From Rome to Greece, my involvement in the project
Written by Ben Payne
I enjoyed the project a lot because it enabled me to apply previous knowledge from my Major in Greece, Rome and Late Antiquity major. I previously studied Homer for an Essay on the involvement of the Turkish people in the Trojan War, so his style of writing was familiar.
For the project specifically worked on texts related to the Black Sea region, taking information from a Roman author named Pomponius Mela (a geographer who lived in Spain in the first century), and then I moved on to working with Strabo – a Greek author of a 7 volume work known as ‘the Geography’ published around 7BC), who I found an amiable guide.
Most of the references in Strabo were to the end of the Trojan War and the voyage of Odysseus’ son Telemachus on the coast of Greece.
I was able to follow his line of thinking quite well despite initial predictions that this would be difficult due to Strabo’s vast knowledge and tendency to be inconsistent in his naming of places and peoples and learned surprising pieces of information in the process from a piece of literature which was novel to me. . For example, the fact that the suitors of Penelope formed a blockade to trap Odysseus on his return to Ithaca was quite interesting. This surprised me as I expected they would wait for Odysseus’ return to the island before apprehending him.
Odysseus and the sirens. Theodoor van Thulden, 1633.
The next phase of the project will involve the contribution of artistic representations of myth – for instance, I contributed a link from Strabo to a piece of work from an Athenian artist depicting the birth of Athena as well as link to the statue of Zeus at Olympia from the text.
I found the project quite easy as my mind is very visual, allowing me to locate the places described by Strabo within a mental map I had built up in my mind over the last several years of study. I didn’t find many obscure things except maybe a couple of cult sites to Poseidon and a hill mentioned by Homer where a deal was struck with Athena.
Supporting my ability to engage with and comprehend the text was an internal mental map of the various locations of mythical I had built over the last several years through my own personal research. It was nice to be able to take advantage of this and the process of referring to it affirmed my abilities as an historian. The challenge was, translating my internal mental map into a more accessible structure on the computer through engagement with the MANTO database and fortunately an interest in linguistics supported my ability to do this.
Overall, I am proud that I contributed numerous references to the database through my text analysis and I am grateful that I was able to work with parts of the Odyssey - one of the oldest texts in the world.
This is the sixth in a series of blog posts from students at Macquarie University who answered the call for PACE interns this semester