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an unnamed German-speaking scholar of ancient Greek archaeology and architecture, presenting at a congress on the reception of past architecture; three audience members ask questions

Ithaca: The Architecture of the Palace in Homer's Odyssey

Andrea Cirla · Jul 19, 2026 · partial coverage

• Homer
• *Odyssey*
• Ithaca
• Pylos
• Mycenaean palace
• architecture
• Peisistratos
• polis
• tholos
• vase painting

Coverage note: full (about twenty-five minutes; automatic English YouTube captions, apparently translated from German, with some garbled passages and slide-related interruptions)

Core ideas

A palace that no longer existed. The speaker sets aside whether Homer was one poet or two and when the poems were composed: what matters is that the Odyssey describes Mycenaean palaces (c. 1500-1250 BC), built of air-dried mud brick, which were burned and weathered into piles of clay centuries before Homer, so nothing like ruins could inform him. Homer, from the northeastern Aegean, is describing the far western end of the Greek-speaking world (Ithaca, Pylos, Sparta). What he knows came through legend, and the palace "emerges through the action": the spaces are the "shells" for the action, from Athena entering as Mentes through the forecourt (prothyron), court, vestibule (prodomos) and hall, to Penelope descending from the upper floor and standing by the single roof-supporting pillar, in four recurrent verses. The Pylos palace plan shows these details: the court, the prodomos where guests sleep (Telemachus, the unrecognized Odysseus), a bathtub in a small room, a staircase and a round hearth.

Interpolations from the sixth century. The speaker spots later additions that Mycenaean architecture cannot explain. The killing of twelve maids is done at a tholos, a round building with external columns from which they are hanged, a type that exists only from the Archaic period (Delphi, Thorikos); the fountain house built by Ithakos and Neritos, with water falling from a rock into a round basin among poplars and an altar to the nymphs, matches fountain houses known from Athenian vase painting at the end of the sixth century. He concludes that the text was edited in sixth-century Athens under Peisistratos, linked to a festival calendar that could not exist without Homer; a similar Near Eastern influence appears in the palace of the Phaeacians (garden, statues, door frames, the powerful Queen Arete, perhaps echoing Semiramis in Assyria).

One column, a whole scene; the polis. The poet evokes a whole environment by a single column (the singer stands by it, Telemachus leans his spear on it), a technique he sees reflected in Greek vase painting around 500 BC (the Pythia in Delphi, an altar at a temple's east front, women at a palaestra). In the discussion, he explains that his starting point was the question of how the polis emerged as a form of self-identification: in the Iliad the kings count and the others surround them; in the Odyssey several actors appear, and in the eighth century a sense of community forms (also in choral dance) from which the polis arises. Asked about method, he says the argument is "multi-layered" and not methodologically tidy; questioners point out that heroic fiction naturally enlarges palaces and that the Cyclopean walls of Mycenae and Tiryns were remembered as the work of the Cyclopes, with temples built over Mycenaean sites.

Excerpts