Talk:Odysseus Unbound/Archive 1

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The title of this article is a bit misleading, in two ways. First, the article is not about Paliki as such, it's about Bittlestone's theory that Paliki is Homeric Ithaka. Second, the title makes it sound like the identification of the peninsula as Homer's Ithaca is generally accepted. The text of the article also gives this impression--talking about "the identification," "the discovery," etc. But Bittlestone's book is only one of a long series of attempts to find the "real" Ithaca, and none of these attempts has (yet) been convincing. Bittlestone's may, the book is very new and it doesn't seem like many classicists have looked at it yet (I haven't had time to do more than look at a couple of chapters). Right now, though, the idea that Paliki is Homer's Ithaca has to be classed as an interesting possibility rather than proven fact.

At the least it should be made clear in the opening paragraph that this is Bittlestone's theory and not a consensus view. I'd like to change the title, also, since the article is about a book and not a place. I think it would be a good idea to change the title to Odysseus Unbound. Akhilleus 20:18, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

I'll put in some qualifiers in that initial paragraph... Great problems in changing the title of the article, as you can appreciate: it's done, lots of links etc., changing all that would be a major headache. But agreed that some reference to the longstanding debate about all of this, to which Bittlestone & Diggle & Underhill are a very respectable addition but certainly only the latest -- would be appropriate.
--Kessler 20:44, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
OK that's done. I'll also add some additional material regarding the other theories of the location, so that the article is not just about the one.
--Kessler 21:00, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
Depending on the direction that the edits go, it would not be hard to move the page to something like Homer's Ithaca or Geography of the Odyssey or Odysseus Unbound--the Wikipedia software will automatically redirect traffic to the new page. I myself favor the title Geography of the Odyssey--that can take in debates not just on the location of Ithaka, but of the places O. visits in Books 9-12 as well. Akhilleus 21:12, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Homer's Ithaca might be interesting -- that model would scale up, as people could add Homer's Pylos and Homer's Scylla & Charybdis and so on -- let me think about that. I don't favor Geography of the Odyssey, though -- doesn't scale / would be too big -- this Paliki, Homer's Ithaca article already is getting to the max size, and there's plenty more that might be done just here. Anything at all "geographic" needs maps & images, too, and we need to respect Wikipedia size limitations, and user downloading capacities. Let me get some other things done and I'll think about your Homer's Ithaca suggestion.

--Kessler 22:57, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Homer's Ithaca is a good idea for an article, I agree. I can see that scaling up OK, too, if & as people become interested in doing articles on other Homeric sites as well: there has been a lot of archaeology, and literature, on all of them, and there are Iliad & Odyssey fans everywhere -- and now new methods in geology & philology & climatology and various other disciplines all are re-focusing things and making new discoveries.

A blanket "Geography of Homer" article would be too big, to hold all of this. I don't object to references to the general subject and summaries, in other related articles, but they can't hope to cover adequately the array of new material recently developed at the Homeric sites.

I prefer to keep the Paliki, Homer's Ithaca, though. Paliki is the latest and currently the leading Homeric site-of-interest, because of the recent study done there, and the details of its discovery & ongoing analysis & forthcoming (?) excavation interest me greatly, as they do many others I'm sure. The key term, for all of us who have read the study and now are debating its findings, is "Paliki": by contrast, the more general Homer's Ithaca article will have to go into some detail on Eratosthenes & Dörpfeld & Goekoop and all the other preceding theories, as you suggested and I agree -- the Paliki article is just about Paliki. My hope is that others will add more here, then, about the geology and philology involved -- involved specifically with Paliki -- also on the Paliki debates, if & as those develop.

If we do an adequate job here on this particular Paliki site, the article won't have room for similar detail on all of the other "Homer's Ithaca" theories and sites: which is why your Homer's Ithaca article idea makes sense to me -- scales up -- I'd put summary treatments of the other location theories in there, and link. Then if someone wants to tackle, for instance, Lefkas, Homer's Ithaca separately, and do Dörpfeld there in detail, they can do it. The point of all of these would be archaeology / philology / geology / climatology / etc. : not the humanistic disciplines already presenting Homer in their own senses elsewhere, in other articles, but here specifically the underlying "science" involved in identifying geographic locations.

I'll set up a stub for Homer's Ithaca.

OK, done that: so now the typology would be,

  • Ithaca (existing) -- general / tourist / modern local government article
  • Homer's Ithaca (new stub) -- history of all of the "Homeric Ithaca" geographic location theories (some of them archaeological, some not)

--Kessler 21:01, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

Images removed, and other issues

Images should contribute meaningfully to the subject, not simply ornament the page. While it's true that Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia so there's no paper to crowd, and informative illustrations are desireable, noninformative images are merely distracting. Besides, most people in the US still do not have broadband, and it's not nice to force them to download a bunch of images that don't tell them anything and don't really add to the article.

An example of an appropriate illustration here would be photos of various locations around Paliki where they might be identified with a place mentioned in Homer, Bronze Age archaeological sites, etc.

