The ancient Greeks would have enjoyed current controversies about the “historical accuracy” of Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of The Odyssey.

The Greeks loved arguing about the “truth” of Homer’s stories. They weren’t precious about their myths. Greek storytellers could – and did – criticise them. They competed to make people see old stories in new ways.

For the ancient Greeks, their deep past – the time of gods and monsters – was a paradox. On the one hand, it was full of fantastic happenings. On the other, those events mainly took place in familiar locations around the Mediterranean and featured heroes who were the ancestors of people living in the present.

We have been mapping the real-world locations tied to Greek myths. The Greeks didn’t locate their deep past in far-off fantasy lands. Instead, these stories happened in places all around them. So what about the journey of Odysseus?

Traversing the Beyond

Homer’s epic The Odyssey, probably composed around 800 BCE, follows Odysseus’ journey home from Troy to Ithaca. Much of the voyage takes place in “The Beyond”: a storyworld with its own logic, full of eerie, strange and monstrous creatures.

Although Homer placed this part of the story in a fantasy world, it didn’t have to stay there. As the Greeks spread throughout the Mediterranean, they started wondering: could Odysseus have travelled........

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