The Wealth of Ithaca
“Lord Apollo, Sun God, you are looking dazzlingly handsome again today!”
Having kicked off another morning with a round of shameless flattery toward Apollo, I set about my usual chores tending the livestock. Naturally, as a boy who had not even seen his tenth winter, I couldn’t be entrusted with the sole care of Ithaca’s herds—one of the realm’s most precious assets.
“Polites! Get over here and help milk the cows.”
“Right away, Philoetius!”
And so, I spent most of my days working as an assistant under Philoetius, the royal cowherd of Ithaca. If you picture modern Ithaca from geography textbooks, you might imagine a tiny, barren speck of rock jutting out of the Ionian Sea, but the land back then was surprisingly expansive.
In fact, almost all the coastal territories of ancient Greece were far larger than their modern counterparts. Millennia of rising sea levels had yet to swallow the lowlands, making the island feel vast and rugged beneath our sandals. Perhaps because of that, the herd Philoetius managed was considerably larger than one might expect. Of course, when measured against the sprawling pastoral plains of mainland poleis, our numbers were still modest at best.
After sweating through the morning alongside Philoetius, I sat down to share a midday meal of bread and goat cheese with him, casually floating a question.
“Philoetius.”
“What is it now?”
“Does our Ithacan soil have any iron in it?”
Philoetius paused mid-chew and gave me a long, deeply pathetic look.
“Are you about to spout more nonsense?”
“Come on, say it like that and people will think I talk crazy all the time.”
“You spend every waking hour howling prayers at the heavens and keeping prince Odysseus on a tight leash. If that isn’t strange, boy, nothing in this world is.”
“Wait, is that really what you think of me?”
“It isn’t just me. Even the King thinks you’re an odd one.”
I winced inwardly. I had been buttering up the Olympians so frantically that I hadn’t noticed my local reputation taking a nosedive into eccentric madness.
“Well, putting that aside... do we have any?”
“Never in all my years have I heard of iron coming out of Ithacan stone.”
“Figures...”
“Even if the rocks bled iron, none of us would know how to forge it into anything useful. Why ask such a thing?”
“Oh, I just thought we might be able to figure that part out somehow.”
“What? Are you telling me you know how to smelt iron?”
Had I been the protagonist of some high-fantasy web novel, I would have smirked, crossed my arms, and nodded with supreme confidence. But in my past life, I was nothing more than an ordinary South Korean college student. So, I shook my head with equal pride.
“Of course not.”
“...Then why in the gods’ names did you ask?”
“...Just curious?”
“Infuriating brat.”
Granted, I didn’t know metallurgy, but it wasn’t as though I was completely ignorant either. I remember reading somewhere that you need a bellows or something to crank up the furnace heat high enough for iron.
The real issue was that I had zero clue how to actually engineer a durable bellows or handle the slag afterward. At best, could I toss the general concept to the palace bronze smiths? Ancient folk lacked modern technical textbooks, but they were far from stupid. Plant the seed of an idea, and a clever craftsman might just hammer out a functional prototype on his own. The problem, however, was that Ithaca had virtually no spare wealth to gamble on unproven experiments.
If I’d known I was getting reincarnated into ancient Greece, I would’ve memorized schematics for practical inventions. Waterwheels, blast furnaces, distillation coils—anything!
With knowledge like that, I could have manufactured trade goods, peddled them across the Aegean, and rolled in silver talents. To reincarnate with memories of the modern era and find almost none of them applicable was a cruel joke. Still, knowing my grim mythological fate ahead of time had to count for something.
Let’s just consider it a fair trade: technological know-how in exchange for knowing how I die.
Crying over spilled milk wouldn’t open a portal back to a university library in Seoul. Looking out over the knolls carpeted in silver-green olive trees and hardy grapevines, I dusted off my tunic and pushed myself up from the grass.
“Should I start rounding up the herd?”
“Aye, go on.”
Before trotting off toward the cattle, I carefully pinched out the tiny flame dancing inside a shallow clay dish between us.
“Gentle Goddess Hestia, thank you for watching over our humble meal.”
