It is not obvious that Homer is cracking one of the first jokes in European literature when the king of the faraway Phaeacians assures Odysseus that their sailors can take him home, wherever that may be - "even if it is far beyond Euboea, the most distant place there is, according to our people who have seen it". Euboea is hardly a name to conjure with these days: few could say where it is (let alone spell it). But if Homer was originally performing on the island of Chios, which is more than likely, then Euboea (modern Evia), the mountainous island that stretches down close to the eastern flank of mainland Greece, was a short, if hazardous, dash across the Aegean. In fact, as Robin Lane Fox points out, with a characteristically vivid glimpse of topographical reality, Euboea is visible from Chios on a good day.
In this seemingly effortless yet stupendously erudite book, Lane Fox attempts to put the Euboeans at the very centre of the map of early iron-age Greek history, the ninth and eight centuries BC. Traders or pirates (not always a clear distinction) from Chalcis and Eretria, the two main Euboean cities, are his "heroes". On their intrepid voyages they took with them an imperishable crockery that has been found in an extraordinarily wide scatter of places around the Mediterranean. The pendant semi-circle skyphos (cup) is their distinctive local pottery.
Documenting these finds, Lane Fox homes in on two areas in particular: one is what he calls the "Cyprus, Cilicia, north Syria triangle"; the other is bordered by Sicily, Sardinia and the Bay of Naples. He has even found a superbly apt passage of Gertrude Bell in 1906 likening the beautiful bay and mountain just north of the Turkish-Syrian border to the Bay of Naples and Vesuvius.
The ancient Greeks, like their counterparts today, spread a vibrant diaspora. The first great wave, in the late seventh and sixth centuries BC, set out from many base-cities, and established settlements from Trebizond to Marseille and Cyrene to Syracuse. But, according to Lane Fox, they were following in the slipstream of Euboeans who had opened up the way in the previous decades. And this was a cultural diffusion as well as geographical; they were the first to apply and adapt the Greek mindset to these distant, often multicultural, locations. One of them, he even claims, should be given sole credit for appropriating and transforming the Phoenician into the Greek alphabet (the not-too-distant forerunner of the letters you are reading at this moment).
For all their seductive ingenuity, the criss-crossing, zig-zagging voyages of Travelling Heroes add up, in the end, to an intricate web of specialist speculation. The range of landscapes, languages and archaeologies that are woven in are voraciously varied, the polyglot 50-page bibliography is astounding; yet the whole is held together by a sticky tangle of "may"s, "might"s and "surely"s, stiffened by a passionate desire for them to be true.
Lane Fox recognises his main problem, which is that The Iliad and The Odyssey, those two huge, formative poems, come from a time and place close to the world and stories he is reconstructing, and yet contain next to no trace of the shimmering visions that he has conjured up. Although allies of Troy in The Iliad come from what is now southern Turkey, and although Odysseus's Ithaca faces towards Italy and the west, there is scarcely any overlap with his Euboean world-picture. If Euboea was the cultural hub of Greece in Homer's era, why this mismatch?
There is a similar, yet different, problem with the other major early poet to survive, the rustic Hesiod. He can be dated to around 700BC, and was quite likely (in my view) a contemporary of Homer: he even has a rival bid for the honour of earliest geographical joke. In his folksy moralising poem known as Works and Days, he says that he will expound "the measures of the multi-splashing sea". He admits that his experience is slight; in fact, the only boat-journey he has ever made was from Aulis - the bay opposite Euboea (gathering place for the Greek fleet against Troy) - across to Chalcis, for a poetry competition. These straits have awkward currents, but the distance he is talking about adds up to metres rather than kilometres - some "measures"!
Yet although Hesiod had definitely been to Chalcis, and although the mountains of Euboea are in easy view of his home village of Ascra, Lane Fox has to face the fact that Hesiod's stories do not chime well with the Euboean narratives that he has reconstructed.
The length and scholarship of Travelling Heroes are ultimately sustained by the brilliant writing and passionate commitment of the author. Robin Lane Fox turns out to be himself, in effect, the central travelling hero of his book. He claims in the preface to have visited "almost all the places" that he talks about. His assured knowledge of maritime winds and currents, the flow of rivers, mountain glens and passes, and local flora and fauna continually ratify this boast. And running throughout are two areas of expertise that are evident without any external evidence: horticulture and horsemanship. This is someone who lives his history.
Oliver Taplin's books include Homeric Soundings: The Shaping of The Iliad (Clarendon). To order Travelling Heroes for £23 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop
