Islands and Shores

This paper discusses the relationship between seafaring and the Hellenistic reception of some archaic Greek lyric poetry. Although most of the texts in question have recently been discussed, the role of the sea has been underplayed or overlooked. The paper argues that the idea of seafaring is an aspect of the poems on the Hellenistic reception of archaic lyric poetry that deserves more attention as it seems to often support/help the continuity between archaic and classical Greece and thriving Egyptian literature and scholarship. The sea unites more than it divides, and it seems to ensure the contact at the end of the journey, instead of emphasising its risks.

Sea of Literatures, 2023

Islands have shaped literary forms just as those literary forms have structured our access to the specific spatiality of islands. This mediation happens via the figural, the trope; thus, representations of islands in literary texts are first of all to be considered as figures that reconfigure the topological space in a tropological way. This reconfiguration depends on historical and geographical conditions. The specificity of the Mediterranean island cannot be a supra-temporal essence, but only a characteristic or a bundle of characteristics that becomes visible through contrasts with other islands or literatures. There is no such thing as a single key concept of literary Mediterranean islandness. This paper does not delineate a literary history of the Mediterranean islands, nor does it claim to develop a finely grained matrix of analysis applicable to any literary example that touches on islands and the Mediterranean. In a necessarily superficial journey through certain parts of the history of literature, focusing on the period from ancient to early modern times, the paper's aim is to detect phenomena that repeat. Departing from these phenomena, more general concepts are approached. In this respect, the contribution is a proposal for reflecting on the island as a category in the literature of and on the Mediterranean.

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2025

How were island spaces considered as barbaric perceived by the Greeks and Romans? Was there a different relationship to the concept of insularity between Greek and Latin thought? If so, for what reasons? To offer a preliminary answer to these questions, this contribution will draw on several Greek and Latin texts relating to Sardinia and Corsica produced between the 5th century BCE and the 1st century CE. The first part of our paper will be a lexical study of the terms used in Greek and Latin to designate the ‘island’ and the ‘continent’. The second part will study the perception of insularity by the Greeks. It will be shown how and why the Greeks, from the Archaic period onwards, conceptualized the island space as an ideal ‘Place’ by associating it with the notions of centrality, sovereignty, and civic harmony. The example of Sardinia and Corsica will allow us to determine to what extent this idyllic vision of the island was at intervals able to transcend one of the fundamental frameworks of Greek thought, which consisted in dividing the oikouménē between ‘barbarian’ and ‘civilized’ peoples. Finally, the last part of the article will be devoted to studying the Roman perception of the island space. We will study how their conflicting history with the Tyrrhenian insulae led the Romans to conceptualize the island space as a place of civic relegation – thus a symbolically and politically peripheral ‘Non-Place’ - and the Sardo-Corsican islander as a paragon of barbarism.

2020

In this paper, I argue that the sea in Homer's Odyssey is not the territory suggested by its map, but rather an all-encompassing narratological frame: the sea keeps the isolated locations of Odysseus' misadventures together. As such the sea in the Odyssey is not just salty, dark-coloured water: it is the continuum in which the narrator's mind roams, looking for anchor points to which to attach tales and episodes. Searching the virtual space of his imagination, Odysseus presents his series of misadventures and their remote locations as islands in isolation, and uses the sea as an equally virtual space to frame them. For the story-weaving Odysseus, the sea is the fictitious tapestry. And as Teiresias' warning words show (Od. XI 121-137, repeated in Od. XXIII 265-283), Odysseus somehow has to escape this fiction to find peace, though he cannot escape death coming from it.

To understand the human perception of landscapes in the past, archaeologists would require knowledge of the immaterial landscape elements: the stories that are connected to physical landscape features. One way of acquiring access to such stories is through written literature (poetry, prose), which has survived centuries and is connected to specific landscapes. In this article, a particular powerful example is examined: Homer’s Odyssey. It will be argued that the epic myth has strong interconnections to the landscape of the Ionian islands in Greece. Whether the Homeric Geography is reflected in the current landscape remains open for debate. However, the text itself has played an important role in the formation of the archaeological record, in the way classical scholarship in the region has developed and in public perceptions of archaeology and history. Because of the extremely long narrative history, Homer’s Odyssey has played a structuring role with regard to the cultural landscape.

This paper traces the development of the Greeks’ fascination with the vast seas to the west of their areas of settlement, from mythical tales about Heracles and Odysseus to Plato’s Atlantis and Pytheas’ Thule and to fictional literature created in Roman Imperial times.

