Ithaka functions within the depth-psychology corpus primarily through its Homeric instantiation: the island home of Odysseus, defined less by geography than by the psychic weight of longing, return, and recognition. The passages gathered here derive chiefly from Lattimore’s translations of the Odyssey and Iliad, situating Ithaka as the telos of an archetypal nostos — the homeland toward which the wandering self strains across seas populated by enchantresses, monsters, and the dead. What matters psychologically is not the island’s cartographic identity (a question the Lattimore introduction explicitly leaves unresolved, noting that Homer’s description ill fits the actual Thiaki) but its symbolic function as the place of re-integration: here father reunites with son, husband with wife, master with loyal servants. The island is also the site of usurpation — the suitors have colonised it in Odysseus’s absence — so that homecoming demands violent reclamation before recognition and reconciliation are possible. In the Iliad glossary, Ithaka appears merely as a geographical tag (‘home of Odysseus’), but the Odyssey material everywhere charges the name with affective and moral force: Odysseus weeps when departure from Phaiakia is delayed, counts his goods upon landing, and must be told by Athene that he has actually arrived. The recurring uncertainty about whether one has truly reached Ithaka encodes the psychological paradox that the self’s home is simultaneously the most familiar and the most elusive destination.
I never saw you, daughter of Zeus, after that… I wandered, until the gods set me free from unhappiness… And now I entreat you… for I do not think I have really come into sunny Ithaka, but have been driven off course
This passage crystallises the psychological paradox of Ithaka: even upon arrival, Odysseus cannot trust the evidence of his senses, requiring divine confirmation that the longed-for home is real rather than another deception.
, Odyssey of Homer, 2009thesis
they would bring me to sunny Ithaka, and they did not do it… he in great sorrow crept over the beach of his own country beside the resounding sea, with much lamentation
Odysseus’s first moments on Ithakan soil are marked not by joy but by grief and suspicion, dramatising how the achieved homecoming is shadowed by the entire weight of the wanderings.
, Odyssey of Homer, 2009thesis
This simply will not do for Ithaka (Thiaki), though that has the landmarks… the places of the Wanderings are combinations. They are made by the imagination.
Lattimore argues that Ithaka’s geographical ambiguity is itself constitutive: the island exists as much in imaginative space as in the Mediterranean, establishing it as a symbolic rather than merely topographic destination.
, Odyssey of Homer, 2009thesis
The Phaiakians famed for seafaring brought me here, and they carry other people as well… They brought me sleeping in their fast ship over the open sea, and set me down in Ithaka
The mode of Odysseus’s final passage to Ithaka — unconscious, borne by divine intermediaries — figures the return home as something that happens to, rather than being wholly achieved by, the wandering self.
, Odyssey of Homer, 2009supporting
Telemachos returned to Ithaka. The suitors set an ambush, meaning to murder him, but he eluded them and reached Ithaka just after his father arrived.
The narrative synopsis positions Ithaka as the convergence point of all the epic’s dispersed threads — father, son, suitors, and Athene — making the island the site where the fragmented household must reconstitute itself.
, Odyssey of Homer, 2009supporting
Arrival of Telemachos on Ithaka… soon the glorious dawn came on. Ashore, Telemachos’ companions now loosened the sails… and rowed her in with oars to the mooring.
Telemachos’s return to Ithaka is rendered with quiet, almost domestic precision, contrasting the heroic register of Odysseus’s homecoming and emphasising the island as a place of ordinary re-anchoring.
, Odyssey of Homer, 2009supporting
the well-made vessel which had carried Telemachos, together with his companions, from Pylos, now came in to Ithaka. They, when they were inside the many-hollowed harbor, hauled the black-hulled ship onto the dry land
The repeated motif of ships arriving at Ithaka’s harbour reinforces the island’s function as a terminal point that draws all voyaging to its resolution.
, Odyssey of Homer, 2009supporting
Athene visits Telemachos in Ithaka and urges him to go in search of his father… Assembly on Ithaka… at Ithaka the suitors learn of Telemachos’ departure and lay an ambush
The structural outline of the Odyssey shows Ithaka as both origin and destination, the pole from which characters depart and toward which all action returns, giving the island its narrative and symbolic centrality.
, Odyssey of Homer, 2009supporting
I’thaka: Island off the west coast of Greece, i.18, etc., home of Odysseus; its position described, ix.21-26.
The glossary entry for Ithaka, though minimal, anchors the term’s primary Homeric reference and cross-references the key passage in which Odysseus himself describes the island’s position.
, Odyssey of Homer, 2009aside
Ith’aka: Island off west-central Greece, the home of Odysseus, 2.632, etc.
The Iliad index entry confirms Ithaka’s presence in the earlier epic purely as a geographical identifier for Odysseus, without the symbolic elaboration it receives in the Odyssey.
, The Iliad of Homer, 2011aside
by Zeus, Agelaos, I swear, and by the sufferings of my father, who has died or is driven far from Ithaka, I do not delay my mother’s marriage
Telemachos’s oath invokes Ithaka as the measure of his father’s absence, making the island a figure for dispossession and the household’s precarious continuity.
, Odyssey of Homer, 2009aside