Cultural Geography in Homer

Eras Journal – Bocchetti, C.: Cultural Geography in Homer

Cultural Geography in Homer

Carla Bocchetti

(University of Warwick)[1]

Introduction

My subject is cultural geography in Homer. The geography of the Iliad has been studied mainly by archaeologists,[2]whose central purpose has been to investigate the historicity of the Catalogue of Ships, that is, the historical period it reflects and its accuracy in depicting a particular period of Greek history. Those who have studied the geography of the Odyssey[3] are mainly interested in the fantastic wanderings of Odysseus, or in putting the magical lands visited by the hero on the map. Although space is becoming a major academic subject in the sphere of humanities in general[4] and classics in particular[5] there has been a great silence on geography in recent Homeric scholarly work. Neither literature scholars nor historians have taken into consideration the possibility of re-evaluating Homer’s geography.

This paper focuses on the representation of landscape in the Catalogue of Ships and the Trojan Catalogue, and proposes that the performance of geographical boundaries must be articulated within the hegemony of a Greek political unity. I will use the name Catalogue of Warriors to refer to the Catalogue of Ships and the Trojan Catalogue of the Iliad as a unity. The fact that they have been referred to by two different names shows that they have never been studied together. However, they are very similar. They have the same function of describing the composition of an army and both display the same geographical approach in representing space.

Cultural geography is concerned with those aspects of land that shape people’s ideas about themselves, and give to their identities a characteristic expression.[6] It formulates the complex strategies of identification that function in the name of ‘the people’ and ‘the nation’, in which the recollection of home and belonging create an imagined community: a collectiveness that can be addressed in ancient Greek history in terms of Panhellenism.

Instead of studying the Catalogue of Warriors from the point of view of its historical narrative based on archaeological reports, it can be considered as an example of performance of space. For that purpose, I work with a geography of simultaneous relations and meanings that are tied together by a spatial rather than a temporal logic.[7]The depiction of lands in the Catalogue, articulated in relation to the rest of the Iliad, creates a vision which produces the sense of ‘place’ that reveals the meaningful relationship between people and their homelands. In the Catalogue, the enumeration which seems to be an empty list of towns receives materiality through an approach which privileges space, environment and landscape as part of identity.

The cultural geography of Homer is concerned with the relationship between landscape and identity, that is, the various ways in which a system of geographical landmarks, such as rivers, mountains and lakes, becomes significant in giving heroes their identities.

To study Greek lands through the performance of space in the Catalogue of Warriors not only draws attention to cultural identity, but also attempts to alter the conceptual object of traditional geographic investigation, moving from a geography conceived as historiography, to the study of geography and landscape in the context of identity. The geographical implications of the Catalogue have been overlooked, and there is no work that studies both catalogues as an independent project. The importance of cultural geography within the study of landscape makes it a possible revision of the genre of catalogue poetry in general, regarding not only Homer’s works, but also Hesiod’s Ehoie[8] and Spartan genealogies.

In this paper I propose to read the landscape of the Catalogue of Warriors as a narrative structure of identity; as a form of social and textual affiliation. I do not wish to deny the particular aesthetic meaning of its topography, by shifting from the aesthetics to the political implication of its landscape; but to argue that ‘narrating space in Homer’ means that a landscape text structures the language of belonging. I will argue that the importance which cultural geography gives to landscape offers a wide theoretical framework for re-considering the study of space and landscape representation in ancient Greek literary works.[9]

The importance attached to the concept of space highlights that there is a new way of reading geographical works, and that includes also works from antiquity. On the one hand, cultural geographers have not yet turned their attention towards ancient geography, and on the other hand, classicists have not turned their enquiry into modern notions of geography. My purpose is to use the validation given to space to locate ancient theories of space within the modern discourses of spatiality. The present concern with cultural geography provides an opportunity to reconsider the role of Homeric studies within the various projects of modernity. How can cultural geography be applied to Homer? And how can it contribute to classical scholarship?

In her recent book, Clarke studies the importance of geography in the work of Strabo, Polybius and Posidonius, and incorporates modern concepts of geography devoting a large introduction to modern concepts of space.[10]However, there are two problems in Clarke’s readings of ancient geography. Firstly, in spite of her introduction, she maintains a middle position in which history prevails over geography, and we will see further below that there is a strong critique in modern humanistic geography towards the concept in which history is used for interpreting geographical works. The second problem is that she interprets the work of Strabo using the model centre/periphery, an imperialistic perspective which can not be applied to all geographical works from antiquity.