Philoetius watched me with an expression of sheer exhaustion, but I paid his exasperation no mind and hurried out onto the slopes.
“Haaah...”
Watching the cattle graze idly on one of Ithaca’s scarce patches of level pasture, I fell into deep, brooding thought. My dilemma was simple: wasn’t there some way to squeeze more utility out of these beasts?
“Even if smelting iron is out of reach, there must be something useful rattling around in my skull...”
There was a specific reason I had my sights set on the cows. Having grown up with the soul of a modern Korean, my grandfather’s old farming tales still rang clear in my ears. He had spent his entire youth plowing paddy fields behind a sturdy Korean ox, so I knew better than most that bovine muscle was the ultimate substitute for backbreaking human labor.
It wasn’t as though the ancients didn’t use cattle at all. In fertile valleys, oxen dragged wooden plows, hauled timber, and served as the most prestigious sacrifices to honor the Olympians. But this was Ithaca. Rocky crags and steep, stony terraces vastly outnumbered flat loam, offering virtually no arable land suitable for ox-drawn plows.
Aside from dragging heavy carts or waiting around for festival days to have their throats slit on altars, the royal cows spent most of their lives doing nothing but chewing cud. Even King Laertes, Odysseus’s father, was racking his brains trying to figure out how to monetize the palace livestock...
“Mmm...”
Why was an Ithacan peasant boy—destined to die a nameless companion to Odysseus in the Trojan aftermath—obsessing over the island’s gross domestic product? Survival, pure and simple. If I could bolster Ithaca’s wealth and infrastructure even a fraction, my odds of outliving the grand epic would improve dramatically.
Ithaca held more clout than its modern tourist-island counterpart, but compared to behemoths like Mycenae, Argos, or Sparta, it remained an impoverished backwater. However idyllic it seemed, our treasury was desperately thin.
“If King Laertes gains more wealth and authority, maybe Ithaca can build sturdier warships, train disciplined spearmen, and keep us alive when the Trojan War drags on.”
There had to be a way.
Right on cue, two burly young bulls locked horns in the distance, tearing up the turf in an aggressive shoving match. Snatching up my herdsman’s staff, I sprinted straight toward the brawl. Could a kid under ten physically break up a fight between two half-ton horned beasts? Ordinarily no, but I wielded a specialized weapon.
“You two keep locking horns, and I swear on the Styx I’ll offer both of you as burnt fat to Lord Zeus!”
Cows are far cleverer than people give them credit for. The moment the word altar rang out, both bulls froze mid-shove, blinked their wide brown eyes, and backed away with docile snorts. Having seen their sturdiest pasture-mates vanish every time solemn men with laurel wreaths showed up murmuring prayers, they possessed an instinctive terror of the divine.
“Whew. Thank the gods, the olive tree didn't get snapped... Wait, what’s that?”
The ancient olive tree beside the scuffle had escaped intact. Had even a branch snapped, Philoetius would have docked my rations for negligence. As I checked the trunk for gouges, my eyes landed on a cluster of fallen olives that had been trampled beneath the bulls’ heavy hooves.
The thick black fruit had been pulverized against the flat limestone ledge, leaving behind a slick, glossy smear of rich green mash and glistening golden liquid.
Staring at the squashed pulp, a sudden shockwave rippled through my brain.
“Wait a second...!”
A brilliant idea struck me like a thunderbolt from Olympus. A revolutionary method to harness raw bovine horsepower while driving Ithaca’s wealth through the roof!
“Philoetius! What if we use the cattle to press olive oil and wine?”
“What?”
The moment the thought solidified, I ran straight back to Philoetius and blurted it out. The royal cowherd stopped binding a halter and stared at me like I had grown a second head.
“Use cattle to make oil and wine?”
“Yes! Their legs and backs are stronger than ten grown men combined. Wouldn’t it make sense to put all that muscle to work?”
Contrary to my expectations of wide-eyed awe, Philoetius merely scoffed, blowing air through his thick graying beard.
“Drop the foolishness, boy.”