While I appreciate the information in this article, it's writtin in a hightly POV sytle, and presents this theory, which is not even said to be widely accepted, as if it were incontrovertable fact. TCC (talk) (contribs) 23:21, 1 March 2006 (UTC)


TCC: you said,
> Images should contribute meaningfully to the subject, not simply ornament the page.
Simple ornamentation not intended... The images you eliminated have specific purposes:
1)
Geology
The article needs to get across that it is concerned with science, not with literature or art or history or all the other "Homer" angles already treated elsewhere. The emphasis on "geology" & "philology", & any other disciplines to be added here, are the point. Without illustrations, it will look like just a big bunch of run-on geeky text. In this instance the "geology" image balances the previous "philology" image of Homer's bust.
2)
The Transmission of Texts
The fundamental idea behind the whole process -- "Homer" and why he is interesting, still -- is "transmission of texts": the "transitions in media" subject -- oral=>manuscript & manuscript=>print & print=>digital -- for the last of which Wikipedia is a leader. Emphasizing the centrality of this, to the perennial quest for "Troy" and "Ithaca" and other Homeric sites, is terribly important to the article: it's what ties mere archaeology to the outside world of literature & art etc., and to general public interest.
So, as with "geology" (above), this "Transmission of Texts" section needs a balancing illustration, I believe. The manuscript image selected both symbolizes "Transmission of Texts" and shows it directly: the enthroned figure instructing the scribe -- might be an old Ithacan on Chios in Anatolia, telling the tale of Odysseus to Homer.
3)
Books
OK I'll grant you this one: I was having fun with WikipediaCommons, I'll admit, and simply wanted to illustrate a "Book"... I'd still like to include it, tho: personal allergy to mere booklists, now that we have digital imagery.
4)
Videos... & see generally, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Animation... "Of what use is a book without pictures?"
This one too, perhaps... although I'd still like to include it, as well, simply to make the point that "bibliographies" need to become more than just "books", now. Instead of "Bibliography" I suggest the term "Resource List": students nowadays just groan, when they see booklists. And often the information in fact gets across better via an image or music clip or, as in this case, a video: combining all the new media in with the old media gets students to look at all of it.
And if WikipediaCommons images can't be used in this manner, where / when can & will they be used? That Muybridge gif is one of the famous online "moving" images: do we have to restrict its use to only articles about "horses" or about "Muybridge" or "photography"? To me it symbolizes the very idea of digital imagery -- which is why I'd like to put it next to the one video listed in the Bibliography/Resource List, in the article.
And you said,
> Besides, most people in the US still do not have broadband, and it's not nice to force them to download a bunch of images that don't tell them anything and don't really add to the article.
I edit in Internet cafes & slow-DSL & non-DSL, for this very reason: this page so far works OK, in slower venues, altho I'll keep checking. Images which do add to the article -- I believe the above images do -- still can't bring user systems to a halt, tho, agreed, so when possible I look for non-megapixels, still, as I have here.
> An example of an appropriate illustration here would be photos of various locations around Paliki where they might be identified with a place mentioned in Homer, Bronze Age archaeological sites, etc.
Well, I'll ask around... but I still can't figure out the purpose of WikipediaCommons, if this is the case... What is the point of assembling all of those wonderful images, there, if we're not going to use them in our articles?
> While I appreciate the information in this article, it's writtin in a hightly POV sytle, and presents this theory, which is not even said to be widely accepted, as if it were incontrovertable fact.
My overall understanding is that the latest demonstrated theory is, in fact, per T.Kuhn and general scientific method, the new paradigm: that, until disproven / falsified / something-better-comes-along, if it explains the observed phenomena more satisfactorily than its predecessors do, it's "fact". No, it's not incontrovertible, but the proof assembled by these study authors is presented in their book, and it is up to others now to controvert it: until then... This one will be discussed for a long time, as it should be; but it is absurd to insist on the older hypotheses any longer, now that this one has been demonstrated to be so much more effective. There are folks walking around today, after all, who still consider Evolution to be "just a theory"; also Einstein -- apples fall "down", north is "up", they say, "Newton was right"...
And the Paliki, Homer's Ithaca example offers a particularly-respectable paradigm. This is not a bunch of armchair amateurs: Bittlestone has respectable credentials, Underhill's academic position and reputation are very good, and Diggle is well-known and very highly-regarded. I will go through yet again, looking for anything not NPOV, but think of the "creationism v. evolution" controversies: the point of NPOV is not to try to please everyone by including everything -- some things are right and some things are wrong -- looks to me like Paliki was Homer's Ithaca, as a fact, originally as hypothesized imaginatively by this lead author but then demonstrated scientifically by him and his two distinguished colleagues & finally presented to us the public in their joint study... Dunno that there's any disagreement on this in the academic/scientific community yet; if it pops up I'll add it to the article. But the older theories about Homer's "Ithaca" location are just old, now.
--Kessler 01:55, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
The issue isn't what we can use, it's what we should use in any given context. There are lots of things in the Commons that aren't helpful for anything but a given subset of articles. But it's a commons in the true sense. Materials there are not limited to use in Wikipedia, of any language, or even other MediaWiki projects. Their licensing says so.
According to WP:TPA, the perfect article "...includes informative, relevant images, each with an explanatory caption. May include maps, portraits, photographs, or artwork; sufficient images to add to a reader's interest or understanding of the text, but few enough images that they do not distract from the article." The images I removed were neither informative nor relevant, did not significantly contribute to understanding the text, and did distract from the article. Even you concede they were primarily intended to reinforce your point that this is intended as a scientific discussion rather than literary.
The writing of an encyclopedia article is, I'm afraid, an inherently and irremediably geeky activity. While any article certainly can be improved by illustrations such as are described above, there's no reason to think so little of our readers as to imagine they'll be frightened off if there aren't enough pretty pictures. If you want to write a scientific article rather than a literary one, framing it in scientific terms is sufficient.
The point you're trying to make with the animated gif is one that eminently does not need to be made to anyone using this medium, the World Wide Web in the 21st century. No one expects you to reference only books; it would be unusual if you did. The standard Wikipedia section for references is "References" -- but these should be references actually used in writing the article. If you want to point readers to helpful background material not used in the article, include a "Further reading" section if don't like "Bibliography" as WP:GTL suggests, although "Resources" works there too. A very brief description of each work might follow the links, but mini-reviews or blurbs are difficult to write in an NPOV way. (I should also note that it makes it very hard to avoid the appearance of talking down to the reader.)
At the risk of belaboring the point: Your "transmission of texts" picture cannot possibly be an old Ithacan talking to Homer; it's an illustration from a book of German love poems. Furthermore, Homer was carrying on an old oral tradition, and it would be surprising if he was even literate. The illustration is therefore not only pointless, it's highly misleading.
I didn't see the bust of Homer as pertaining specifically to the "Philology" section; it appeared to be a good illustration to accompany the article in general. That's why I didn't remove it.
You are, I'm afraid, mistaken as to the scientific method. It's not enough to propound a theory no matter how valid it might appear. It needs to be examined by the appropriate scientific community, and then achieve acceptance by widespread consensus, not merely avoid rejection. This is especially true in the "soft sciences" where whether one theory explains observations more satisfactory than another cannot usually be demonstrated with mathematical certainty. Even in the hard sciences it's of critical importance that the results be replicable. If you could find a few other papers that cite Bittlestone positively, that would help. TCC (talk) (contribs) 03:02, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

