Talk:Odysseus Unbound/Archive 1
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The title of this article is a bit misleading, in two ways. First, the article is not about Paliki as such, it's about Bittlestone's theory that Paliki is Homeric Ithaka. Second, the title makes it sound like the identification of the peninsula as Homer's Ithaca is generally accepted. The text of the article also gives this impression--talking about "the identification," "the discovery," etc. But Bittlestone's book is only one of a long series of attempts to find the "real" Ithaca, and none of these attempts has (yet) been convincing. Bittlestone's may, the book is very new and it doesn't seem like many classicists have looked at it yet (I haven't had time to do more than look at a couple of chapters). Right now, though, the idea that Paliki is Homer's Ithaca has to be classed as an interesting possibility rather than proven fact.
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At the least it should be made clear in the opening paragraph that this is Bittlestone's theory and not a consensus view. I'd like to change the title, also, since the article is about a book and not a place. I think it would be a good idea to change the title to Odysseus Unbound. Akhilleus 20:18, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
- I'll put in some qualifiers in that initial paragraph... Great problems in changing the title of the article, as you can appreciate: it's done, lots of links etc., changing all that would be a major headache. But agreed that some reference to the longstanding debate about all of this, to which Bittlestone & Diggle & Underhill are a very respectable addition but certainly only the latest -- would be appropriate.
- --Kessler 20:44, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
- OK that's done. I'll also add some additional material regarding the other theories of the location, so that the article is not just about the one.
- --Kessler 21:00, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
- Depending on the direction that the edits go, it would not be hard to move the page to something like Homer's Ithaca or Geography of the Odyssey or Odysseus Unbound--the Wikipedia software will automatically redirect traffic to the new page. I myself favor the title Geography of the Odyssey--that can take in debates not just on the location of Ithaka, but of the places O. visits in Books 9-12 as well. Akhilleus 21:12, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
Homer's Ithaca might be interesting -- that model would scale up, as people could add Homer's Pylos and Homer's Scylla & Charybdis and so on -- let me think about that. I don't favor Geography of the Odyssey, though -- doesn't scale / would be too big -- this Paliki, Homer's Ithaca article already is getting to the max size, and there's plenty more that might be done just here. Anything at all "geographic" needs maps & images, too, and we need to respect Wikipedia size limitations, and user downloading capacities. Let me get some other things done and I'll think about your Homer's Ithaca suggestion.
--Kessler 22:57, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
Homer's Ithaca is a good idea for an article, I agree. I can see that scaling up OK, too, if & as people become interested in doing articles on other Homeric sites as well: there has been a lot of archaeology, and literature, on all of them, and there are Iliad & Odyssey fans everywhere -- and now new methods in geology & philology & climatology and various other disciplines all are re-focusing things and making new discoveries.
A blanket "Geography of Homer" article would be too big, to hold all of this. I don't object to references to the general subject and summaries, in other related articles, but they can't hope to cover adequately the array of new material recently developed at the Homeric sites.
I prefer to keep the Paliki, Homer's Ithaca, though. Paliki is the latest and currently the leading Homeric site-of-interest, because of the recent study done there, and the details of its discovery & ongoing analysis & forthcoming (?) excavation interest me greatly, as they do many others I'm sure. The key term, for all of us who have read the study and now are debating its findings, is "Paliki": by contrast, the more general Homer's Ithaca article will have to go into some detail on Eratosthenes & Dörpfeld & Goekoop and all the other preceding theories, as you suggested and I agree -- the Paliki article is just about Paliki. My hope is that others will add more here, then, about the geology and philology involved -- involved specifically with Paliki -- also on the Paliki debates, if & as those develop.
If we do an adequate job here on this particular Paliki site, the article won't have room for similar detail on all of the other "Homer's Ithaca" theories and sites: which is why your Homer's Ithaca article idea makes sense to me -- scales up -- I'd put summary treatments of the other location theories in there, and link. Then if someone wants to tackle, for instance, Lefkas, Homer's Ithaca separately, and do Dörpfeld there in detail, they can do it. The point of all of these would be archaeology / philology / geology / climatology / etc. : not the humanistic disciplines already presenting Homer in their own senses elsewhere, in other articles, but here specifically the underlying "science" involved in identifying geographic locations.
I'll set up a stub for Homer's Ithaca.
OK, done that: so now the typology would be,
- Ithaca (existing) -- general / tourist / modern local government article
- Homer's Ithaca (new stub) -- history of all of the "Homeric Ithaca" geographic location theories (some of them archaeological, some not)
- Paliki, Homer's Ithaca (existing) -- Paliki theory detail & archaeology
- Lefkas, Homer's Ithaca (future?) -- Lefkas theory detail & archaeology (Dörpfeld)
- Ithaki, Homer's Ithaca (future?) -- Ithaki theory detail & archaeology
- etc.
--Kessler 21:01, 28 February 2006 (UTC)