorting others.

Wilusa (pp. 54–55), Ahhiyawa (pp. 56–57)

Cline gives an overview of Wilusa, on the edge of the Hittite empire, later called Ilios/Ilion in Greek; the name of one of its rulers, Alaksandu, which appears to be a hittitised form of a Greek name, Alexandros; and a state called Ahhiyawa somewhere in the west, which most scholars correctly identify as somewhere in the Greek-speaking world. (Note incidentally that it should never be assumed that Ahhiyawa referred to all of the Greek-speaking world.)

There are a couple of omissions here. Cline wants to equate the 13th century BCE Alaksandu with the character Alexandros (also called Paris) in the Iliad, and — like many scholars — thinks the names are unlikely to be a coincidence. Contrary to what Cline says, Alexandros in the Iliad is not Troy’s king. (The Homeric Paris is certainly not in a position to be committing Troy to being the vassal of another Anatolian state, as the historical Alaksandu did.)

The more important omission is: why does a king of Hittite-era Wilusa have a Greek name? This is a difficult question. But there is actually a potential answer, as explained by Bachvarova (2016: 333–342), to do with a Wilusan-Ahhiyawan dynastic marriage (which Cline mentions on p. 61, in a different context). Perhaps Cline does not try to link this marriage to Alaksandu himself because it would raise more questions than it answers: the Trojan War myth, where Alexandros is a full-blooded Trojan, is too dissimilar to what we know of this marriage to be convenient for Cline’s argument.

(Cline also never asks how it came about that Homer never mentions the historical Hittites, Mira, Seha, or Arzawa, and instead talks exclusively about 7th century BCE ethnic groups. But this objection is probably better aimed at chapter 3, on Homer.)

Madduwatta and Attarissiya (pp. 57–58)

Cline discusses a Hittite document known as the Indictment of Madduwatta (CTH 147; late 15th–early 14th century BCE). The Indictment discusses a warlord named Attarissiya, who becomes Cline’s archetype for a Greek leader attacking the west coast of Anatolia.

Cline claims:

1. the Indictment describes Attarissiya as ‘“the ruler of Ahhiya” (Ahhiya being an early form of the word Ahhiyawa)’;
2. Attarissiya ‘came to the western coast of Anatolia and fought against Hittite troops.’

Claim 1 is doubtful; claim 2 is half false. Attarissiya is an Anatolian name, not Greek; Ahhiya may not be Ahhiyawa; and the Indictment never puts Attarissiya anywhere near the west coast of Anatolia.

On claim 1: the Indictment does refer to Attarissiya as ‘ruler of Ahhiya’. But Cline omits three important facts.

1. Attarissiya is a ruler (LÚ), but other Hittite documents consistently refer to rulers of Ahhiyawa — the Greek-speaking state — as a ‘king’ (LUGAL). Attarissiya was no king.
2. The name ‘Attarissiya’ is linguistically Anatolian, probably specifically Lukkan, built out of elements seen in other names such as Attarimma (a town in Lukka) and Sarissiya (a mountain). These elements have no analogues in Greek names of any period.
3. Hittite documents invariably classify Ahhiya as a city, using a city determinative transcribed ^URU (twice in CTH 147, once in CTH 571.2).

So Attarissiya isn’t a Greek king of Ahhiyawa the country: the text really seems to point to a Lukkan ruler of Ahhiya the city. (In practice ^URU does sometimes get used for countries as well, but it would be tendentious to assume in advance that that must have happened in both CTH 147 and 571.2.)

On claim 2: the Indictment states that Maduwatta’s territory is the valley of the ‘Siyanta’ river, an unknown location but somewhere in southern Anatolia. Madduwatta had at one point been attacked by Kupanta-Kurunta of Arzawa (§§8–9), and later by Attarissiya (§12). We know Arzawa was in western Anatolia. But for Attarissiya the only geographical reference point is in §36, which shows that Maduwatta and Attarissiya had both attacked Cyprus (Alasiya) at the same time. Cyprus is about 100 km south of the Anatolian coast, 100 km west of Ugarit, but 700 km from the west coast of Anatolia by sea, and 900–1,000 km from Troy or mainland Greece. The text certainly does not point to Attarissiya attacking western Anatolia.