Let us consider the first problem. The way in which ancient geography has been traditionally studied can be revisited in the light of the theories of cultural geography. Modern geographers claim the independence of the concept of space from that of time, and that means they see geography rather than history as the academic subject par excellence of this century. In fact, ‘space’ is taking over the privileged position of ‘time’ as an academic subject. This helps geography to broaden its meaning and scope of research using different approaches to investigate space; for example the revision of Kant’s aesthetics is one of the attempts for claiming the intellectual legitimacy of space.[11]Foucault predicted that an epoch of space would emerge in critical social theory, believing that “the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time”.[12] Soja considers that history as an academic discipline has been the focus of nineteenth century CE social theory, but that in the second part of the twentieth century CE, it is geography which has become the major concern of critical social theory.[13] The result of that revaluation of the concept of space is that the material and intellectual contexts of modern critical social theory have begun to shift dramatically.[14]

Clarke’s strategy of studying geography maintains basically the traditional historical approach, and therefore, on the one hand, narrows the scope and field of analysis which cultural geography is trying to open, and, on the other, makes it more difficult to consider other types of ancient sources as possible subjects of study from a geographical perspective. The subject of Classics should be considered alongside modern trends in the humanities since it gives the opportunity to reconsider works which have not been studied in detail before, or those which are not of interest to modern classicists, within a new attractive frame: such is the case, for example, of studying geography and identity from a non-imperial point of view in Greek history, or to consider other ancient works as part of geography, like the case of genealogies and catalogue poetry in general.

Let us consider the second problem. According to Clarke the world of Strabo’s Geography was constructed following the consolidation of the Roman Empire.[15] She considers that the world of the Geography was a world constructed with a periphery and a primary centre. The notion of centre/periphery is one of the most useful ideas in constructing spatial models as it offers a ready-made scheme easy to apply in a geographical investigation; the problem with it is that it suits a worldview from an imperialistic perspective in which the periphery is attached to the centre through relations of powers.[16] That model can not always be used for interpreting geographical works and may explain the lack of interest among modern classicists in studying ancient Greek geography, as is shown by the fact of very few recent publications in the field.

Traditionally, the development of geography was associated with serving a practical purpose of an empire, focused on the political and economic functions during ages of domination.[17] However, Marxist,[18] feminist[19] and post-colonial[20]writers responded to that traditional approach offering new ways of studying geography from a variety of angles.

Clarke argued in her critique of feminist geography that Strabo could have written a geographical work from a marginal position but that his Geography is not an example of that.[21] Post-colonial and feminist geographers[22] focused on two positions: firstly, the criticism of the author or narrator of a geographical work, namely a white male character, and secondly, on the importance of periphery in terms of gender, nationality and race in spatial social models. The contribution of those interests to geography is that space should be understood not in binary terms (mainly centre/periphery), but through its modification, diversity, mobility and change.[23]

Marxist approaches also contribute to cultural geography, and to the enlarging of our capacity to envision the dynamics of spatialization. David Harvey and the Marxist approach to geography call for a radical reformulation of the many ways we look at, conceptualise, and interpret not only space itself, but the making of history, and the constitution of society.[24] Soja[25] and Lefebvre[26] consider space to be a unity which is created through social relations, shifting the attention from that of a scientific approach based on geomorphology and mathematical models, to that of humanities. Marxists argue for the social origin of spatialisation, allowing the subject of geography to grow toward a different form of enquiry, namely that in which space is regarded within a humanistic approach as a social product. Marxist, feminist and post-colonial views highlight the importance of space in humanities, for they construct a model in which multiculturalism and diversity are seen as equally important parts of the inhabited space, arguing against the imperial approach of interpreting space.

