The author is both a field archaeologist and art historian and has been researching the texts of the Odyssey and the Iliad for the last 40 years, focusing on factual information, such as geography. The palace of Odysseus is the most thoroughly described building in Greek literature and the object of intensive but unsuccessful archaeological research since 1805. The last major effort to find the palace involved the entire British School at Athens from 1929-1938 and that also ended in disappointment. The failure of archaeologists to discover the palace convinced everyone that the Homeric epics were mostly fictional and that mythology itself could not be trusted to contain historical information. But the palace not only occupies almost half of the Odyssey but also includes genuine architectural terms and unique details about specific rooms, furnishings and objects known from other palaces. Renewed excavations at Ithaca, Greece, began in 1984 in a final effort to solve the mystery. Though facing many difficulties, the team was able to discover and confirm a number of places and features described in Homer's Odyssey, including a small but significant part from the Throne Room of the Palace and two courtyard areas specifically mentioned; traces of 'The Shady Grove of Apollo'; the 'Tholos'; the Cave of the Nymphs and the surprising discovery of a hitherto unknown second part of the cave system directly below it, originally separated by a 10 ft thick floor, accessible only through a long tunnel. There was a great deal of evidence that in this second cave the companion of the Nymphs, the god Pan, had been worshipped. It seems clear that the ancients deposited their votive offerings to the god Pan and the Nymphs in this cave and decided to keep its existence a secret. The temple of Apollo, built a century after Homer and belonging to the major sanctuary of the city was confirmed close by, where British archaeologists had previously discovered important evidence dating after the end of the Bronze Age.

This book focuses on historical evidence emerging from the fieldwork and related information retrieved from the Homeric epics themselves. It discusses the history of the city of Odysseus that served as a background to the Odyssey during the Bronze Age but also in the following periods when the descendants reverently preserved its memory. Every locale in the complicated geography of the epic, both local and abroad, is examined and the palace is discussed in detail, accompanied by a reconstruction including its vicinity. Emphasis is given to the chronology of events as preserved by Homer. For the first time, the specific mention of a sun eclipse is taken seriously and placed exactly on 30 October, 1206 BCE, with the help of NASA. The results of this work offer new insights into the history of the Aegean Late Bronze Age (1600-1200 BCE) and the place of the Homeric epics within the framework of archaeological discovery.