The article reviews the arguments for seeing ‘Temese’ (Od. 1.184) and ‘Alybas’ (24.304) as Italian
place names, and considers the significance of the Odyssey’s being bookended by putative references
to fictitious voyages to and from Italy by ‘Mentes’ and ‘Eperitos’ respectively. Sicilians, moreover, cut
intriguingly different figures in the poem. On the one hand, the Suitors think of Sicilians as ruthless
slave-dealers (20.383). On the other, Laertes relies on a devoted Sicilian woman (24.211-12), and
Odysseus pretends to a fervent guest-friendship with a man from Sicania (24.303-14). The positive
attitude of Odysseus and Laertes (and, by implication, of the poem’s narrator and narratee) towards
Sicilians contrasts very suggestively with the negative attitude of the Suitors. It is, finally, suggested
that Odysseus’ encounters with monsters and man-eaters (the Cyclopes, the Laestrygonians, Skylla and
Charbdis, Kirke) may already have been situated in Sicily and Italy prior to the Odyssey, and that the
poet of the Odyssey purposely refrained from situating his monsters there. Thus the Odyssey-poet
himself may have pointedly adopted a positive attitude to the heroic-age inhabitants of Sicily that
contrasted with the negative attitude prevailing in his tradition. This putative decision not to demonize
the inhabitants of Sicily may be the natural concomitant of a desire to show the home-grown Suitors of
Ithaca as the real “monsters” of the Odyssey.