“Huh? Why? If we build a pen and—”
“Do you honestly believe no one in Hellas has thought of that before? There’s a very good reason we don't let beasts tread the harvest.”
They already tried it?
“...What happened?”
“Cattle are strong, aye—too strong. That’s the curse of it. If an ox stomps on olives or grapes, its sheer weight pulverizes the seeds and stones right along with the flesh.”
“Ah.”
“And once the crushed seeds bleed their bitter oils into the mash, the olive oil turns rancid and the wine tastes like boiled bile. It ruins the entire yield.”
Their excessive strength was the fatal flaw. Broken pits released harsh, astringent tannins, turning liquid gold into unpalatable sludge. It was a surefire way to squander months of labor. Yet my mind refused to stall.
“I’m not talking about the virgin pressing! I mean the leftover pomace after the first tread!”
“The pomace?”
“Exactly! Human feet and lever stones can only squeeze out so much. Once the soft fruit is pressed clean of seed damage, cattle could crush the remaining pulp and wring out every last drop of lower-grade oil and wine for common trade!”
“Hmm...”
Philoetius stroked his chin, his expression shifting from mockery to genuine contemplation. Given that I spent half my day offering borderline deranged flatteries to the sky, I half-expected him to chase me off with a switch. But the practical herdsman was listening.
“Trampling the dry skins might yield a few extra amphorae, true enough. But how do you propose keeping dirt, dung, and grit out of the vat?”
He conceded the concept, but zeroed straight in on the execution.
“Crushing it is one thing, but keeping the runoff clean while a half-ton beast stamps around in a pit is another matter entirely.”
Naturally, letting an ox stomp around in an open trough meant manure and soil would contaminate the precious harvest.
Think, Polites. How do you separate the animal from the vat?
Then, an image flashed into my mind from an old folk village museum.
A millstone.
Two massive circular stones grinding together as a long wooden spar was pulled round and round.
Rotary motion.
I muttered under my breath, piecing it together.
“...What if we make the ox walk in circles, and translate that turning power into a press?”
A horse-mill or animal-powered capstan. Instead of trampling the vat, you hitched the ox to a long radial timber connected to a central upright axle. As the beast walked along an outer circular track, the beam spun the central mechanism.
“How do you make an ox turn in circles without—”
“Wait, not just a simple grinding stone...”
“Here he goes again.”
Ignoring Philoetius’s weary sigh, I followed the spark racing through my thoughts. A rotary millstone could crush pomace without shattering seeds if the clearance was calibrated. But what if we took that rotational energy and converted it into downward, vertical compression?
...A screw press. Like Archimedes’ screw, but driving a massive threaded timber downward into a slotted wooden basket!
If we channeled an ox’s immense pulling leverage into a massive wooden screw, the downward pressing force would be astronomical—far exceeding anything human weight or stone counterweights could ever muster. And then...
“Okay, this is where my modern knowledge hits a brick wall.”
I admitted my limits without hesitation. My role wasn’t to draft engineering schematics, calculate gear ratios, or carve precision wooden screw threads from olive wood. My liberal arts education was woefully inadequate for that.
My job was simply to take this half-baked spark of future ingenuity and dump it into the lap of someone with genuine craftsmanship and authority.
Not because I was lazy or dodging responsibility, mind you. No, delegating complex technical labor to qualified experts while taking credit for the inspiration was the peak of wisdom I had acquired during university group projects.
“Finished muttering to the dirt, boy?”
“Huh? Oh, yes! Well, my morning chores are done, so I’ll be taking my leave!”
“What? Confound it... Fine, get out of my sight.”
“Understood! May Hermes, guide of travelers and guardian of herds, watch over Philoetius and grant him a restful end to his labors!”
“You really are... Bah, forget it.”
Philoetius let out a heavy huff, but the faint softening around his rugged eyes told me he wasn’t genuinely irritated. Shaking his head with an amused grumble, he turned to guide the lowing herd back toward the stone pens.
In ancient Greece, no mortal alive would ever take offense at having a prayer offered to the gods on their behalf.
That was perhaps the greatest piece of practical wisdom I had mastered since being reborn into this mythological world.