The island has been used in ancient literature as the prototypical locus fantasticus, the most appropriate setting for every kind of fantastic idea and marvellous adventure. Various types of island may be discerned in the classical literary canon: the island of natural wonders, characterised by extraordinary physical conditions and supernatural phenomena; the treasure island, home of an invaluable hoard of riches; the island of the monster, lair of a terrible destructive creature, such as a dragon, a man-eating giant, or other kinds of miscreant; the magic island, inhabited by a powerful wizard or witch, who exercises his or her spells over the area; the utopian island, in which the inhabitants have established a perfect polity; the island of Cockaigne, a utopia of trenchermen and gastronomic abundance; the metaphysical island, where a secret substance of spiritual enlightenment and regeneration may be found; and the island of the dead, which either serves itself as the residence of the souls of the deceased or provides a gate towards the underworld. Modern fiction has added a few further concepts to this fundamental ancient repertoire: namely, the technological island, in which a bold and often sinister scientific or biological experiment is put to practice; and the philosophical or theoretical island, which offers the narrative materialisation of a philosophical idea, the reflection of a theoretical principle or of a model of thought in geographical space. The oldest fantastic islands in world literature are found in ancient Egyptian novellas ("The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor", an uncanonical form of the island of the monster) and Mesopotamian epics ("Gilgamesh", the first metaphysical island). In Greek literature, the first travel narrative is the Homeric "Odyssey", which includes a long account of Odysseus’ voyages and adventures in the seas of fairyland. The Homeric epic offers an anthology or encyclopedia of fictitious islands; the poet strove to gather in his narrative all the forms of fantastic island that were current in the mythical tradition and the popular imaginary of his time. He constructed a comprehensive and monumental literary panorama of imaginary places, to serve as a model for all the writers that would follow. In the Hellenistic period, the narratives of fictitious travel enjoyed a new vogue in Greek literature, under the impetus of the expeditions of Alexander the Great. A number of Hellenistic travel romances (Euhemerus, Iambulus) present developed and sophisticated examples of utopian islands, localised in the eastern seas explored by Alexander's troops, off the coasts of Arabia and India. Even in the "Alexander Romance", in which the hero's travel adventures mainly take place on terra firma, the Macedonian conqueror and his men sometimes arrive at the shore of a sea or a big lake; from there, they cross over to an island, on which they undergo some marvellous adventure, such as an encounter with a dangerous monster, or a weird illusion, or a utopian society of sages. Alexander was the most important successor of Odysseus in the Greek popular imaginary, and his adventures could not remain untainted from the most emblematic concept of travel fiction. In the ripe Roman age, Lucian's "True Histories", another work of extended travel fiction, includes an encyclopedic collection of multifarious fantastic isles, combining fantasy, irony, and satire into a multi-layered narrative. On the surface, Lucian presents his work as a parody and satirical travesty of the genre of fantastic travel literature. He mocks the authors of fictitious travelogues, who string together the most extravagant marvels and yet claim to present accurate reports of full historical veracity. He also criticises the naïve readers, who let themselves be carried away by such tales and accept their blatant impossibilities. On the other hand, Lucian obviously delights in inventing and narrating all those incredible travel wonders. Although he pretends to disapprove of the fallacious authors of fantasy, he is himself a born narrator of such tales and unfolds them with great gusto. Thus, the readers may be enchanted by the marvellous images and the imaginative paradoxes and enjoy Lucian’s narrative as a genuine and enticing romance of travel fantasy. In this respect, Lucian achieved a rare accomplishment: he composed a parody of fabulous travelogues, which however may be also read as an exquisite specimen of fantastic writing per se. Lucian tells an exciting story of adventures, and simultaneously he ironises its literary tropes and conventions at every turn of the narrative.

Shima, 2019

Τhe geological history of the island topoi started in the interior of the primordial sea of our planet hundreds of millions of years ago, an immensely long time before the appearance of humans. Evidence of hominid-"islanders", and, consequently, their age-old sea crossings, is today being traced deeper and deeper in Palaeolithic stratigraphies. Written forms of the concept of islands exist in early scripts and, with consistency, later in Homer, in ancient literature and in other accounts. Research on islands was established in the 19th and early 20th centuries in major works by authors such as Darwin and Malinowski. But, despite such initial or "proto" activity, how much has our modern synthesis of knowledge and interdisciplinary understanding of islands and islanders-and their territories and seas, identities and behaviours-progressed? What makes us keep wondering about natural and human-made material and symbolic islandscapes, and their potential similarities and distinctions from non-insular worlds? Following on from previous reflections about the work of the University of Crete's Island Interdisciplinary Workshop that mainly derive from our archaeological and interdisciplinary study of the island of Gavdos, off the southwestern shore of Crete, I shall try to suggest a relevant methodological framework by summarising a number of insular issues in a diachronic Aegean and Mediterranean perspective.