Cultural geography gives us the theoretical background to study Homer’s spatial project from a decentred perspective. In fact, one of the major problems of the geography of the Catalogue is that it seems not to be relevant to the history/story of the Trojan war. How can we study Homer’s spatial project from within a non-imperial discourse? I argue that cultural geography offers us a possibility of a new reading of geography in ancient texts, in particular the geography of Homer’s Catalogue of Warriors, with an approach not related to discourses of domination and power. The geography of the Catalogue of Warriors does not display a central power: one can not say for instance that Mycenea is the centre of the Achaean Catalogue, or that in it the Peloponnesse has a greater importance over the rest of Greece. The centre/periphery model used by Clarke to interpret Roman geography is not of much help in the case of Homer’s Catalogue of Warriors. The geography of the epic poems and in particular the Catalogue is not the result of a conception of space from an administrative purpose of the political expansion of the Achaeans, so we cannot accommodate its information to suit an image of power placed centrally. Homer’s geography in the Catalogue of Warriors came down to us in a form which does not seem to correspond to the demands of an empire’s conquest. That issue shows that there has to be another way to read the geographical model of the Catalogue of Warriors, and I argue that the study of its landscape as a symbol of identities is one of the ways in which Homer’s Catalogue can be revived.

Contrary to Clarke, I believe that it is not worthwhile to read all geographical works in terms of an empire’s most prominent discourses. Since there are a great number of ancient works of geographical importance that have been overlooked in their geographical implications, such as genealogies and the genre of catalogue poetry; it can be more convenient to take an approach which makes it possible to change the traditional concept of what is a geographical work and consider other types of geographical information as valid geographical documents.

Cultural Geography and Landscape

The discourse of geography from the perspective of landscape was developed by Carl Sauer as a response to geographical determinism.[27] In the nineteenth century CE geography was established as an academic subject based on the notion that human actions were determined by the nature of the physical environment. [28] Geography as a science took shape within an intellectual climate dominated by Darwinism, an outlook which accorded to the environment the crucial role in determining the destiny of all species; notions based on environmental determinism can be traced back to Hippocrates and Aristotle.[29] Cultural geography, rather than discussing the influence of the environment on human societies, chose to explore the way in which human cultures had adapted their environments. Despite the fact that cultural geography started in North America and remained closely tied to Sauer and the Berkeley school,[30]British geographers have taken the lead in the last two decades in transforming the discipline, and they have done so in a multiplicity of voices: post-structuralist, Marxist and feminist.[31]

Although cultural geography does not work with a preconceived methodology, and it is open to diverse approaches, there are two main perspectives in which it has been studied: on the one hand, there is a group of scholars who primarily analyse landscape,[32] and on the other hand, there are those who concentrate on space and place.[33] However, those two concepts do not exclude one another, and there are scholars who work in both concepts as a unity.[34] My interest in cultural geography lies in the validation it gives to landscape interpretation.

The importance of landscape in modern cultural geography makes it possible to reconsider the representation of lands in literary works from antiquity. Since its beginning cultural geography placed an interest on landscape focused on two problems: the fact that it is an elusive, difficult to describe concept; and the questions concerning the relationship between landscapes and human beings. Hartshorne argued that the concept of landscape defined as “the appearance of a land as we perceived it”, enabled users to shift “from the landscape as sensation to the objects that produce that sensation”.[35] That distinction between sensation and object created an awareness among geographers who were disillusioned by the excess and failure of the positivistic movement.[36]

The spectrum of approaches to the study of landscape is remarkably broad, and humanist geographers work with different definitions of it. Tuan considers that landscape is the “construct of the mind and of feeling”.[37] Coones wrote that the term ‘landscape’ means “an actual scenic view and a tract of land owned and inhabited”.[38] Lowenthal noted the breadth of the concept: “Landscape is all-embracing – it includes virtually everything around us – and has manifest significance for everyone”.[39] Cosgrove represented landscape not as an object or an image, but as “a way of seeing”,[40] as spatial construction in which a given group of people has given meaning to their land and themselves. Cultural geographers use the assistance of semiology in order to read the meaning of landscape. Landscape can be considered as a text and therefore it carries in itself several layers of meaning. Semiotic terminology such as signs, symbols, signification and myth, are being adapted with increasing frequency to assist in landscape interpretations.[41]

Our task is to de-code the language of the landscape of the Catalogues, and see how much they can tell us about the image which Achaeans and Trojans had of their lands. To read the landscape of the Catalogue means to establish a code of meanings through its topography. Mountains and rivers create a network of significance in which heroes are attached to their homelands. In the context of war – the context of the Catalogue of Warriors – landscape constitutes a scenery for each army: a rugged mountainous territory for the Achaeans, and a territory with many rivers for the Trojans. The landscape works as a theme of unifying the identity of each army as a whole; no matter the differences between the different contingents which conform each army, the important point is that as a war scenery, the identity of each army as a group can be read in terms of the common physical features of the landscape of each battalion (See tables 1 and 2).