I'll chime in on a couple of points under discussion here. But the major point is that you're trying to be too comprehensive--it looks like you're trying to make this article into a grand theory of everything Homeric, especially with your references and "see also" sections. That's unnecessary--the way you've broken the pages down, this article should be focused on the location theory and nothing else.

I agree with Csernica that the images aren't necessary. I don't even think the bust of Homer is necessary. A map of Paliki and another map of the Ionian islands is all that's needed.

The references list is too extensive for a page on a theory about the location of Homeric Ithaka. There's already a list of general works about Homer on the Homer page, not to mention stuff on the Odyssey and Iliad pages. If the books you list aren't there already, then by all means add them (although few classicists read Bowra anymore, and research into the "world of Odysseus" has gotten considerably more sophisticated than Finley). However, your annotations don't seem appropriate for an encyclopedia article.

This article also isn't the place for an extended discussion of the composition/transmission of the poems. The place for that is the Homer page and/or the oral tradition article.

I have to strenously disagree with your idea that Bittlestone represents a Kuhnian paradigm shift. His book *just* came out--published in 2005. I'd wager that very few classicists have even seen it, and despite the fact that Bittlestone's theory seems to be largely a geological one, it's classicists who will determine whether Bittlestone's theory becomes the consensus viewpoint. And it's pretty likely that it never will unless evidence of substantial Bronze Age settlement is found on Paliki. Otherwise, most classicists are going to say, "hm, that's interesting, maybe so." Anyway, look at the book again, since Bittlestone doesn't present this as something *proven*, but a weighty hypothesis that needs further investigation on the ground (see Ch. 34 especially). In some ways, the book looks like a fundraising tool, since the program of research he proposes is going to be very expensive in terms of equipment, expertise, and time.

Another reason why it's going to take a long time for this idea to get a consensus behind it--if it ever does--is that the "real" location of Ithaka is not very important for many classicists. For most of us, it doesn't make much difference whether it was Ithaka, Lefkas, Kefallenia, or Kerkyra--the physical geography of the poems just isn't that interesting versus literary and social questions, like how the poems were composed and what kind of society they're portraying. If Paliki does turn out to be Homeric Ithaka, it won't change the way most of us read the Odyssey.

One more point: Bittlestone is an amateur; his degree is in economics. Nothing wrong with that; Ventris was an architect, and Schliemann was certainly no academic. Diggle is certainly well-known, but he is not known as a Homerist, rather as a textual critic. None of this means all that much, except that this argument shouldn't be evaluated on anyone's credentials, just on its merits--and it looks like a lot more hard data is needed before it can be said to be proven. Akhilleus 08:22, 2 March 2006 (UTC)


A couple of replies to two interesting posts: first to Csernica/TCC -- you said, referring to images,

> The issue isn't what we can use, it's what we should use in any given context. There are lots of things in the Commons that aren't helpful for anything but a given subset of articles. But it's a commons in the true sense. Materials there are not limited to use in Wikipedia, of any language, or even other MediaWiki projects. Their licensing says so.

But how often do they in fact get used? It won't do Wikimedia Commons much good to assemble a lot of freely-available material and then tell people who try to use it that they can't. Nothing worse than an un-used database: particularly one with legally-OK to use content, that being so rare.

Context rules, in the selection of illustrations, I understand: but we disagree, perhaps, on whether the context here is appropriate -- I am trying to "evoke" a point made in the text, while you are trying to illustrate specifically and only that. It seems to me the entire purpose of illustration is to evoke. Particularly true for a non-science audience, which Wikipedia's is and will be increasingly: best way to get them interested in tech or other obscure articles is to provide to-them familiar non-tech illustrations, which lead them into the tech text gently, as these illustrations do.

