Behind one of the world’s greatest stories lies an even more extraordinary truth.
The Odyssey is one of the most famous stories ever told. But behind the monsters and the gods and the wine-dark sea lies a puzzle that has fascinated historians and archaeologists for two centuries: how much of it is real?
The Real Odyssey follows the evidence from the Bronze Age palaces of Mycenae to the volcanic islands of the Tyrrhenian Sea, from the shaft graves of ancient Greece to the seafloor off the Turkish coast.
Drawing on the latest research, Andrew Miles reveals a world more extraordinary than Homer’s myth—a world of palace bureaucracies and maritime trade networks, of oral poets who preserved three thousand years of history in their formulas, and of a landscape that may have changed beyond recognition since the poem was first performed.
The poem is three thousand years old. The investigation is just beginning.