These ways of reading landscape have an impact on interpreting nature in the Iliad and Odyssey. Cultural geography focused on environmental meanings,[42] the aesthetics of landscape and architecture,[43] and the emotional significance of place in human identity.[44] The dramatic role of landscape in the Iliad can be seen in the Catalogue. The opening of each Catalogue, and their closures, represent means to explore the dramatic impact of landscape in the story; the Achaean closes with a rugged territory (Magnesia, Il .2.756-759) and the Trojan closes with the river Xanthos (Il .2.877). Those images of ruggedness and fertility are related to dramatic aspects in the story and in the construction of identities: Hector’s identity as leader of Troy is attached to his relation with the Scamander river (Il.6. 402, 22.145-156), and, for example, Odysseus constructs his story of wanderings through basing his identity on an attachment to Mount Neritos (Od .9.22, 13.351).

Cultural Geography and Ancient Geography

Ancient geography has been studied mainly as the history of geographical ideas. Italian scholarship offers the largest bibliography on geographical historiography. The work of Janni[45] deserves attention for it has contributed greatly to the understanding of ancient notions of space, and Cordano[46] also deserves mention. But the school of Perugia and its international colloqium in Acquasparta, published in 1991 by F. Prontera as Geografia storica della Grecia Antica sets out the major concerns and the directions in which ancient geography should be studied.[47] In this book, an international group of archaeologists and historians work on different topics – political and administrative geography, religious geography, ethnography and geography, and geography and travel literature – with the purpose of explaining how local tradition, epic, cult and myth have become an integral part of the physiognomy of ancient Greece. Italian scholars were influenced by the work of Van Paassen, published in the Netherlands in 1957, who they consider to be a pioneer in approaching the subject of the history of ancient geography from multiple angles, especially that of the complexity of geography as literary genre.

Moving away from a historical perspective, it was the French school who made a significant turn in another direction in the conception of space. Under the influence of the anthropologists Gernet and Levi Strauss, they saw nature as one of the sites of meaning that could help us penetrate the ancient psyche. With a structuralist approach Vidal Naquet[48] studied the theme of space in binary structures in relation to myth; Vernant’s “Hermes-Hestia” is also a significant example.[49] Also in French, Hartog and Ballabriga study space from mythological and religious perspectives.[50]

However, recently British scholars have devoted much attention to that discipline enlarging it with modern conceptions of space. Rutherford and Rood are the most relevant examples. Rutherford studies Theoria and sightseeing as part of religious journeys, and in a forthcoming book, considers pilgrimage and the significance of space in a sacred context.[51] Rood studies the implication of space in the work of Xenophon and considers theAnabasis an example of Panhellenism.[52]

In America, James Romm devotes his investigation to the relationship between geography and literature.[53]Dougherty works on travel and culture.[54]Also, scholars working on Greek tragedy have turned their attention to the importance of space and topography. Following French influence, Buxton presents the major study in English of the relation of space and myth;[55] Taplin and Zeitlin also show concern for the relevance of a geographical investigation in tragedy.[56]

With regards to Homer, there are recent publications which show a renewal of interest in Homer’s geography, for example those of Scully, Visser, Luce, and Malkin.[57] Scully focuses on Troy and its epithets, Luce on the topography of Ithaca, Visser studies the implication of orality in the geography of the Catalogue, but does not take too much account of Parry’s research on oral poetry; and finally Malkin studies Ithaca and Odysseus as major themes in the history of colonisation.

My interest in Homer’s geography is not to investigate the history of ancient ideas, nor to establish Homer’s reception in later works from antiquity; in that sense it differs from Italian scholarship that traditionally focuses on historiography. My interest in geography also differs from French scholarship, since I do not build my theory in binary terms, and therefore I do not follow the approach of structuralism. The validation which I intend to give to the geography of the Catalogue praises landscape in the context of group identity, it is a way of highlighting the aesthetics of landscape as a form of information on Panhellenism.

