Since I was a kid I've been interested
in Greek mythology. I remember going to the Odeon Theater in 1962
Saint John, NB, and watching The 300 Spartans, starring
Richard Egan. That movie left an impression on this youngster. But
one of my favorite movies ever is Jason and the Argonauts. It
came out in 1963 and I remember it well although I was only nine. I
Googled it recently and was not surprised to find that the fight
against the skeleton warriors is still a marvel of animation. I still
don't know how they did it, making those skeletons of dead soldiers
rise out of their graves to fight.
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| Jason and the Argonauts (1963) |
Sometime later I read a book called
Ulysses Found by Ernle Bradford. It was written by a retired
English naval officer who had been stationed in the Mediterranean
during WW2. He spoke of one calm midnight during his watch duty on
deck that he thought he'd heard the Syrens singing. It was near a
small lava island called Gali. After he left the navy he sailed his
own boat around the Mediterranean and followed Homer's description of
the Odyssey journey. I've reread that tattered paperback several more
times over the years, mesmerized by his virtual tour of the old
ancient story. That got me thinking about the truth behind the myths
of the Argonauts and also the siege of Troy.
Since the Odyssey was treated as a
myth, the heroes and places mentioned in the story were just fiction.
Or so they thought...
Mycenae, the golden city of great King
Agamemnon was discovered. The city Tiryns of “the Cyclopean walls”
was discovered. Knossos was discovered. Even Troy itself was
unearthed. And they were all found by following Homer's descriptions
in his epics The Iliad and The Odyssey.
This led to questions about the reality
of the heroes in Homer's accounts. Was he constructing these warriors
to fill up his tragic tale? Did he make up a good yarn to convey
moral values in a dangerous era?
There is good evidence that these
warriors were real people. They lived and breathed. They fought and
died, their names and deeds remembered.
Laertes was one of the Argonauts who
helped Jason retrieve the golden fleece. It was Laertes' son who is
the hero of The Odyssey. Odysseus (or Ulysses to the Romans) has
always been of special interest to me and I've visited his island
kingdom several times since 1976.
I have recently added another hero to
my list although he isn't Greek or from Greek mythology. His name is
Robert Bittlestone and his book is called Odysseus Unbound. Robert
passed away in 2015 to my surprise as he was my age and his mission
was unfinished on this earth. His book and search was to find the
real island of Odysseus, hero of the Trojan War.
For a century, scholars have tried to
locate the actual island that was described by Homer as the home of
Odysseus. That island was described as the one in the group of Ionian
islands which would be last to see the sunrise and was also last to
see the sunset. Since that would place the island farthest to the
west in the island group, the modern day Ithaca does not fit this
basic description. It lies farther to the east, closer to the
mainland. Robert Bittlestone's theory solves the riddle of Ithaca's
location. He found the island of Odysseus. It is an amazing book and
he was a very thorough investigator. He was painstaking in his
procedures and surrounded himself with experts in their fields.
In May of 2016 I went to Greece to meet
John Crawshaw, Project Coordinator of the Odysseus Unbound Project (
http://www.odysseus-unbound.org/
). I'd been in contact with the project through emails because of my
great interest in what they were trying to accomplish. John was kind
enough to offer his time for a few days and take me on a tour of a
place called Paliki on Kefalonia Island, of what was quite probably
the actual site from Homer's tale.
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| Paliki area of Kefalonia Island, Greece |
The terrain we covered on the island
was anything but easy. John's Subaru SUV was a necessity to get up
the rocky rutted paths and through goat pastures where he took me on
the tour. There was even what appeared to be an ancient walled-in
area where Odysseus' swineherd, Eumaius, would have minded the pigs.
But I got chills when we arrived at what could have been the palace.
As I walked through this place my head was full of thoughts about the
dining hall where Odysseus, Eumaius and Telamachus killed a hundred
of Penelope's suitors.
I was standing at the heart of The
Odyssey at last. For a half century I'd dreamed of this place and I
was here.
I'm working on a video of my Odysseus
Unbound tour and will update here when it is done with a link.
Other videos of recent rides are
available on www.motorcyclegreece.ca