> According to WP:TPA, the perfect article "...includes informative, relevant images, each with an explanatory caption. May include maps, portraits, photographs, or artwork; sufficient images to add to a reader's interest or understanding of the text, but few enough images that they do not distract from the article." The images I removed were neither informative nor relevant, did not significantly contribute to understanding the text, and did distract from the article.

I disagree: the "geology" image is relevant to the "geology" section of the article, the "manuscript" image is relevant to "transmission of texts", even the little Muybridge video image is relevant to the video entry in the resource list -- the point of each is to prod people into thinking about that subject, so that they will read and better understand the text devoted to it -- that's the point of any illustrative image.

You are thinking of scientific text relevance, perhaps, in which the text comes first and the pictures come after: but non-science texts usually go in reverse sequence to that, pictures leading users to text -- that's the point of Alice's, "Of what use is a book without pictures?" Here, science text is being pitched to a non-science audience, & it benefits greatly from such pictures.

> Even you concede they were primarily intended to reinforce your point that this is intended as a scientific discussion rather than literary.

Not a concession, but it is a central point: all the more reason why the article benefits from those pictures -- yes the article presents "science", but to a non-science audience.

> The writing of an encyclopedia article is, I'm afraid, an inherently and irremediably geeky activity.

Partial agreement: the whole point of an encyclopedia such as Wikipedia is to convey geeky and other info to a wider and more general and emphatically non-geek audience. Geeks don't need encyclopedias, no specialists do: they have their specialized journals, and discussions, and lengthy gobbledygook learned preprints written in "math", and so on -- the doctor who pulls out her "Mercks Manual" during a consult gets fired, as she needs to know that stuff by heart.

But encyclopedias -- Diderot's certainly, also Britannica, also just about every other one that I can think of -- assemble and translate geek knowledge primarily for the benefit of non-geeks. That's why Diderot & crew stuck so many pictures in theirs... and they were criticized for that effort, too... by specialists... :-)

> While any article certainly can be improved by illustrations such as are described above, there's no reason to think so little of our readers as to imagine they'll be frightened off if there aren't enough pretty pictures.

Extreme position: you're stretching now to say articles don't really need pictures -- do I have to head off into Wikipedia and picture-count, to prove to you that plenty of its articles contain plenty more? I've used very good Wikipedia articles which have lots: Battle of Waterloo presents 9 images, President of the US has 48 images -- both of them are fine articles, but would be far poorer without their pix -- I put 5 images in this Paliki, Homer's Ithaca article and you've cut that back to 2 and even are suggesting just 1.

> If you want to write a scientific article rather than a literary one, framing it in scientific terms is sufficient.

I don't think it is. Scientists like pictures too: they tend to use them to illustrate points made first in text, as I've said, but they do use graphics in their presentations.

This is not an article for an exclusively-scientific audience, however: yes it is concerned with the "science" behind "Homer" -- as compared to other articles which emphasize the literary or historical or artistic or other humanistic aspects of Homeric studies, or tourist info about places in Greece which happen to be Homeric sites -- but the article will not be read exclusively by scientists. Wikipedia readers come from all over, and non-scientists prevail among them I would bet: non-scientists like their pictures too, and they tend to go from picture to text, the reverse of scientists. Either way, then, the article would benefit from putting those images back in.

> The point you're trying to make with the animated gif is one that eminently does not need to be made to anyone using this medium, the World Wide Web in the 21st century.

How many people do you seriously think are acquainted with this Muybridge gif? Every geek I know has seen it, but non-geeks haven't, and the purpose of Wikipedia is to broaden our little Internet world out to reach the non-geek community too, isn't it, or are we just going to continue to talk among ourselves, here.

Household penetration rates of the Web etc. may be doing ok in the USofA, and they're not doing so shabby in Western Europe -- although even in these two advanced places the "Internet Divide" & "Information haves & have-nots" & "Digital Underclass" are large and growing problems -- but outside the still-small wired world most of the planet doesn't even have the Internet, yet, or even reliable electrical supply, so there's still a lot of folks who haven't seen W3, or a computer, or the Muybridge gif.

Anyway... the gif wonderfully illustrates a point being made in the article... which was my point in including it...

> No one expects you to reference only books; it would be unusual if you did.

OK, then let's not call it a "Bibliography", let's call it a "Resource List" instead.

> The standard Wikipedia section for references is "References" -- but these should be references actually used in writing the article.

We're confusing two animals here, I believe: 

       * References -- which means, as you say, sources used in
       the actual article -- this ought to be "Footnotes" instead,
       to be more clear;

and, 

       * Bibliography -- which means, literally, "books" -- and
       ought to be "Resource List" so that more than just books
       can be listed. "Bibliography" nowadays is an anachronism.

> If you want to point readers to helpful background material not used in the article, include a "Further reading" section if don't like "Bibliography" as WP:GTL suggests, although "Resources" works there too.

I hadn't seen this, thanks -- I will use "Resources" from now on.

> A very brief description of each work might follow the links, but mini-reviews or blurbs are difficult to write in an NPOV way. (I should also note that it makes it very hard to avoid the appearance of talking down to the reader.)