If we were to interpret these points without the assumption that Ahhiya = Ahhiyawa, we would certainly conclude that Ahhiya was a Lukkan city, probably on the coast facing Cyprus. That would put it in or near what is now the Turkish province of Antalya (ca. 250 km from Cyprus). Interpreting Attarissiya as a Greek king attacking the west coast of Anatolia requires ignoring most of what the text actually says, and substituting an imaginary scenario in its place.

The Assuwa ‘rebellion’ and Tudhaliya’s sword (pp. 58–60)

In the late 1400s BCE, according to the Annals of the Hittite king Tudhaliya (CTH 142), Tudhaliya attacked western Anatolia. It was a fairly standard practice for powerful Bronze Age states to launch raids from the edge of their territories every now and then and head back home. It was a way of projecting power, to remind neighbours who not to attack. Following Tudhaliya’s war, many places in western Anatolia formed a defensive alliance to resist further Hittite aggression: the ‘Assuwa alliance’. Tudhaliya promptly came straight back and crushed the alliance.

Tudhaliya’s Annals name Wilusiya — Troy — as a member of the Assuwa alliance. But the alliance was probably centred on what would later become the heartland of Lydia, around the Küçük Menderes river: that is where later Greek sources put Asiē, a name derived from Assuwa. (So ‘Assuwa’ is also the origin of the modern continent name Asia.)

Cline relates these events very differently. In his account, Assuwa and its allies were not a defensive alliance but a ‘rebellion’ against lawful Hittite rule; the ‘rebellion’ was not prompted by Hittite aggression, but by Mycenaean agents provocateurs interfering in Anatolian affairs and rousing the peaceful Assuwans against their benevolent overlords; and Tudhaliya was forced to respond by fighting the Mycenaeans. This, Cline thinks, is the context for Mycenaean armed conflict in western Anatolia — with Hittites, not Trojans.

The catch is, he made all of that up. Certainly none of it is borne out by Tudhaliya’s Annals. The Assuwa alliance needed no external encouragement. It is perfectly clear that it was formed in response to Tudhaliya’s aggression. Saying the Assuwans ‘rebelled against Hittite overlordship’ is like describing NATO as rebelling against Soviet rule. This was a defensive agreement, not a rebellion. There was no need for Mycenaean interference.

Cline’s only excuse for wedging Mycenaeans into this made-up story is one artefact: a sword found at Hattusa in 1991, inscribed with a dedication commemorating Tudhaliya’s victory over Assuwa.

Pride of place in Cline’s argument: a sword with a dedicatory inscription, which supposedly demonstrates Mycenaean military action in northwest Anatolia in the 1400s BCE. In reality, the sword is Anatolian, not Mycenaean. (Image source: Genz 2017)

In 1996 Cline cautiously suggested that this sword might possibly be a variant of an Aegean type.

... it may well be a variant of an Aegean Type B sword, but might reflect only Mycenaean influence rather than outright manufacture.

However, the identification of the Hattušas sword as Aegean Type B is not as cut-and-dried ... and strenuous objections to such an identification have already been raised.

... a connection with the legendary earlier Mycenaean raids in Anatolia may certainly lie within the realm of possibility. ... If such were the case ...

It is certainly plausible to suggest that the Mycenaeans and the Trojans were at one time allies, not foes ...

Cline 1996: 137, 138, 149, 150 (my emphasis)

So the sword might be Greek; lots of scholars think it isn’t, but if it is, then it’s possible it might suggest a Mycenaean presence in Assuwa; and if there were Mycenaeans there, then it’s possible they might have been there as allies.

Cline’s tone changed drastically in the 2010s.

[T]his is not a typical sword for anyone to have been using in Anatolia at that time, for it appears to be a type of sword specifically made and used by the Mycenaeans of mainland Greece only during the late fifteenth century BCE.

Cline 2013: 59–60

[T]his is not a sword of local manufacture. The sword is of a type used primarily on mainland Greece during the fifteenth century BC.

Cline 2014: 36

The problem is that everyone else is perfectly clear that the sword isn’t Mycenaean. It’s Anatolian.

Taracha (2003) tidily sums up the evidence, a decade before Cline wrote the above statements.

