Sam Jefferson - In the Wake of the Gods: A cruising companion to the world of the Greek myths

The myth of Arion and the dolphin as portrayed by the French artist Franois Boucher. According to myth, Arion was a talented musician who was on his way home to Greece after winning a music competition in Sicily. On his way back, the crew got so sick of his lyre playing that they decided to steal his winnings and throw him overboard. Fortunately for Arion, he was rescued by a friendly dolphin who took him to shore. In true Greek myth style, he left the dolphin to die when he reached the shore.

I N THE BEGINNINGit was all fire and hot stuff. The gods were angry. Not only that, much worse, they were bored and to pass their time they occupied themselves with a mixture of tormenting the human race and carrying out the most depraved acts imaginable. At any rate, that certainly seems to have largely been the Greek take on gods and how they behaved. During their time, they bestrode Greece and the wider Mediterranean behaving appallingly and with a very human level of wantonness and vindictiveness. In the process, their tales overlapped with reality with such regularity that Greece itself can be mapped out by their misadventures. This was the initial premise for this book, albeit in the form of a short article mapping out mythical Ithaca in relation to Odysseus and his many misadventures. However, I soon came to realise that the whole of the Ionian was full of mythical landmarks and that each story was well worth retelling.

This brings us straight to the nub of this book. The aim is to create a guide for sailors that will allow them to cruise the Greek coast while also placing landmarks, ports, bays and headlands within the context of the mythical tales. On one level, sailing around in search of sites linked to non-existent people and events that probably didnt happen might seem crazy, and yet the Greek mythical world is far more tangible than you might think and there is a clear correlation between mythical and real sites. Because, of course, many myths were constructed around the framework of at least somethingthat happened in an actual place. By following in the wake of the gods, it soon becomes clear that you can find out an awful lot about who the Greeks were, how their civilisation worked and, more broadly, how much our world today owes to them.

One thing to stress here is that this is not some scholarly book earnestly analysing the veracity of where and when a myth may/may not have occurred.