"it was surprising to me how geographically widespread the hometowns of the characters were"<p>On the contrary, that was quite unsurprising, because the story describes a fight of two large alliances, and talks about the lords and rulers of these places. It doesn't talk about the local warriors e.g. Agamemnon was leading, but talks about the actual allies, the lords that joined each with their own armies.<p>In that time when Homer says "Lord-A and Lord-B and Lord-C participated" it's the equivalent of modern "Country-A and Country-B and Country-C participated". It's not like the story is describing a band of adventurers, the both sides commonly represent pretty much the whole military might of the surrounding region at the time, and since there's no centralization yet, each local "warband" is lead by their local "kings"/warlords/leaders/nobles, who are named in the story.<p>The colored areas of the map are not just a homeland of random representative characters, but the "countries" that actually fought in the war - you could say that it is "a way of making listeners from many areas feel connected to the story", or you could say that it is simply not omitting any participants; For example skipping Philoctetes from the list would pretty much mean saying that the land of Meliboea didn't participate in the war - it's like omitting New Zealand from the list of WW2 Allies, it would be far more serious than making people connected to the story, it would be considered offensive.
Original source is user Pinpin on Wikimedia: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Homeric_Greece-en.svg" rel="nofollow">https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Homeric_Greece-en.sv...</a>
> I wonder if that level of mobility was accurate for the time<p>Looking at old scripts or books like the one from Herodotus, I would say yes, just that it would take a few days/weeks instead of hours.<p>Also since the traveling meant being able to fight for your life, only the adventurous would do it.
In Iliad 12, the Trojans wish for the Achaeans to die unremembered; in the original Greek, literally "nameless." This map is a good reminder that the level of detail in the Iliad is no accident, it's an integral part of what the story's about.
There really should be a legend on here:<p>1) There are boxes of two different colors here, light green versus yellow. I read the Iliad in high school, so I forget if there are actual differences that the creator was attempting to codify. I shouldn't have to look it up, good information design should make that apparent to the unfamiliar viewer.<p>2) I assume the crosses are meant to signify that the character died at some point? If that's true, perhaps another signifier would be more appropriate, since that seems to the uninitiated to be associated with the death of a Christian person. Since this was written sometime beyond 1,000 B.C.E., I'm going to say that those people weren't Christians.<p>Would love for someone with the time/ability to edit that map to make these updates.
It gets really tricky when they use son-of-this-and-that. I'm working through the much shorter Ilias Latina and it's really hard to keep track of the characters.