Catalogue Poetry and Group Identity

The recurrent metaphor of landscape as the interior of national identity emphasises the topography of lands as a medium to construct a sense of belonging. As Bhabba describes it, landscape is “the power of the eye to naturalise the rhetoric of national affiliation and its forms of collective expression”.[58] I argue that stories of nostos (stories of return) are stories of identity. Landscape plays an important role in creating an image of home in stories of nostos. In fact, Taplin points out that the Catalogue addresses other possible stories of nostos: “The Catalogue not only enumerates the scale and personnel of the Achaian expedition by naming and sometimes describing or evoking their homeland, it reaches back to their departures from their families, and indirectly to the years that those families have awaited the return of their men”.[59] The Catalogue structures a process of visualisation of space: Greekness becomes concrete and visible in landscape. Although the idea of nostos proposed by Malkin is interesting in relation to identity, it looks forward in time to stories of colonisation.[60] Mitchell [61] thinks that national identity is all about belonging, ‘nation’ is a landscape idea materialised through land. Although ancient Greece was not a nation in the modern sense of the word, there were however, some ways through which Greeks built a sense of collectiveness, and one way of doing that was through catalogue poetry. Cultural geographers in particular see landscape as a factor in social critical thought, and in reshaping the idea of nation. The idea of nation as it is used by cultural geographers gives us a way of understanding the process of constructing an identity through myths and memories.

Catalogue poetry includes both geographical accounts and genealogies, and had the social function of maintaining and creating identities. Instead of saying that in Homer there is a clash between Europe and Asia, it can be argued that the landscape of each region gives a sense of home to those warriors who have the hope of returning from the war, and to those who do actually accomplish it.

The construction of identity in the Catalogue gives a sense of group identity to both of the armies involved in the Trojan War. The concept of Panhellenism can help us illustrate the goal of constructing in general a sense of identity. Traditionally the beginnings of the idea of Panhellenism should be sought in the Greeks’ resistance to the Persian invasions of 490 and 480-479 BCE, and it is defined as “the idea that what the Greeks have in common as Greeks, and what distinguishes them from barbarians”.[62] However, Panhellenism was not an ideology for unifying Greece in terms of a ‘nation’. The idea of nation was alien to the Greeks; according to Walbank the Greeks failed to realise their potentiality as a nation.[63] Also Finley[64] thinks that although the structure of the polis constitute a powerful block similar to what we call ‘nationhood’ (Arist. Politics 1326 a35-b24), it however points in directions wholly unrelated to any modern theory on the subject. A common language, common descent, common religion symbolised by Panhellenic institutions such as the oracle of Delphi and the games of Zeus at Olympia, can not be labelled under a notion of ‘nation’, but under Kulturnation. That means that in spite of an absence of a central Greek political power which served as a centripetal force, the Greeks were held together as a common culture mainly through language and religion.

There are other definitions of the term. For example, Snodgrass applies the concept of Panhellenism to the pattern of intensified intercommunication among the city-states of Hellas, starting in the eighth century BCE, as evidenced in particular by the Olympic games, Delphic oracle and Homeric poetry.[65] Nagy has extended the concept as a model for explaining the nature of Homeric poetry; as Panhellenism he refers to “those kinds of poetry and song that operated not simply on the basis of local traditions suited for local audiences. Rather, Panhellenic poetry would have been the product of an evolutionary synthesis of traditions, so that the tradition that it represents concentrates on traditions that tend to be common to most locales and peculiar to none”.[66]

In fact, early poetry of the eighth century BCE, Hesiod, Homer and the tradition they belonged to, has as a major theme the identity of Greek people, whether united in a military expedition (Iliad) or as a geographical system (Catalogue of Ships) or as a genealogical system (the Catalogue of Women and its antecedents). Catalogue poetry is an expression of Panhellenism; the works are examples of the sense of Greek national identity burgeoning in the eighth century BCE. The social function of genealogies of the Ehoie, attributed to Hesiod but probably composed in the mid-sixth century BCE after Greek colonies had been established in the Mediterranean,[67] ought to explain the names and origins of both Greeks and foreign peoples by incorporating them into mythical stemmata.[68] These genealogies were ethnocentric, in that they sought to trace all the people of the world back to Greeks gods and heroes providing mythical prefiguration and legitimisation of Greek residence in foreign parts.[69] Hesiod’s poetry is preoccupied with legendary ancestry. The legendary pedigree was important for military and social prestige: before fighting Homeric heroes boast of their ancestry, citing between two and eight generations of ancestors (Il.6. 145-211). The praise poetry of Pindar, for example, confirms the extension of the genealogies of powerful families into the heroic past, the fame of the victory of the athletes is compared to the fame of the heroes of the epics.[70]InCatalogues are emblems of identity through which a society explains its present, giving an order to its past. Identity can be largely defined through legends and landscape, by stories of gods and mortals, by catalogues of genealogies like Hesiod’s Ehoie, by the heroic deeds of Achaeans and Trojans, and by their dramatic destinies located in ancient homelands with hallowed sites and scenery. The landscapes as well as the genealogies are a significant component which endows communities with their identity.[71] Catalogues were not obsolete poetic devices. Due to their flexible narrative form they are a dynamic genre through which a society gave forms to its identity and through which it expressed a sense of belonging.

