Review of "Odysseus Returns," a PBS Quest to Find the Tomb of Odysseus

Promotional image for "Odysseus Returns" featuring Makis Metaxas (PBS)

​This week, PBS presented Odysseus Returns, a documentary following the three-decade quest of “amateur historian” Makis Metaxas as he attempts to convince the world that Odysseus was real, that Homer’s island of Ithaca was in fact the neighboring island of Kefalonia in northwest Greece, and that he had seen both the tomb of Odysseus and the Greek hero’s bones. It’s a tall order for a ninety-minute film, and I was disappointed that the somewhat meandering documentary presents only one side of the argument, leaving the audience with the impression that not only is Metaxas right but that the Greek government and archaeologists are conspiring to prevent Odysseus’ tomb from being identified. So much does the film endorse Metaxas’s perspective that PBS affixed a disclaimer to the beginning of the documentary noting that the film’s claims are not the views of the Greek government. Typically, such as disclaimer says something like “not necessarily,” implying some wiggle room, but this one is simply “not.”

Kefalonia (bottom) and Ithaki (top) neighbor each other.

​Metaxas has been on the trail of Odysseus for thirty years, and part of his argument is logical enough and a defensible literary proposition: He argues that the “Ithaca” described in the Odyssey is not the island of Ithaki in today’s Greece but rather the neighboring island of Kefalonia, whose geography better matches the features described by Homer. It is quite possible that in Homer’s time, or before, Kefalonia and Ithaki were part of a single polity whose ruler referred to it as Ithaca. It would be unusual, of course, for a Greek location to have its name transferred, but it is not unprecedented. Robert Bittlestone proposed the same idea in his 2005 book Odysseus Unbound.
 
However, because Homer is big tourist business in Greece, the claim could threaten the island of Ithaki’s business model, so it has been controversial. Metaxas, who was once a government official on Kefalonia, claims that the Greek ministry overseeing archaeology has tried to suppress his claims to maintain the status quo. The Greek government did not participate in the film.
 
To this extent, the documentary offers little more than a local dispute over literary analysis, but Metaxas doesn’t stop with this claim. Sometime in the early 1990s, Metaxas says he stumbled across the entrance to a Mycenaean tholos tomb at Tzanata on Kefalonia, and he believes that it must be the tomb of Odysseus.  The tomb was formally discovered in 1992 by archaeologist Lazaros Kolonas, who excavated the tomb and its 72 bodies. It appears to be the tomb of kings or elites due to its large size and (formerly) rich burials, long since looted, so Metaxas concludes that Odysseus would have been buried there. He goes further and feels that a body with remains of a cloak might be Odysseus himself.
 
The argument rests, at heart, on the claim that a crystal seal found in the tomb is the broach Odysseus wears in Odyssey 19.225–232. There, Odysseus wears a golden pin on his cloak which depicts an unusual scene of a dog killing a fawn. The rock seal from the tholos tomb is made of crystal and depicts a lion killing a deer. We hear in the documentary that the words “lion” and “dog” have the same metrical length in ancient Greek, so Homer may have swapped out the lion for the dog, since lions were no longer common in the Mediterranean by his time. (They had become extinct in Greece after the Bronze Age collapse, by around 1000 BCE, some three centuries before Homer.) No comment is made about the seal being of rock and the pin of gold, nor of one being an identification seal and the other being a cloak brooch. (In the image below, Metaxas has colored an impression of the clear crystal seal yellow to appear more like gold.)

The seal Metaxas claims as Odysseus' brooch.

A similar seal found at Mycenae.

​This is quite a bit of weight to rest on a rock, particularly when the similarities can also be ascribed to coincidence, since hunting scenes, including those with deer and lions, are relatively common on Mycenaean seals. Indeed, a very similar seal with a lion killing a deer was found at Mycenae, showing that the Tzanata tomb seal is not unique. Further, Homer is known to have included some genuine bits of Mycenaean culture and lore in his poems. The famous boar tusk helmet in Iliad 10.260–5 describes a genuine accessory that went out of fashion three hundred years earlier, and he describes the Achaean leader with the old kingly term anax (Mycenaean wanax) that had fallen out of favor centuries before, replaced by basileus. Martin Nilsson carefully documented in The Mycenaean Origin of Greek Mythology (1932) how Greek myths, including Homer’s epics, correspond to cities that were important in the Bronze Age, even if they declined or vanished after, and character names use older word-forms that go back to Mycenaean usage. So, in short, while the rock crystal seal is not really all that similar to the Homeric brooch, it would not exactly be out of character for Homer (or whoever or however many passed under that name) to have remembered in a general way the royal seal of the kings of Ithaca from the Bronze Age, or at least the general type of animal seals used by Mycenaean high officials.
 
After Metaxas spends some time explaining how he has been wronged, persecuted, and ridiculed for threatening the monopoly of Big Greek Myth, he takes us to the site of the Tzanata tholos tomb, which had been open for tourists but is currently off limits due to what is said to be conservation and restoration work. Metaxas notes that almost no work has been done for many years and the site has never been formally published in academic literature (though I found that it has been discussed in academic books since 1999 and Kolonas published at least three articles about it since 1992), but instead of attributing this to the general malaise of the Greek government over the past challenging decade of austerity and crisis, he claims that the Greek government and elite archaeologists are conspiring to lock away the tomb to prevent the public from learning that Odysseus was real and buried on Kefalonia so Ithaki can keep collecting Odyssey-themed tourism money.
 
It’s a bit much, particularly since in 2021 Metaxas praised the government for its conservation efforts and plans to build a protective roof over the site. If they were really trying to suppress the “truth,” why would Ministry of Culture give filmmakers access to the identification seals and let an outside expert make impressions of them and study them? As far back as 1999, Christina Souyoudzoglou-Haywood published an academic book, The Ionian Islands in the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, discussing the tholos tomb, how it transforms our understanding of the Mycenaean political structure of Kefalonia, and acknowledging the possibility that it might reflect a “Homeric” arrangement where Kefalonia controlled Ithaki. But she cautioned that not enough evidence exists to draw such a conclusion. And that hasn’t changed. It’s not a secret; it’s just not proven.
 
Metaxas’s conspiracy theory is rather silly on its surface, since Metaxas’s ideas appear in contemporary tourist guides to Kefalonia, including the Berlitz Guide, and the tholos, far from being suppressed, is actively promoted in the tourist industry as a major attraction in that part of Greece, appearing in literally dozens of tourist guides since 2000.
 
Metaxas’s ideas are not pseudohistory in the mold of Ancient Aliens, but his ideas go much farther than the evidence allows and are rooted in the same belief that ancient myths, if properly interpreted through modern eyes, become an eyewitness guide to ancient history. The filmmakers, working for Morgan Freeman’s production company (Freeman provides narration for passages from The Odyssey), pull back at the end from Metaxas’s extreme ideas and instead hold only to a more modest and defensible conclusion that the Mycenaean-era tholos tomb supports the idea that Kefalonia was the original Homeric Ithaca. But by then the damage has been done, and the audience is left thinking that an eccentric old Greek found the actual body of Odysseus, still wearing the same clothes Homer put him in.