• The overall shape, tang, and riveting method have parallels in Aegean Type B swords.
• However, the Aegean riveting method is in turn based on Syrian practice, with parallels in Cilicia (southeast Anatolia).
• Tudhaliya’s sword has multiple ribs along the length of the blade, something not seen in Aegean swords. The closest parallel is actually found in Romania.
• We have continuity of evidence for the development of early thrusting swords in Anatolia, but not in the Aegean; and that implies that, if anything, the influence was the other way round — the Aegean style was based on Anatolian techniques.

More recent commentators take it as read that the sword is Anatolian in origin (Bryce in Beckman et al. 2011: 138; Genz 2017: 87). Only Cline is keeping this myth alive.

Wilusa and Ahhiyawa in various Hittite texts (pp. 60–65)

In these sections Cline documents interaction between the Hittites, Wilusa, and Ahhiyawa continuing through the two centuries after Tudhaliya crushed the Assuwa alliance. In this section Cline mentions the Ahhiyawan marriage that Bachvarova draws on to explain the presence of a Greek name in the Wilusan royal family in the 1200s BCE (see above).

The problem here isn’t that any of this is false. It’s that Cline presents these interactions as if they support his argument. The sheer quantity of them is bound to impress general readers as if they are some kind of gotcha. But it isn’t exactly surprising to find international interactions at the boundary of Hittite territory: these texts are simply what ought to be expected from multiple cultures being in close proximity.

If any hittitologist were to name the main locus of Hittite-Ahhiyawan interaction in this period, they would never pick Troy. They would pick Miletos. The reason books get published on The Trojans and their neighbours, and not on Bronze Age Miletos, isn’t because Troy was more important. It’s because there is no famous classical Greek epic about a war at Miletos. Modern interest in Troy is driven by a 7th century Greek myth, not by 15th–13th century Anatolian history.

‘Steep Wilusa’ (pp. 65–67)

In the 1980s Calvert Watkins pointed to the phrase alati ... Wilušati, ‘(from) high/steep Wilusa’, in a collection of first lines of Luvian cult songs at Istanuwa (CTH 772.1). Some formulas in Homer have a similar meaning: Ἴλιος αἰπεινή, Ἴλιον αἰπύ ‘high/steep Ilios’; Πριάμοιο πόλιν ... αἰπήν ‘Priam’s high/steep city’. Cline cites this to suggest continuity between Hittite sources and Homer.

Many formulas in Homer go back a very long way, some perhaps even to pre-Greek poetic traditions. That doesn’t suggest that a given story with these phrases is describing a historical event. Phrases are literary devices, and it’s not very surprising to see literary devices persisting over time.

In this case, we would at best be talking about a calque, not an inherited formula. The phrases have similar meanings, but Greek αἰπύς is not linguistically related to Luvian ala-. Some Homer scholars have pointed out that the phrases are used differently: the Luvian phrase indicates motion away from a place, the Homeric formulas are linked to the city’s mythical destruction. This thematic link is sometimes in the context of another formula, αἰπὺς ὄλεθρος ‘steep destruction’.

Note. Sale 1987: 35–36 n. 28; Létoublon (no date) n. 21. On αἰπὺς ὄλεθρος see Létoublon in the section ‘αἰπεινή “lofty”’.

For a robust and general treatment of the relationship between Hittite and Greek poetic devices, it isn’t enough to depend on a single phrase. The fullest treatment is by Mary Bachvarova (2016). She shows that the clearest continuity between Bronze Age Hittite texts and Homer is to be found in Near Eastern story patterns about the fall of a city, not in records of specific events — that is, in fiction tropes, not in history (2016: 354–356).

Conclusions

Cline imagines a 15th century conflict prompting a stream of stories about Mycenaean conflicts in Anatolia over 750 years, reframing and recontextualising the conflicts, but always set at Wilusa/Ilios. But proximate explanations are always going to be more robust. The Greeks did imagine their story taking place in the spot where Hittite Wilusa had once stood. But as we saw in talking about Chapter 3, the Troy of the Iliad is the Greek colony of the 600s BCE. (Remember, Hittite Wilusa had no cult of Athena Ilias.)

I will not write a separate critique of Chapter 5, since it spends more time presenting material evidence than interpreting it. But I will observe that, like many scholars, Cline is overly prone to talking about Troy’s ‘destruction’.

