Chapter 10

The two communities of which Eumæus tells us were probably, one, on the promontory of Plemmyrium, and the other, at a place between three and four miles distant, now called Cozzo Pantano, on each of which sites Dr. Orsi has discovered the burying ground of an extensive village or town (borgo) to which he had assigned the date xii.-xi. centuries B.C. before his attention had been called to the existence of a reference to prehistoric Syracuse in theOdyssey. Many examples of implements found on these two sites may be seen in the museum at Syracuse. I did not gather that any other prehistoric burying grounds had been found at or in close proximity to Syracuse.

Whether the people whose burying grounds have been found at the above named places were Greeks, who were displaced later by Sicels, as the Sicels in their turn were displaced by the Corinthians, or whether they were Sicels of an earlier unrecorded immigration, I must leave Dr. Orsi and others to determine, but the name of the sea which washes the East coast of Sicily points to the existence at one time of extensive Ionian settlements on East Sicilian shores. The name, again, Aci, which is found inAci reale, Aci Castello, andAci trezza, and which among the common people is now always sounded Iaci, suggests a remote Ionian origin—for we may assume that there was no Ionian migration later than 734 B.C. of sufficient importance to give the name Ionian to Sicilian waters, towns, and islands. The reader will be reminded in the following Chapter that Ἰακός means Ionian.

Eumæus was so young when he was carried off that even though Greek was not his native language, he would have become Grecised in a few years; I incline to think, however, that the writer of theOdysseywould have said something about his being a Sicel if she had so conceived of him in her own mind. She seems to think of him as a Greek by birth.

The Sicels, however, also probably spoke Greek. The inhabitants of Temesa, on the toe of Italy, do not indeed seem to have done so (Od. i. 183); but we do not know that they were Sicels. No writing has been found at Plemmirio nor yet at Cozzo Pantano; we have therefore very little to go upon.

But postulating that we may accept Thucydides—whose accuracy as regards Syracusan details proves that even though he had not been at Syracuse himself, he had at any rate means of informing himself on Sicilian history—who is evidently taking pains, and whose reputation is surpassed by that of no other historian—postulating that we may accept his statement (vi. 2) that the great irruption of Sicels which changed the name of the country from Sicania to Sicelia took place about 300 years before B.C. 734, I think we may safely put back the date of theOdysseyto a time before B.C. 1000.

For theOdysseyconveys no impression as though Sicily at large had been lately subdued and overrun by Sicels. Locally, indeed, the city at the top of Mt. Eryx had, as we have seen (Od. vii. 60), been conquered and overthrown; but I shall bring Thucydides, as well as other evidence, to show that in this case the victors are more likely to have been Asiatic Greeks than Sicels. The poem indicates a time of profound present peace and freedom from apprehension, and on the one occasion in which the writer speaks of Sicily under its own name, she calls it by its pre-Sicelian name of Sicania.[3]The old Sicel woman who waited on Laertes (xxiv. 211 and elsewhere) is not spoken of as though there were any ill-will on the part of the writer towards the Sicels, or as though they were a dominant race.Lastly, one of the suitors (xx. 382) advises Telemachus to ship Theoclymenus and Ulysses off to the Sicels. Now if the writer had the real Ithaca in her mind, the Sicels could only have been reached by sea, whether they were in Italy or Sicily; but I have already shown that she never pictured to herself any other Ithaca than the one she had created at Trapani; the fact, therefore, that Theoclymenus and Ulysses were to be put on board ship before they could reach the Sicels, shows that she imagined these last as (except for an occasional emigrant) outside the limits of her own island.

If the foregoing reasoning is admitted, 1050 B.C. will be about as late as it is safe to place the date of theOdyssey; but a few years later is possible, though hardly, I think, probable. Unfortunately this date will compel us to remove the fall of Troy to a time very considerably earlier than the received date. For a hundred years is, one would think, the shortest interval that can be allowed between theOdysseyand theIliad. The development of myth and of the Epic cycle, of which we find abundant traces in theOdyssey, is too considerable to render any shorter period probable. I therefore conclude that 1150 B.C. is the latest date to which we should assign theIliad.

The usually received date for the fall of Troy is 1184 B.C. This is arrived at from a passage in Thucydides (i. 12) which says that sixty years after the fall of Troy, the Bœotians were driven from Arne and settled in what was originally called Cadmeis, but subsequently Bœotia. Twenty years later, he tells us, the Dorians and the Heraclidæ became masters of the Peloponese; but as he does not fix this last date, probably because he could not, so neither does he fix that of the fall of Troy.

The date commonly accepted for the return of the Heraclidæ and their conquest of the Peloponese is 1104,[4]but those who turn to Müller'sHistory of the Doric Race,[5]Vol. I., p. 53, will see that there is no authority for this date which is worth a moment's consideration; and with the failure of authorityhere, we are left absolutely without authority for 1184 B.C. as the date of the fall of Troy.

Admitting for the moment 1150 B.C. as the latest date to which we should assign theIliad, the question arises: How much later than the fall of Troy did Homer write? Mr. Gladstone has argued very ably in support of the view that he wrote only some forty or fifty years after the events he is recording, in which case it would seem that he must date theIliadhardly at all later than the latest date to which I would assign it, for he does not appear to dispute the received date for the fall of Troy, though he does not say that he accepts it. I should be only too glad to find that I can claim Mr. Gladstone's support so far, but farther I cannot expect to do so; for the impression left upon me by theIliadis that Homer was writing of a time that was to him much what the middle ages are to ourselves.

