Richard E. Grant’s Very Modern Odyssey

Synopsis

Richard E. Grant retraces the twenty-year voyage of Odysseus across the Mediterranean, travelling from Malta to Sicily, Tunisia, Italy, Corfu and Ithaca in search of the real places behind Homer’s Odyssey. His journey opens on Malta and Gozo, the island many believe to be Calypso’s Ogygia, where the nymph is said to have kept Odysseus captive for seven years. Made to coincide with Christopher Nolan’s film of The Odyssey*, the four-part Channel 4 series sets the myth against the landscapes that may have inspired it, and the people who live among them today.

The opening episode begins on Malta, with Grant sailing into the Grand Harbour and taking in Valletta, before crossing to Gozo, which has been believed to be Ogygia. Here he visits Ramla Bay, with its distinctive red sands before heading up to Mixta cave to Professor Timmy Gambin, Associate Professor of Maritime Archaeology at the University of Malta and the head of Heritage Malta’s Underwater Cultural Heritage Unit.

Gambin reveals that Mixta cave is one of several that could be Calypso’s Cave and that Gozo has been suggested as the real location of Ogygia since the third century BCE. He fails to mention that there is another cave at the opposite end of the bay which is called Calypso’s Cave, and has unfortunately been closed to visitors for several years due to geological instability. There is however a viewing platform above the cave system and it is one of the stop-off points on the hop-on, hop-off bus routes.

*Which was not filmed on Gozo, despite what you might read on other sites.

Why Gozo lays claim to Calypso

Homer never names Gozo. In the Odyssey, Calypso’s island of Ogygia is kept deliberately vague, described as far off, at the very navel of the sea. That vagueness is exactly why more than one Mediterranean island has claimed to be it, and why the argument has never fully settled.

Gozo’s case is a good one, though, and older than you might expect. Writing around 240 BC, the Greek scholar Callimachus called it “Gaudos, the isle of Calypso”, Gaudos being the ancient name for Gozo. By the 19th century, most scholars who took Homer literally had narrowed Ogygia down to Malta or Gozo. So the link between the island and the myth is old, and it has a named source behind it.

The cave is a different matter. Everything ancient was an argument about the island, not about one particular hollow in the cliff above Ramla Bay. Naming that spot Calypso’s Cave is a much more recent habit, helped along by a setting that fits Homer’s description and by its being an easy place to send visitors. It suits the story. That isn’t quite the same as proving it.

Plenty of people never bought any of it, either. The Croatian island of Mljet has its own Calypso cave and its own claim. As far back as the 3rd century BC, the geographer Eratosthenes argued that Odysseus’s whole route was fiction and shouldn’t be pinned to a map at all, which is roughly where most scholars still sit today.

Top Tip: none of this makes the view any less worth the climb. If the precise cave was never really the point, then standing above Ramla and looking out at the same stretch of coast, myth and all, does the job perfectly well. Which is presumably why Richard E. Grant could film his Calypso moment at Mixta Cave next door and lose nothing.

Production Info