OK: the chain-pulling blurbs in there were first drafts, run off at an Internet cafe the other day where I couldn't figure out how to get a "notepad" up and running -- I'll change their syntax to proper "annotation" style.

I've always felt, and been told, that an annotated bibliography is better than a booklist, and am trying to provide that here -- or get one started to which I hope others will contribute as well -- but there only are so many hours in a workday / Wikiday.

> At the risk of belaboring the point: Your "transmission of texts" picture cannot possibly be an old Ithacan talking to Homer; it's an illustration from a book of German love poems.

Absolutely correct... but then it would be pretty tough to get a good picture of an old Ithacan talking to Homer... and Homer was sight-impaired and so no "scribe"... :-)

Just "evoking", here -- the distinction you and I discuss up above -- the point I myself take from the illustration, which is famous for it, is "transmission of texts", that one person is "transmitting" oral tradition to a scribe who is setting it down as written tradition -- the image could have been set anywhere, in Alexandria with library scribes recording Greek knowledge, in Mainz with Gutenberg printing manuscript knowledge, in Mountain View with digerati encoding printed texts -- same message. Images are meant to be flexible: their non-scientific versions, anyway.

> Furthermore, Homer was carrying on an old oral tradition, and it would be surprising if he was even literate. The illustration is therefore not only pointless, it's highly misleading.

Your particular take on images appears to be very literal -- but other people see other things, like the colors, or the rendering, or the historical context -- and still others see things even more weirdly. Picasso played with this, in cubism: five different people viewing his "Desmoiselles d'Avignon" will see five different things... I am using this image here, in this context, to illustrate "transmission of texts" (generic): which I believe it does, with its enthroned figure dictating oral tradition to its scribe -- there is another famous image though of "oral tradition to oral tradition" transmission, at the top of,[1]

-- which may serve the purpose as well or better. Would you prefer this one? If so I can see about permissions...

> I didn't see the bust of Homer as pertaining specifically to the "Philology" section; it appeared to be a good illustration to accompany the article in general. That's why I didn't remove it.

Please do not remove it. The article in general is about Homer, yes, but it is about a very specific aspect of what Homer did, namely the specific location of one important part of the action described -- in detail -- in Homer's second epic. The philological work involved in identifying Homer's Ithaca is a critical part of the effort, as philology is in any archaeology, and in this article the philology is centered upon Homeric texts. The geology isn't, tho... The geology section needs its image...

I simply can't accept that the only place in Wikipedia an image of "Homer" can be used is in an article entitled "Homer"...

-- or an image of/from "The Codex Manesse Konrad von Wurzburg" only in an article entitled, exactly, "The Codex Manesse Konrad von Wurzburg" -- I've seen this particular image or at least medieval ms. images very like it many times before, in art & medieval history & history of the book & yes transmission of text etc. literature, but never in anything entitled, exactly, "The Codex Manesse Konrad von Wurzburg"...

-- or a video of "Muybridge's horse" only in an article entitled "Muybridge's horse"... or maybe "photography"...

Images are more flexible than this. Your interpretation of this image policy to me seems to take literalism to an extreme. And it certainly would damage or destroy the Wikimedia Commons effort: I can't see how the latter would survive, in fact...

> You are, I'm afraid, mistaken as to the scientific method.

I don't believe so: I could send you a bibliography... :-)

> It's not enough to propound a theory no matter how valid it might appear. It needs to be examined by the appropriate scientific community, and then achieve acceptance by widespread consensus, not merely avoid rejection.

I can't paraphrase Kuhn right here, from memory -- maybe I can -- let's look in Wikipedia -- 

       "When enough significant anomalies have accrued against a
       current paradigm, the scientific discipline is thrown
       into a state of crisis, according to Kuhn. During this
       crisis, new ideas, perhaps ones previously discarded, are
       tried. Eventually a new paradigm is formed, which gains
       its own new followers, and an intellectual 'battle' takes
       place between the followers of the new paradigm and the
       hold-outs of the old paradigm. Again, for early 20th
       century physics, the transition between the Maxwellian
       electromagnetic worldview and the Einsteinian
       Relativistic worldview was not instantaneous nor calm,
       and instead involved a protracted set of 'attacks,' both
       with empirical data as well as rhetorical or
       philosophical arguments, by both sides, with the
       Einsteinian theory winning out in the long-run."

       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift


-- not quoting from Kuhn, here -- I'm not at home, or I'd quote you chapter & verse from my old very dog-eared copy -- but the Wikipedia account seems clear enough.

What you and I are discussing, I believe, is the question of timing, much-discussed, in the large literature about Kuhn's ideas: when has the paradigm "shifted", at the end / "in the long-run" -- and when has the old paradigm dissolved into a state of crisis, at the beginning / when everyone finally agrees that old Ithaca doesn't match the Homeric description.

Actually, in the Homeric studies case the true crisis was caused by Schliemann, some time ago: when he found that there really was a "Troy"... suddenly the idea that there really might be an "Ithaca" probably was born 'way back then, plus the realization that the traditional Ithaki island location might not be it...

In the intervening period, then -- between the crumbling of the old paradigm and the acceptance of the new -- there are hypotheses, and there are "leading" hypotheses. Call Bittlestone & Diggle & Underhill the "leading hypothesis", then: a great deal of action is predicated upon leading hypotheses, within Kuhn's construct of old paradigm dissolution / new paradigm emergence.

