A map for the questions you never thought you had: Where was Automedon, charioteer of Achilles, born? And where did Chromius, son of Priam, perish?
Making the 
rounds of the social media today is this map of all the characters of Homer‘s Iliad, including the walk-ons and bit-players. We thought we’d join in the fun.
I’m told that some of the locations are wrong – feel free to weigh in with your corrections. Here’s a big omission: where are the wimmen folk? The map comes to us courtesy of Wikimedia.
I note, with some satisfaction, that Delos, part of the Greek Cyclades, is shown – that is the place of Mount Cynthus, birthplace of Artemis, and our namesake.
Author: Cynthia Haven
Cynthia Haven has written for The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, World Literature Today, and other publications. Her work has also appeared in Le Monde, La Repubblica, The Kenyon Review, Quarterly Conversation, The Georgia Review, Civilization, and others. She has been a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven was published in London, 2005. Her Czestaw Mitosz: Conversations was published in 2006; Joseph Brodsky: Conversations in 2003; An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czestaw Mitosz was published in 2011 with Ohio University Press / Swallow Press. She is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford. Her biography René Girard, A Life will be published next year.
Join me at twitter: @chaven
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The women folk: well, Chryseis, who more or less starts off the action, is from somewhere within a day’s sail of Troy, one gathers. And Cassandra, who gets almost the last word, is from Troy. If the Agamemnon and Menelaus are from Argos and Sparta, then Helen is from Sparta, too. But without pulling the Iliad from the shelves, that’s about the best I can do.
And Briseis. And Polyxena. And Andromache… All I can think of on a busy morning. Thanks for checking in, George.