Complete Map - Fagles

The complete map does justice to the poem’s range, which is simultaneously broad and intimate, vast in scope, yet attentive to the smallest details (the plants of Laertes’ well-tended farm, the types and varieties of coastlines). This attention to detail highlights how The Odyssey is a narrative of lived place as well as of epic event. Through its toporefs, Ithaca is most often referenced and dwelt on via ‘projection’ and ‘indirect’ connections which emphasise its characteristic as a lost and distant place that is also the ultimate goal.  It is no surprise, then, that Ithaca is at the centre of the map. It is also a site of possession and ownership: ‘my own native Ithaca’, ‘my own country’. Place names such as ‘seagirt Ithaca’, ‘the heights of Troy’, or ‘wooded Zacynthus’ incorporate topographical epithets that root places in the landscape and through memory. Overall, the complete map demonstrates how the text integrates different kinds of place – domestic, hostile, mythic, familiar – through a sustained reference system.