The homeric Odyssey and the cave as an archetype of rural landscape and first mediterranean habitat

Abstract

The search for an answer to the question of when the landscape begins, brings us closer to a subject as complex as that of looking for traces of landscape in Homer’s genesic works. From a phenomenological analysis of literary texts, we are forced to draw on such heterogeneous sciences as psychology, painting or geography, to promote a transdisciplinary convergence that helps us in our search for landscape and housing archetypes from attentive and inquisitive readings of the Homeric hexameters and some of the possible objectifications of their places of indeterminacy. We focus on the Odyssey, Homer’s second masterpiece, recited and written at the end of the 8th century BC and considered the germ of Western literature. Such an epic narrative develops complex plots in settings belonging to known and differentiated territories known as “Hellas”. In short, Homeric stories necessarily take place in a “place”, be it real, imaginary or fictitious, of a physical space or vital territory- in which action and daily life will take place. The Poet, as aedo-educator, selects stereotypical natural or cultural spaces of the Mediterranean in order to show archetypes of nature, geography, the polis, and the Mediterranean landscape itself, as an educational and unifying program for the dispersed peoples of Hellas. And the objectifications of that Homeric world, carried out throughout history by different memory repositories, will be the basis for the creation of the West. Here we dare to identify the cave —located on mountainous limestone slopes and facing the sea— with the archetype of the first Mediterranean rural landscape and habitat.