That period may last dozens of years, as it did for Einstein's ideas, and Darwin's, and Alfred Wegener's plate tectonics ideas, or less as it did for Newton's, or far more as it did for Galileo's and now for these ideas about the location of Homer's Ithaca since Schliemann opened the can of worms...

Nevertheless, while the scientists debated and refined their debates, endlessly, people in fact acted upon the "leading hypothesis", in each case: the earth was at the center of things, apples did "fall", then apples didn't "fall", and geological plates did collide, and species did evolve, etc.

So, no, "needs to be examined by the appropriate scientific community" and "achieve acceptance by widespread consensus" both beg the question, of interim "leading hypothesis" acceptance and use. If the world were to wait for consensus among all scientists we'd never get anywhere -- and it doesn't wait.

This latest "Homer's Ithaca" hypothesis already has been confirmed by two of the leading authorities in its several fields: the process of confirmation has begun, and we are past the initial launch of that -- enough to make it at least the current "leading hypothesis". The others which preceded it don't work, for one thing -- they never did -- making them just part of the now-dissolved old paradigm, in Kuhn's formulation. So that's the reason for the article and for all the attention being given to this study, now.

> This is especially true in the "soft sciences" where whether one theory explains observations more satisfactory than another cannot usually be demonstrated with mathematical certainty. Even in the hard sciences it's of critical importance that the results be replicable.

Like the old conundrum about the business schools, where folks who like to measure things in "money" go to study...

Yes, academic consensus certainly is the dream in the "soft sciences"; but it's rarely attained, ever, by any "theory". I remember "The Pirenne Thesis", which kicked around inside history faculties for many years... also Toynbee's ideas, which kicked and then some... and literature and classics departments have similar... econ and philosophy too, and so on...

The point to you is, though, that despite the lack of consensus the "soft sciences" do in fact function, and have for centuries. I believe you may be imposing a notion of consensus derived from the "hard" sciences in this case, then: mathematical certainty doesn't work all that well even in physics -- maybe it does, sometimes, in engineering & chemistry -- but in the "soft sciences" it doesn't pertain at all. Still, though, they do work.

In this instance, then, the question is not the attainment of mathematical certainty by the current "leading hypothesis" -- not even the attainment of paradigm status, which can take decades or even sometimes centuries, as we've discussed -- it's enough just to be "leading", perhaps, in the "soft sciences", to function, while the minute details continue to get worked out, endlessly, in-committee. That wouldn't work for chemistry -- wouldn't want it to, there -- nor in geology or maybe in archaeology, at least in most subfields of those -- but philology is fuzzier, perhaps, and history and Classics definitely have their humanistic sides.

So where we are, I think, is at the most recent end of a long historical tradition of guessing about the exact location of Homer's Ithaca -- recounted in the article of that name, here -- but we also have a current "leading hypothesis", in the Bittlestone/Diggle/Underhill theory, which will be the working paradigm, as vs. finalized paradigm perhaps, for the foreseeable future. How's that, for legalese... As such, though, the theory is of great importance: provisionally at least it supplants all previous, and it very much deserves detailed explication in any "encyclopedia".

> If you could find a few other papers that cite Bittlestone positively, that would help.

OK, I'll begin the hunt... Good talking with you.

--Kessler 21:21, 4 March 2006 (UTC)


And a reply to your message, Akhilleus: you said,

> it looks like you're trying to make this article into a grand theory of everything Homeric

No, I'm not. Sorry if it appears so: I'll edit it for this.

> especially with your references and "see also" sections. That's unnecessary -- the way you've broken the pages down, this article should be focused on the location theory and nothing else.

OK, I'll tone down the references & "see also". (Looks like you just did...)

> I agree with Csernica that the images aren't necessary. I don't even think the bust of Homer is necessary. A map of Paliki and another map of the Ionian islands is all that's needed.

Well, I disagree, as I've said to Csernica above, here: to me it seems a waste of good images, and of good effort, to have all that excellent content at Wikimedia Commons and not use it.

> There's already a list of general works about Homer on the Homer page, not to mention stuff on the Odyssey and Iliad pages. If the books you list aren't there already, then by all means add them

OK I'll do comparisons for this.

> (although few classicists read Bowra anymore, and research into the "world of Odysseus" has gotten considerably more sophisticated than Finley).

Both of which may be among great difficulties of said research: students -- and users among the general public too, but particularly and importantly young students -- are not attracted to sophistication, certainly not of the type which populates much "classics" and "history" literature nowadays. Both disciplines are greatly in need of some simplification, at least for introductory purposes: a beginner needs inspiration, not detail.

Bowra inspired several generations. Finley inspired several others. Nowadays there is Nagy, but more are needed. My point in suggesting all three is that I personally believe a beginner would derive great inspiration from reading them: that sets someone up for going further -- better than, for example, a detailed linguistic analysis of some obscure poet might. Here on Wikipedia I doubt more than a small percentage of users are "experts", so articles have to be attractive to beginners, too.

(A little quick research on Bowra's "modern" status, by the way: he shows up in the bibliography of Richard Martin's 1989 The Language of Heroes -- entries there for Heroic Poetry (1952), Homer (1972), and a 1962 essay in Wace & Stubbings (1962). Or does modernity begin in 1990, now? Maybe it does... but, per Acton, too bad for it if so...)

> your annotations don't seem appropriate for an encyclopedia article.

