| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Ancient and Medieval

Carol Dougherty. The Raft of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer's Odyssey. New York: Oxford University Press. 2001. Pp. viii, 243. $49.95.

This book contains ten chapters in three parts. "Setting Sail" establishes the dominant metaphor of the book: legendary Odysseus's raft/boat/ship = poetry. "Phaeacia" extracts the Odyssey's reflections of archaic Greek overseas experiences and colonialist perceptions. Briefly, "Home at Last" offers meditations on the hero's bloody return to Ithaca and reestablishment. Carol Dougherty's previous Poetics of Colonization: From City to Text in Archaic Greece (1993) discusses many of the same texts and issues. 1

The volume lightly trenches on archaeology, human geography, ethnology, primitive economics, and cultural criticisms. Text illustrations are generally not discussed. Dougherty speaks of profit and theft as "the polarized terms" (p. 42) in this premonetary, giftexchange economy. But what constitutes Homeric commerce? The date of any object, transaction, or event mentioned in the poem can vary by several centuries, and any mini-episode may contain anachronistic references incompatible with each other. The poems themselves do not, historians realize (despite p. 201, n.8), provide a consistent picture (e.g. bride-price or dowry for Penelope?). Moses Finley notoriously cut the knot in the notable World of Odysseus (rev. ed. 1978), by splitting the difference, dating "Homer's" picture not to the prehistoric Mycenean past or the bard's seventh (?) century present but to the tenth and ninth centuries B.C.E. . . .

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