The modern theories on cultural geography, and especially those which refer to landscape, constitute a useful theoretical frame enabling exploration of how identity is portrayed in the Catalogue of Warriors. Situating Homer within the new trends of cultural studies, in this case that of landscape interpretation, has given us the possibility of reconsidering the geography of the Catalogue of Warriors within a discourse which gives preponderance to geography and space, instead of history and time.

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Notes

[1] Carla Bocchetti is currently Assistant Professor at Universidad Nacional de Colombia in South America.

[2] T.W. Allen, The Homeric Catalogue of Ships, Oxford, 1921; H. Simpson-Lazenby, The Catalogue of the Ships in Homer’s IIiad, Oxford, 1970.

[3] V. Berard, Les navigations d’Ulysse, Vol. 1, Paris, 1927-29; G. Germain, Genèse de l‘Odyssée, Paris, 1954.

[4] R. Sack, Conceptions of Space in Social Thought: A Geographic Perspective, Minneapolis, 1980; W. Raymond,The Sociology of Culture, New York, 1982; A. Smith, National Identity, London, 1980; R. Muir, Approaches to Landscape, Houndmills and London, 1999; M. Crang, Cultural Geography, London, 1998.

[5] I. Rutherford, “Theoria as Theatre: The Pilgrimage Theme in Greek drama”, PLLS, Vol. 10, 1998, pp. 131-56; I. Rutherford, “Theoria and Darshan: Pilgrimage as Gaze in Greece and India”, Classical Quarterly, Vol. 50, 2000, pp. 133-146; K. Clarke, Between Geography and History: Hellenistic Constructions of the Roman World, Oxford, 1999; O. Taplin, “Spreading the World Through Performance” in R. Osborne and S. Goldhill (eds), Athenian Democracy and Performance Culture, Cambridge, 1999; F. Zeitlin, “Playing the Other” in J. Winkler and F. I. Zeitlin (eds), Nothing to Do with Dionysus? Athenian Drama in its Social Context, New Jersey, 1990; T. Rood (Forthcoming).

[6] C. Sauer, “The Morphology of Landscape”, University of California Publications in Geography, Vol. 2, 1925, pp. 19-54; D. Mitchell, Cultural Geography: An Introduction, Oxford, 2000.

[7] I follow especially E. Soja,Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Theory, London, 1989.

[8] I. Rutherford, “Catalogues of Women: Formulas, Voice and Death in Ehoie -Poetry, the Hesiodic Gunaikon Katalogos and the Odysseian Nekuia” in M. Depew and D. Obbink (eds), Matrices of Genre, Cambridge Mass., 2000.

[9] I will refer to landscape in cultural geography further on.

[10] K. Clarke, Between Geography and History, pp. 243-244.

[11] J.A. May, Kant’s Concepts of Geography and its Relation to Recent Geographical Thought, Toronto, 1970, p. 42; K. Clarke, Between Geography and History, p .7.

[12] M. Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, and Power” in The Foucault Reader, New York, 1984, p .70; M. Foucault,”Of Other Spaces”, Diacritics, Vol. 16, 1986, pp. 22-7, p .23.

[13] E. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, pp. 11, 123.

[14] H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Oxford, 1991; J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of Public Sphere, Cambridge, 1989; E. Hobsbaum and T. Range (eds), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, 1983; K. Anderson and F. Gale, (eds),Inventing Places, Melbourne, 1992.

[15] K. Clarke, Between Geography and History, p. 210.

