The Myth in Plutarch's 'The Face in the Moon'

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F E L I C E V I N C I

Felice Vinci (born 1946) is a Roman nuclear engineer, who studied classical Greek and Latin already in elementary school. He was given a book about Homer’s stories by his teacher early on in life and he became fascinated by the stories. He read them like modern children read Donald Duck or comics about super heroes.

His passion for Homer never left him, but when due to his work he found himself having more time to study them, he started again to study the Iliad, but now in classical Greek.

The spark for studying further the geography of Homer’s tales was given by Plutarch (50-125 A.D.), who writes that Ogygia, the island where Odysseus was kept prisoner by Calypso was not in the Mediterranean but rather a few days sailing from Britain in the northern parts of the Atlantic Ocean.

Many since Plutarch had noted the difficulties with Homer’s geography, so also Vinci. But this time he really began studying the maps. Where then was Ogygia according to Plutarch?

Vinci embarked on an interesting journey tracing the path of Odysseus. For Vinci the journey ends with the birth of a new theory about Odysseus, Troy and Homer’s epics. He concludes that it all took place in the Baltic region between the Faroe islands and the Gulf of Finland.