Much of the same in the Daily Telegraph:-
Odyssey island 'revealed' by Briton's holiday hunch
By Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent
(Filed: 30/09/2005)
A British businessman said yesterday that he had solved one of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world.
Robert Bittlestone claims that he has found the true location of Homer's Ithaca, the island of Odysseus.
If true - and the claim has yet to be substantiated by archaeological evidence - it would be the greatest classical discovery since Heinrich Schliemann found the site of Troy in Turkey in the 1870s.
It might also establish that the wandering Odysseus was a real Greek - not just a poetic and mythical figment of Homer's imagination. It raises the tantalising possibility of finding Odysseus's palace and maybe his gold.
Mr Bittlestone, 53, a management consultant from Kingston-on-Thames, Surrey, developed the theory after a hunch came to him while on holiday in 1997.
He has since devoted his spare time to proving that a peninsula on the western side of the Ionian island of Cephalonia was once a separate island - and was Odysseus's Ithaca.
Matters are complicated by the presence a few miles to the east of Cephalonia of the island of Ithaki, long assumed to be the mythological Ithaca. But archaeological investigations there have never yielded any conclusive evidence.
Homer's two great epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, tell of the Trojan war in the 13th century BC and of Odysseus's 10 years of adventures on his journey home to Ithaca. Homer's best clue as to the whereabouts and topography of Ithaca are contained in the lines from the Odyssey:
'Around are many islands, close to each other, Doulichion and Same and wooded Zacynthos.
Ithaca itself lies low, furthest to sea Towards dusk [ie west]; the rest, apart, face dawn and sun [ie east].'
Homer, who, if he existed, composed his poems some 500 years after the Trojan wars, thus placed his Ithaca to the west of Same (modern-day Cephalonia) not to the east where modern Ithaki, which is mountainous and not low-lying, sits. Zacynthos, which still bears the same name, lies well to the south.
This conundrum has baffled Ithaca-hunters for years.
But Mr Bittlestone said yesterday that it came to him while on holiday in the area, that Cephalonia was once two islands, with the western Paliki peninsula, which is low-lying, separated from the bulk of Cephalonia by a stretch of water only a few hundred yards wide. He believes that Paliki is the fabled Ithaca while Ithaki is Homer's Doulichion.
Mr Bittlestone enlisted the support of two British academics, James Diggle, professor of Greek and Latin at Cambridge University, and John Underhill, professor of stratiography at the University of Edinburgh.
Both said in London yesterday that they had found plenty of evidence to support Mr Bittlestone's claims and none to contradict them.
In Odysseus Unbound, a heavyweight book to be published soon by Cambridge University Press, Prof Underhill says he has found substantial evidence that rock falls along with a rise in land levels probably caused by earthquakes, may have filled in the narrow straits between Cephalonia and Ithaca in the past 3,000 years.
Prof Diggle said that up to 70 topographical features on Paliki were very similar to how Homer had described them and the trio say that they have identified a hill that could be the site of Odysseus's palace.
Mr Bittlestone said: "What has flabbergasted me is that if you take a literal interpretation of The Odyssey you find that it fits Paliki like a glove."
In 1995, Greek archaeologists found flakes of flint and some shards of handmade pots from the right period on the hill.
The trio admitted yesterday that they cannot yet prove their case. They have founded a charity and are appealing for funds to carry out excavation work and to do more tests on the rockfalls.
Source:-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... haca30.xml