geography
geographyThe Homeric poems (see Homer) display a quite complex sense of place, and of the ordering of the world, in which there is already a notable sense of theory. The Iliad's Catalogue of Ships systematically evoked the Greek homeland, and its names remained recognizable for the most part (though in some cases perhaps by learned re-creation); the wider world was much less precisely docketed (making later authorities such as Eratosthenes believe—the theory of exōkeanismos—that Homer had deliberately relegated Odysseus' wanderings to a vague outer darkness), and there was therefore much less onomastic continuity. The listing of such places begins more recognizably in Hesiod, and some quite elaborate conception of the layout of the Mediterranean was clearly associated with the complex movements of people and...
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