Image: Homer Dictating to a Clerk, 1663 (oil on canvas)

Illustration: Portrait of Strabo from 1585

Illustration: Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang on his return home from India

Illustration: Painting of Ibn Battuta visiting Mongols

Illustration: Painting of Thomas Jefferson

Freya Stark riding a donkey in Jebel Druze

Kira Salak crossing the Libyan Sahara with camels

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The Classical Traveler: Homer (Eighth Century B.C.)“Homer was like Shakespeare, [and the Iliad and Odyssey] were regarded like the Bible. Going to Troy was like a pilgrimage to Jerusalem,” says travel historian Tony Perrottet, author of Route 66 A.D. and an expert on the amblings of the ancients. Greek poet Homer lived an epic life, and the Trojan War stories he put to verse created a vivid classical road map that’s been assiduously followed by travelers fo...

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn

TRAVEL

Photos: Famous Great Travelers

Tourism has been around since antiquity—the earliest guidebook, The Description of Greece, was written by Greek geographer Pausanias around A.D. 160—but travel is timeless. A handful of history’s boldest travelers staged epic journeys that crossed new lands, broke cultural barriers, and revealed the radical diversity of the world around us. In doing so, these trailblazers confirmed that wanderlust is part of the human condition. “Curiosity is the one thing invincible in nature,” wrote explorer Freya Stark—one of ten travelers whose intrepid itineraries left the world a better place. —By George W. Stone

May 1, 2012