[16] T.C. Champion, Centre and Periphery: Comparative Studies in Archaeology , London, 1995; A. Bodlewska and N. Smith, Geography and Empire, Oxford, 1994.

[17] E. Said, Culture and Imperialism, New York, 1993; F. Driver, “Geography’s Empire: Histories of Geographical Knowledge”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 10, 1992, pp. 23-40.

[18] D. Harvey, The Condition of Post-modernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford, 1989; E. Soja, Postmodern Geographies.

[19] S. Piles and M. Keith (eds),Geographies of Resistance , London, 1997.

[20] D. Massey, Space, Place and Gender, Minneapolis, 1994; G. Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge, Minneapolis, 1993, pp. 34-35; E. Said,Culture and Imperialism; D. Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion , London, 1995.

[21] K. Clarke, Between Geography and History, p. 244

[22] L. McDowell, “The Transformation of Cultural Geography”, in D. Gregory, R. Martin and G. Smith (eds), Human Geography: Society, Space and Social Science, Minneapolis, 1994; M. Domosh,”Feminism and Human Geography” in C. Earle, K. Mathewson, M. Kenzer and M.D. Lanham (eds), Concepts in Human Geography, Rowman and Littlefields, 1996; C. Nash, “Post-colonial Progress in Cultural Geography”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 20(1), 2002, pp. 27-52.

[23] K. Clarke, Between Geography and History, p. 294-336 refers to the model centre/periphery when she explains that Strabo’s interest in India must have been part of a theoretical interest in constructing geography, since India was not part of the Roman Empire.

[24] D. Harvey, The Condition of Post-modernity.

[25] E. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, p. 17.

[26] H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space.

[27] C. Sauer, “The Morphology of Landscape”, p. 19-54.

[28] On determinism see H. Semple,Influences of Geographic Environment on the Basis of Ratzel’s System of Anthropo-geography, New York, 1911.

[29] Hippocrates, Air waters and Places, 24: “For the most part you will find assimilated to the nature of the land both the physique and the ways of the people”. Aristotle (Pol.VII 4,1327b 20 ss) ; K. Clarke, Between Geography and History , p. 27.

[30] W. L. Thomas Jr, (ed.), Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth , Chicago, 1956; P. Wagner and M. Mikesell,Readings in Cultural Geography, Chicago, 1962.

[31] S. Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and The United States, Cambridge, 1993; D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels (eds), The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments, Cambridge, 1988; P. Jackson, Maps and Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural Geography, London, 1989; D. Ley and M. Samuels (eds), Humanistic Geography: Prospects and Problems, Chicago, 1978; D. Massey, Space, Place and Gender; G. Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge.

[32] D. Mitchell, Cultural Geography, pp. 37-65; R. Muir, Approaches to Landscape, pp. 1-48; D. Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge, 1985.

[33] F.Y. Tuan, “Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive Approach”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers , Vol. 81, 1991, pp. 684-96; N. Entrikin, “Place and Region”, Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 18, 1994, pp. 227-233.

[34] J. Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840, Cambridge, 1972; E.H. Zube,”Themes in Landscape Assessment Theory”, Landscape Journal, Vol. 3, 1984, pp. 104-109.

[35] R. Hartshorne, The Nature of Geography: A Critical Survey of Current Thought in the Light of the Past, Lancaster, 1939, p. 149.

[36] D. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, London, 1984, p. 45. On Hartshorne’s ideas see K.R. Olwig, “Recovering the Substantive Nature of Landscape”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 86, 1996, pp. 630-53.

[37] F.Y. Tuan, “Thought and Landscape” in D.W. Meining (ed), The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, Oxford and New York, 1997, p.89.

[38] P. Coones, “Landscape Geography” in A. Rogers, H. Viles and A. Gourdie (eds), The Student’s Companion to Geography , Oxford, 1992, p. 70.

[39] D. Lowenthal, “Introduction in Penning-Rowsell” in D. Lowenthal (ed), Landscape Meaning and Values, London, 1986, p. 1.

[40] D. Cosgrove, Social Formation, p. 1.

[41] J.S.P. Hopkins, “West Edmonton Mall: Landscape of Myth and Elsewhereness”, The Canadian Geographer, Vol. 34, 1990, pp. 2-17; W.G. Hoskins, English Landscape , London, 1973, p. 5; J. Duncan and N. Duncan, “(Re) Reading the Landscape”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 6, 1988, pp. 117-26.