Thought you wouldn't like those... They are rough drafts -- I'll remove & edit them.

> This article also isn't the place for an extended discussion of the composition/transmission of the poems. The place for that is the Homer page and/or the oral tradition article.

Composition is not being addressed. No extended discussion of transmission is intended, either: the point is rather to connect the discovery of an original "Ithaca" with the general issue of transmission of the Homeric texts -- a very important point, for the latter discussions, is that an original "Ithaca" might in fact have existed, particularly one with geographic features closely corresponding to Homer's descriptions, just as in the case of the discovery of "Troy".

> I have to strenously disagree with your idea that Bittlestone represents a Kuhnian paradigm shift.

Please see my discussion of Kuhn with Csernica, above. I'll dust off my understanding of Kuhn, if you'd like to discuss his views in detail, but generally it's a matter of timing -- paradigms sometimes take a very long time to "shift" -- viz. Wegener's "plate tectonics", also the long debate about "Have we Homer's Iliad?" In the meantime, though, "leading hypotheses" do a great deal of the heavy lifting, in disciplines. Let's call the Bittlestone/Diggle/Underhill theory the current "leading hypothesis", then, that's good enough for me. Given this study, anyway, any classics student who nowadays suggests that Ithaki was the location of "Ithaca" is going to get shouted - down - in - seminar, and told to go read Bittlestone/Diggle/Underhill.

> His book *just* came out -- published in 2005. I'd wager that very few classicists have even seen it,

I expect they're all reading it now, though -- all read it over Christmas break, in fact -- they're just waiting for the first real naysayer to stick his head out so the rest of them can pounce. That being how "leading hypotheses" work...

> and despite the fact that Bittlestone's theory seems to be largely a geological one,

No it's not, I myself expect: the geology to me appears clear, or as clear as anything in geology ever does -- plate tectonics is accepted, now, as is resulting geological uplift, and water and wind currents in that region have been much-studied, stratigraphy and sedimentation and erosion all are involved but Underhill is a known expert in these areas. The key to the study though, I believe, is the philology, and that is why Diggle's involvement has been so important: few will want to go up against Diggle, there.

And it's not "Bittlestone's theory" -- it's Bittlestone's & Diggle's & Underhill's.

> it's classicists who will determine whether Bittlestone's theory becomes the consensus viewpoint.

"Classicist" is a very broad term... Nowadays, too, it is a term which has undergone a great deal of very recent change: change prompted by involvement with, and advances in, geology and philology among many other fields. Think of Rhys Carpenter's early grapplings with climatology: a great deal has happened since. Nagy seems on-board already, in his enthusiasm for the idea: 

       "Its reconstruction of prehistoric Ithaca has a
       convincingly Homeric 'look and feel' to it. Reading the
       Odyssey is unlikely ever to be the same again".

Are there others who will disagree with Nagy? Well of course there are. But that is in the nature of Classics.

"Consensus" is not the question, or the only question, in all of this. Few contentious issues ever achieve consensus: "Have we Homer's 'Iliad'?"...

But it's like the old conundrum (Archilocus?): if you go halfway to the door and then halfway again and so on, do you ever reach it -- no, but you get close enough to open it and go through. Academic consensus is mere idealism, and often an unrealistic goal: "leading hypotheses" are the wage-slaves of science, and even moreso in the humanities -- by the time an idea has become "the consensus viewpoint" / the new paradigm, it is time for its revision or replacement.

> And it's pretty likely that it never will unless evidence of substantial Bronze Age settlement is found on Paliki.

Archaeology comes next, that's true. Radiology and climatology and pond pollen analysis and tree rings too... The more the better. In the meantime, though, no grad student had better maintain that Ithaki is "Ithaca", any longer: plenty of texts are under revision as we discuss this, you can bet.

> Otherwise, most classicists are going to say, "hm, that's interesting, maybe so." Anyway, look at the book again, since Bittlestone doesn't present this as something *proven*, but a weighty hypothesis that needs further investigation on the ground (see Ch. 34 especially).

Bittlestone/Diggle/Underhill... Yes, they're careful: had they not been their theory would have been that much more suspect.

Your use of "Bittlestone" is incorrect, incidentally, I don't understand why you are insisting on it, unless it's just an abbreviation -- sounds ad hominem -- the three are co-authors.

> In some ways, the book looks like a fundraising tool, since the program of research he proposes is going to be very expensive in terms of equipment, expertise, and time.

Read Schliemann -- read Arthur Evans or Aurel Stein -- if you want to see fund-raising attempts. No, I don't find the current study to be "fundraising", certainly not as blatantly as those others. The study is honest -- one thing I like about it -- and the writing does engage its readers more than normal turgid academic prose might. But this is the 21st c, not the 19th, and fashion changes. I'd call this discovery-text more an update of the others, than anything so crass as simply "fundraising". This sort of thing does lead to further research, as you yourself keep pointing out: these authors simply are being "up front" about that.

> Another reason why it's going to take a long time for this idea to get a consensus behind it--if it ever does--is that the "real" location of Ithaka is not very important for many classicists. For most of us, it doesn't make much difference whether it was Ithaka, Lefkas, Kefallenia, or Kerkyra--the physical geography of the poems just isn't that interesting versus literary and social questions, like how the poems were composed and what kind of society they're portraying.

