Name: Gladstone's Studies on Homer
Author: Gladstone

Gladstone was Prime Minister of the UK for 12 years.

The third volume contains a folding ‘Map of the World According to Homer,’ presenting the poet’s cosmos as Gladstone interpreted it. At its centre lies the familiar Aegean, while further afield the chart incorporates shadowy or fantastical zones: the Lotus-Eaters, the wanderings toward Scheria, and the descent to the Underworld. Real places – Italy, the Caspian, the Persian Gulf – are present but displaced, fragmented, or only partially delineated. By juxtaposing the recognisable with the mythical, the map gives form to Gladstone’s view of Homer’s world as a hybrid geography, grounded in empirical knowledge yet capacious enough to accommodate the poetic imagination.
Imaginative narratives based on sea voyages and episodic encounters with discrete isolated worlds are found throughout this collection, and arguably are all ultimately modelled on Homer’s eight-century BC epic Odyssey. Gladstone’s efforts at charting the hero’s meandering journey using modern cartographic methods resonate not only with novels like Treasure Island (1883) but also the episodic voyages of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1871), Star Trek (1966–), The Ballad of the Salty Sea (1967–1969), and One Piece (1999–).

Ex Carta

Gladstone’s Studies on Homer includes a folding map reconstructing the ancient Mediterranean world of the Iliad and Odyssey. The chart visualises Homeric geography as both real and imagined, linking classical scholarship with the empirical rigour of Victorian cartography.

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898), four times Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was not only a statesman but also a classical scholar and prolific writer. His published works range from The State in its Relations with the Church (1841) to theological and literary studies such as The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture (1890). Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (1858) remains the most significant of his classical contributions, combining the rhetorical force of his political oratory with earnest scholarly inquiry. In it, Gladstone examines Homeric literature through philological, historical, and geographical lenses.

Gladstone approached Homer’s epics as composite works, shaped by fragments of genuine geography, mythical invention, and poetic necessity. He ‘believed that Homer wrote an accurate and in a sense historical description’ of his world as well as a poetic one. However, he was also keenly aware that the poet’s conception of the earth was a very different one than that of Gladstone’s day, and based his conjectures on the question: ‘what map of the earth did Homer shape in his own mind, that he might adjust to it the voyages and tours of his heroes’? He also cautioned against any attempt at a literal reconstruction of Odysseus’s voyages from the surface of the globe: ‘Do not let us engage in the vain attempt to construct the geography of the Odyssey upon the basis of the actual distribution of the earth’s surface.’

Yet he also sought to identify where Homer’s references corresponded with known places, noting that while the Aegean is depicted with relative accuracy, regions such as Italy’s southern coast, the Caspian Sea, and the Persian Gulf are distorted, transposed, or described at second hand. Gladstone argued that Homer’s geography thus reflected both direct knowledge and distant hearsay, woven together in poetic form.

The third volume contains a folding ‘Map of the World According to Homer,’ presenting the poet’s cosmos as Gladstone interpreted it. At its centre lies the familiar Aegean, while further afield the chart incorporates shadowy or fantastical zones: the Lotus-Eaters, the wanderings toward Scheria, and the descent to the Underworld. Real places – Italy, the Caspian, the Persian Gulf – are present but displaced, fragmented, or only partially delineated. By juxtaposing the recognisable with the mythical, the map gives form to Gladstone’s view of Homer’s world as a hybrid geography, grounded in empirical knowledge yet capacious enough to accommodate the poetic imagination