[42] Y.F. Tuan, “Geography, Phenomenology and the Study of Human Nature”, Canadian Geographer, Vol. 15, 1971, pp. 181-92; D. Ley and M. Samuels, Humanistic Geography , pp. 1-17.

[43] D. Cosgrove, “Prospects, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 10, 1985, pp. 45-62.

[44] D.C.D. Pocock (ed),Humanistic Geography and Literature , London, 1981; P. Jackson, Maps and Meaning, pp. 2, 45.

[45] P. Janni, La mappa e il periplo: cartografia antica e spazio odologico, Roma, 1984.

[46] F. Cordano, La geografia degli antichi, Bari, 1992.

[47] E. Lepore, “Problemi dell’organizzazione della chora coloniale” in M. Finley (ed), Problème della terre en Grèce ancienne , Paris, 1973, p. 268.

[48] P. Vidal-Naquet, “Land and Sacrifice in the Odyssey : A Study of Religious and Mythical Meanings” in S.L. Schein (ed), Reading the Odyssey, New Jersey, 1996.

[49] J.P. Vernant, “Hestia-Hermes: the Religious Expression of Space and Movement in Ancient Greece”, in Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, London, 1983.

[50] F. Hartog, Mémoire d’Ulysse: récits sur la frontière en Grèce ancienne, Paris, 1996; A. Ballabriga,Le Soleil et le Tartare: L’image mythique du monde en Grèce archaïque , Paris, 1986.

[51] I. Rutherford, “Theoria as Theatre”, p. 131-56; I. Rutherford, “Theoria and Darshan“, pp. 133-146.

[52] I want to thank Tim Rood for giving me his paper “Xenophon and the Argonuats” (Forthcoming).

[53] J. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought , New Jersey, 1992.

[54] C. Dougherty, The Raft of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer’s Odyssey, Oxford, 2001.

[55] R. Buxton, Imaginary Greece: The Contexts of Mythology , Cambridge, 1994.

[56] O. Taplin, “Spreading the World Through Performance”, pp. 33-57; F. Zeitlin, “Playing the Other”, pp. 63-96.

[57] S. Scully, Homer and the Sacred City, Ithaca and London, 1990; E. Visser, Homers Katalog der Schiffe, Leipzig, 1997; J.V. Luce, Celebrating Homer’s Landscape: Troy and Ithaca Revisited, New Haven and London, 1998; I. Malkin,The Returns of Odysseus, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998.

[58] H. Bhabba, Nation and Narration, London, 1990.

[59] O. Taplin, Homeric Soundings, Oxford, 1992. p. 84.

[60] I. Malkin, The Returns of Odysseus, pp. 1-31.

[61] D. Mitchell, Cultural Geography, pp. 271-283.

[62] P.J. Rhodes, The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd Edition, p. 1106.

[63] F.W. Walbank, “Nationality as a Factor in Roman History”, Harvard Studies Classical Philology, Vol. 76, 1972, pp. 145-68.

[64] M. Finley, “The Ancient Greeks and Their Nation” in Use and Abuse of History, London, 1975, p. 122.

[65] A. Snodgrass, The Dark Age of Greece: An Archaeological Survey of the Eleventh to the Eighth Centuries, Edinburgh, 1971, pp. 421, 435; A. Snodgrass, An Archaeology of Greece , Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987, pp.160, 165.

[66] G. Nagy, Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past, Baltimore and London, 1990, p. 54. M. West, The Hesiodic Catalogue, p. 136.

[67] M. West, The Hesiodic Catalogue, p. 136.

[68] I. Rutherford, “Catalogues of Women”; M. West, The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, Oxford, 1985; E. Hall,Inventing the Barbarian: Greek self definition through Tragedy, Oxford, 1989; J. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity , Cambridge, 1997.

[69] E. Bickerman, “Origines Gentium”, Classical Philology , Vol. XLVII, 1952, pp. 65-81.

[70] Pindar, Nemean, 9.39-42; I. Rutherford, “Theoria as Theatre”, pp. 131-56; G. Nagy, Pindar’s Homer, pp. 199-214.

[71] D. Lowenthal, “Age and Artefact”, in D.W. Meining (ed), The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, New York and London, 1979, p. 103.