That's why a number of classicists don't get read. The saying about "every year we learn more and more about less and less"... If Classics allows itself to become so specialized that it loses it general appeal -- what faster way to do that than to forget the "excitement" involved in its subject, and lose sight of the forest because of the trees -- then enrollments will whither, funding will dry up, departments will get "consolidated" with others. Theology once was "queen of the sciences", remember... And Western Civ. is under fire on all campuses, now... It would seem to me to be incumbent upon all Classicists to make the personal effort to see the importance, frankly: if not, they're the same bunch who thought Schliemann's discovery of "Troy" was not important, either.

> If Paliki does turn out to be Homeric Ithaka, it won't change the way most of us read the Odyssey.

I can't see why not. Gregory Nagy says he can't see why not, either, in the review quoted above. It certainly will change the way everyone else reads the Odyssey, why won't it change current Classicists?

> One more point: Bittlestone is an amateur;

Hm. That's an insult, in most contexts... I imagine you will say said insult would be unintended -- that you meant it "literally", as some sort of distillation of "loving a thing" without really understanding it as well as a true expert might -- Bittlestone to his great credit has not pretended personal expertise, as others in his situation very often have. But, as Harpo Marx pointed out, it's all in the innuendo... certainly it sounds insulting...

> his degree is in economics.

And that's a little snippy... you seem to have some problem, with Bittlestone... Or is it a reflection on others with degrees in economics? You may have a point there, in fact... the dismal science, that...

> Nothing wrong with that; Ventris was an architect, and Schliemann was certainly no academic.

Oh.

Categories are what you make of them. We could begin a list, here, of the undergraduate degrees of a thousand or so accomplished people, and come up with some sort of precise correlation factor; but then some Rumsfeld-style bull-in-china-shop would point out that "correlation is not causation", so where would we be then?

I'd say judge Schliemann and Ventris, and Bittlestone -- and his co-authors -- on their merits, their achievements, and not on their categories. The world has had enough of "Quelles sont vos qualités?"

> Diggle is certainly well-known, but he is not known as a Homerist, rather as a textual critic.

Which may have been an additional advantage he brought to his task, then. The capacity called for was textual criticism, not preconceived knowledge about Homer: the entire achievement of the Paliki exercise was to overturn a large body of preconceived supposed knowledge about Homer, so asking in someone who thought he already knew the answer would have begged the question.

> None of this means all that much, except that this argument shouldn't be evaluated on anyone's credentials, just on its merits--and it looks like a lot more hard data is needed before it can be said to be proven.

Certainly agreed as to the superior value of merits over credentials.

Now let's see whether the standard of "proof" which you appear to require -- academic "consensus" -- will be required in the current case, if it is a goal realizable at all. It is a goal achieved rarely enough about anything: academics love to argue.

--Kessler 21:21, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

Direction of the "Homer's Ithaca" articles

I've just made some edits that attempt to make the article less enthusiastic. I have to say that I really wonder why this page exists at all. It's about one book--not even one theory, just one book. The tone seems a bit closer to advertising than scholarly or journalistic writing. (And if you doubt that Bittlestone wants and needs publicity, just look at the website for the book--he's actively seeking funding for the next phases of his project.) To be clear, I'm not accusing anyone of stealth marketing here--I just don't think the tone is right for a site striving to be a neutral-point-of-view encyclopedia.

What's more, despite the participation of Diggle, I'm not impressed by the book's handling of ancient evidence, or of previous identifications of Ithaca. Luce and Berard are much more solid than the book gives them credit for--and their views are never presented fairly. So, given what I've read so far, I can say I'm not convinced. I know nothing about geology, but that part seems fine--it's the philology I disagree with. In my opinion, this book doesn't have the importance to warrant its own Wikipedia page.

So I'm going to go back to a suggestion I made awhile ago--this page should be only one section of a Homeric Ithaca article, which can cover all the attempts to identify the "real" Ithaca, and the reasons why people felt they had to make the identification, and why this identification is significant at all. Akhilleus 08:15, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

Please see my reply, just posted above, to several of your concerns which you repeat here. And no the Homer's Ithaca article does not address the recent discoveries in Paliki -- which are the subject of the Paliki, Homer's Ithaca article -- and the two should not be conflated.
Homer's Ithaca, as it says, is devoted to the history of theories about the location of "Ithaca" -- it is a guide to the many other ideas, which have been going on since Eratosthenes. Hopefully others -- not me although I may try a few -- will add articles on each of these, eventually, and link them. But in a single article that would not scale up: each such article, one on Dörpfeld and all the rest, would be a lengthy and interesting story on its own, and the sum of all of them would be too long. Homer's Ithaca is an index-page, showing how it all fits.
Paliki, Homer's Ithaca, however, is devoted to just what it says, Paliki: to the new discoveries there, and the process of scientific testing and confirmation, and re-testing and re-confirmation, as that goes forward. There is more than enough in all of the excitement over Paliki for a full article: ditto too, then, for Lefkas, which I hope someone will write, and for Ithaki, and all the other historical suggestions...
If you have personal knowledge and views on Diggle's work and on that by Luce and Bernard, as you say above here that you do, why don't you assemble it into a section and post it on Paliki, Homer's Ithaca? The whole point here is to assess that new study, as its further investigation goes forward, and your contribution might form an important part of the process.
--Kessler 21:44, 4 March 2006 (UTC)
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