An improbable coalition of an economist turned management consultant, and two British professors of classics and geology, yesterday announced they had cracked the true location of Odysseus' Ithaca, one of the riddles of the ancient world. They claim that it was not the Greek island of Ithaki, as the islanders have proudly boasted for centuries, but a peninsula of Kefalonia.
The region now known as Paliki is part of the main island but in the ancient world, the trio believes, was separated by a sea channel that over millennia filled with rock after earthquakes and landslips.
Robert Bittlestone, who studied economics at Cambridge University, UK, before becoming an international management consultant, yesterday said his idea was a "what if?" theory. However James Diggle, professor of Greek and Latin at Cambridge, admires "a bold brilliant hypothesis, which explains not only where it is but why it has been so difficult to find."
John Underhill, professor of stratigraphy at Edinburgh, on whose geological expertise the entire theory rests, said more cautiously: "Nothing to date refutes the notion that Robert has put forward."
Ithaca is the home that Homer's hero, Odysseus, returns to after 10 years of the Trojan war and 10 years' wandering. Its location has been disputed for centuries. Excavations on Lefkas, Kefalonia, Zakinthos and Ithaki, have been claimed variously as proof or dismissed out of hand.
The problem is the sunset. Homer says: "Around are many islands, close to each other -- Doulichion and Same, and wooded Zacynthos. Ithaca itself lies low, furthest to sea towards dusk; the rest, apart, face dawn and sun."
Ithaki, the most easterly of the modern group, faces the dawn, and is hilly. But the Paliki peninsula of Kefalonia is flat, faces the sunset, and if the authors are correct, was once an island.
"You could say Homer didn't care, he was writing a poem, not a Michelin guide -- but what if Homer was right all along, what if the geography of the land has changed?" Bittlestone said.
He believes Paliki matches Homer's description of the island in detail and dreams that the gold of Odysseus may one day be found there.
The team, which next week publishes the theory in a book, hopes to raise money with the cooperation of the Greek government for geological and archaeological digs. They will try to date the sediment in a dried-up lake, but this could bring the project to a juddering halt.
"If we find those deposits are older than 3,000 years that will mean the site could not have been under the sea in our period -- we might as well pack our bags and go home," Underhill said.
That might be greeted with cheers from the island of Ithaki. But even worse news for them is that Diggle does not even believe in Homer.
"Homer's just a convenient name that was attached to these poems. Somebody caused the poems to be written down, and that could have been Homer. But in the sense of a single person who composed the Iliad and the Odyssey -- I don't think he existed," Diggle said.
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