Geographies of Myth and Places of Identity: The Strait of Scylla and Charybdis in the Modern Imagination (IMAGINES - Classical Receptions in the Visual and Performing Arts)

Turning to a region of South Italy associated with Greater Greece and the geographies of Homer's Odyssey, Marco Benoît Carbone delivers a historical and ethnographic treatment of how places defined in public imagination and media by their associated histories become sites of memory and identity, as their landscape and mythologies turn into insignia of a romanticised antiquity. For the ancient Greeks, Homer had set the marine monsters of the Odyssey in the Strait between Calabria and Sicily. Since then, this passage has been glowing with the aura of its mythological landmarks. Travellers and tourists have played Odysseus by re-enacting his journey. Scholars and explorers have explained the myths as metaphors of whirlpools and marine fauna. The iconic Strait and village of Scilla have turned into place-myths and playgrounds, defined by the region's heritage. Carbone observes the enduring impact of Hellas on the real Strait today. The continuous rekindling of cultural and visual traditions of place in the arts, media, travel, and tourism have intersected with philhellenic historiographies, shaping local policies, public histories, views of development, and forms of Hellenicist identitarianism. Elements of society have celebrated the landscape of the Odyssey, appropriated Homer as their imagined heirs, and purported themselves as the original Europeans–pandering to outdated ideological appropriations of 'classical' antiquity and exclusionary, West-centric views of the Mediterranean.

Marco Benoît Carbone is Senior Lecturer in Intercultural Studies at Brunel University, UK. He has received his PhD and worked as a Teaching Assistant at University College London, UK. He specialises in ethnographic methods of social research.

Filippo Carlà-Uhink is Professor of Ancient History at Potsdam University, Germany. His main research areas are the social and economical history of Late Antiquity, the history of the Roman Republic, the cultural history of ancient Rome, with a particular attention for space concepts and the construction of space, and the reception of antiquity in modern media. He is co-editor of Bloomsbury Academic's series IMAGINES - Classical Receptions in the Visual and Performing Arts, and editor of Caesar, Attila & Co. Comics und die Antike (2014) and, with Irene Berti, Ancient Magic and the Supernatural in the Modern Visual and Performing Arts (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

Martin Lindner is Lecturer in Ancient History and Curator of the Tom Stern Collection film archive at the University of Göttingen, Germany.