Troy was never ‘destroyed’. That is simply a thing that never happened. No one would say San Francisco was ‘destroyed’ by the Oakland fires of 1991! In every alleged ‘destruction’ event, there was continuity of population and culture, and immediate rebuilding. Stephan Blum, a researcher on the Troia Projekt at Tübingen, recently wrote (2026):

[Architectural reorganisation at Troy] simply reflects the everyday reality of a settlement’s history: building, use, maintenance or levelling, rebuilding and repetition.

Instead, I argue that Troy’s archaeological record reveals centuries of architectural continuity, stable coastal occupation and trade networks stretching from Mesopotamia to the Aegean and the Balkans — a geography of connection rather than conflict.

It is perhaps worth mentioning in passing that while modern retellings emphasise Troy being consumed by flames, that isn’t a Greek motif. The fire imagery comes from Vergil’s Aeneid, where it is modelled on the Romans’ sack of Carthage in 146 BCE. There is no link to Bronze Age Wilusa.

The real Bronze Age Troy persisted through accidents and hiccups, as any city does. After the collapse of the early 1100s BCE, some cities in the Aegean world prospered, including Miletos and Ephesos; others were abandoned; others were somewhere in between. Troy is one of the ‘in between’ group. Its inhabitants lingered; new immigrants arrived; but the population declined, and peacefully drifted away 250 years later. Another 200 years after that, Greeks colonised the site. And they created a just-so story about Troy: a story to explain why there had been an abandoned city there, and to rationalise their claim to the site, ahead of other competing ethnic groups in the area.

That story became famous. So did Troy. The city was at its height in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods: it was never powerful, but it was frequented by the powerful and the famous. It declined again after a devastating earthquake in about 500 CE. People carried on living there for a long time, but the site was again peacefully abandoned by the time the Ottomans arrived in the early 1300s. Since then there has been no urban settlement, though there has been an unbroken stream of tourists.

In the 1790s a story began to circulate that ‘Homer’s Troy’ had been in a different location. It was discredited, but it left a degree of confusion, with the result that Richard Jebb argued ferociously against Schliemann’s and Dörpfeld’s findings in the 1870s. As a result, many people today have come to think that Troy itself was once regarded as fictional, and that its discovery proved a myth true.

That has never been the case. Myths are regularly set in a real place, but they never have to be based on a real event. Not a single Greek myth is based on a historical event, so far as we know.

A myth isn’t proven by the fact that it mentions real places. It also can’t be proven by a book that relies on selective treatment of the facts, on distortions, and on false claims. It surprises me that Oxford University Press allowed such a book to go to print. It is regrettable if anyone relies on it.

References

• Bachvarova, M. 2016. From Hittite to Homer. The Anatolian background of ancient Greek epic. Cambridge.
• Beckman, G.; Bryce, T. R.; Cline, E. H. 2011. The Ahhiyawa texts. SBL ‘Writings from the Ancient World’ 28. Atlanta. [SBL]
• Blum, S. 2026. ‘Rethinking Troy: how years of careful peace, not epic war, shaped this Bronze Age city.’ The Conversation 29 Jan 2026. [Internet Archive]
• Cline, E. H. 1996. ‘Aššuwa and the Achaeans: the “Mycenaean” dword at Hattušas and its possible implications.’ Annual of the British School at Athens 91: 137–151. [JSTOR]
• —— 2013. The Trojan War. A very short introduction. Oxford.
• —— 2014. 1177 B.C. The year civilization collapsed. Princeton.
• Genz, H. 2017. ‘Regional or international? The origin and development of Hittite weapons and military technologies.’ In: Schachner, A. (ed) Innovation versus Beharrung. Was macht den Unterschied des hethitischen Reichs im Anatolien des 2. Jahrtausends v. Chr. Istanbul. 84–103.
• Létoublon, F. (no date). ‘The Trojan formulaic theater.’ Classics@ Journal 14. [Harvard University]
• Sale, W. M. 1987. ‘The formularity of the place phrases of the Iliad.’ Transactions of the American Philological Association 117: 21–50. [DOI | JSTOR]
• Taracha, P. 2003. ‘Is Tutḫaliya’s sword really Aegean?’ In: Beckman, G.; Beal, R.; McMahon, G. (eds.) Hittite studies in honor of Harry A. Hoffner Jr. on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Winona Lake (IN). 367–376.