The Phaeacians

A people who moved away

The Phaeacians are a seafaring people in the Odyssey, Homer’s epic poem about the long journey home of the hero Odysseus. They once lived at Hypereia, close to the Cyclopes. Homer says these stronger neighbours kept raiding them. So their leader, Nausithous, moved his people to Scheria, far from any other community.

There he built a wall around a new city. He put up houses and temples and shared out the fields. By the time Odysseus arrives, Nausithous is dead and his son Alcinous rules.

Distance is part of who the Phaeacians are. They live on an island at the edge of the world Odysseus travels through. They have already left violent neighbours behind and built a city where houses, worship and farmland all mark a new settlement.

Being remote does not make them timid sailors. Scheria is far from everyone by land, yet close to every coast by sea. This is their place in the Odyssey: a people out of ordinary reach, whose ships can carry a stranger back to any home he names.

The city of two harbours

Odysseus reaches Scheria after a shipwreck. Nausicaa, the daughter of Queen Arete, gives him the poem’s clearest picture of the city. A high wall surrounds it. A harbour lies on each side of a narrow entrance. Ships are drawn up beside the road, with gear stored for each one. The meeting place is built around a temple of the god Poseidon and lined with stones sunk deep into the ground.

There the citizens work on the tools of sailing: ropes, oars and sails. Nausicaa describes this as everyday work. She then sends Odysseus towards the palace and tells him to appeal first to her mother. The public space of the city belongs to ships and to Poseidon. Inside the royal house, the person who decides is the queen, whom the people honour.

The goddess Athena hides Odysseus as he enters the city. He is welcomed as a guest and listens while the singer Demodocus sings of the war at Troy.

The Phaeacians do more than give Odysseus a ride home. In their hall he first tells the whole story of his wanderings, in the form the poem keeps.

Ships that know the way

Alcinous asks Odysseus to name his city and country, so that the ships can take him there. These ships need no pilot and no steering oar. They know what people are thinking, and they know every city and every farming land. They can cross mist and cloud with no fear of being wrecked.

That gift lets the Phaeacians finish a voyage that no ordinary crew has managed. Odysseus sleeps during the crossing from Scheria. The ship races into the harbour of Phorcys on Ithaca, his home island. The sailors lift him onto the sand with his bedding, set his gifts beside him and leave before he wakes.

The escort is exact, and they ask nothing for it. The Phaeacians do not wait for thanks. They know where he is going better than the sleeping king does. He wakes and cannot recognise his own island, because Athena has covered it in mist.

The ship turned to stone

Poseidon has long resented the Phaeacians for giving safe passage to strangers. As the ship returns from Ithaca, he asks Zeus for permission to punish it. Poseidon turns the ship to stone while the people watch from the shore, and he fixes it in place with the flat of his hand.

Alcinous recognises an old prophecy in the sight. His father had warned that Poseidon would strike one of their ships on its way back and throw a great mountain around the city. The king orders sacrifices and prayers. The poem does not say whether the mountain ever falls. It leaves the Phaeacians watching their ship, frozen in stone at the edge of Scheria.

Scheria and Corfu

Homer never says that Scheria is Corcyra, the island now called Corfu. The historian Thucydides gives a different kind of evidence, centuries later. In explaining the tensions between Corinth and Corcyra, he says the islanders were proud of a fame at sea that went back to the Phaeacians who had lived there before them. This records an ancient claim made by the people of Corcyra. It is not a map drawn by the Odyssey itself.

That claim is why the Phaeacians are linked here with Corfu. Both facts stand. Scheria is the name Homer gives their island, with its two harbours, the temple of Poseidon and its impossible ships. Corcyra is the real island whose people claimed the Phaeacians as their forerunners and made their mastery of the sea part of local pride.