If he had lived as near the Trojan War as Mr. Gladstone supposes, he would surely have given us some hint of the manner in which Troy fell, whereas he shows no signs of knowing more than the bare fact that the city had fallen. He repeatedly tells us this much, but always more curtly and drily than we should expect him to do, and his absolute silence as to the way in which the capture of the city was effected, goes far to prove either that all record of themodus in quohad perished—which would point to a very considerable lapse of time—or else to suggest a fact which, though I have often thought it possible, I hardly dare to write—I mean that Troy never fell at all, or at any rate that it did not fall with the close of the Trojan War, and that Homer knew this perfectly well.

The infinite subtlety of theIliadis almost as unfathomable as the simplicity of theOdysseyhas so far proved itself to be, and its author, writing for a Greek audience whom he obviously despised, and whom he was fooling to the top of their bent though always sailing far enough off the wind to avoid disaster, would take very good care to tell them that—if I may be allowed the anachronism—Napoleon won the battle of Waterloo, though he very well knew that it was won by Wellington. It is certain that no even tolerably plausible account of the fallof Troy existed among the Greeks themselves; all plausibility ends with their burning their tents and sailing away baffled (Od. viii. 500, 501)—see also the epitome of theLittle Iliad, given in the fragment of Proclus. The wild story of the wooden horse only emphasises the fact that nothing more reasonable was known.

WALL AT HISSARLIK, SHOWING CONTRAST BETWEEN WEATHERED AND PROTECTED COURSES.

THE ILIADIC WALL.

But let us suppose that Troy fell, and that Homer's silence was dictated by the loss of all record as to the manner of its falling. In this case one would think that two, or even three, hundred years must have passed between the fall of Troy and the writing of theIliad. Let us make it the same distance of time as that between the Parliamentary Wars and the present day. This would throw back the Trojan War to about 1400 B.C., and if we accept Homer's statement that the wall of Troy (i.e. that which Dr. Dörpfeld excavated in 1893—for that this is the Iliadic wall may be taken as certain) was built in the time of Priam's father Laomedon, we should date the wall roughly as 1450 B.C. I may add, that it seems to me to be of somewhat earlier date than the so-called Treasury of Atreus at Mycene, and hence still earlier than that which bears the name of Clytemnestra.

I see by the latest work on the subject[6]that Dr. Dörpfeld dates it as between 1500 and 1000 B.C. I know how perilous it is to date a wall by the analogy of other walls in distant countries, which walls are themselves undateable with anything like precision, but having seen the Iliadic wall as also those of Tiryns and Mycene, as well as most of those that remain in the Latin and Volscian cities, I should say that the wall of Troy was much later than those of the megalithic ages, but still not by any means free from the traditions of megalithic builders. I should date it roughly at not later than 1300 B.C. and hardly earlier than 1500 B.C.[7]

I will, however, date the Iliadic wall as 1400 B.C. The Trojan war will then be supposed to have taken place from 1360-1350 B.C.; the writing of theIliadwill be about 1150; and that of theOdysseyabout 1050 B.C. This is a tight fit, and I should be glad to throw the Iliadic wall back to the earlier of the two dates between which Dr. Dörpfeld has placed it, but precision is out of the question; 1400 B.C. will be as near the truth as anything that we are likely to get, and will bring the archæological evidence as derivable from the wall of Troy, the internal evidence of theIliadandOdyssey, the statement of Thucydides that the last and greatest inroad of the Sicels occurred about 1030 B.C., and our conclusion that theOdysseywas written before that date, into line with one another.

The date 1050 B.C. will explain the absence of all allusion in theOdysseyto Utica, the land near which, on certain rare days, can be seen from Mt. Eryx. The Phœnicians are known in theOdyssey, disliked and distrusted, but they do not seem to be feared as they would surely be if so powerful a maritime nation were already established so near the writer's own abode. She does not seem to know much about the Phœnicians after all, for in iv. 83 she makes Menelaus say that he had gone to Cyprus, Phœnicia, and the Egyptians, and in the next line she adds that he had also been to the Ethiopians and the Sidonians, as though she was not aware that Sidon was a Phœnician city.

The absence of all allusion to Olympia when Telemachus was on his return from Pylos is most naturally explained by supposing that Olympia was not yet famous. The principal hero at Athens appears to be the earliest known object of the national cult, I mean Erechtheus (vii, 81); the later, though still very early, cult of Theseus is not alluded to. There is no allusion, however vague, to any event known as having happened in Greek history later than 1100 B.C., and though the absence of reference to any particular event may be explained by indifference or forgetfulness, the absence of all reference to any event whatever suggests, I should say strongly, that none of the events to one or other of which reference might be expected had as yet happened.

While, however, placing 1050 B.C. as the latest limit for theOdysseyI do not see how we can place it earlier than 1150 without throwing the date of the Iliadic wall farther back than we can venture to do, for we can hardly date it earlier than 1500 B.C., and 350 years is as short an interval as we can well allow between the building of that wall and the writing of theOdyssey.

Let us now compare the history of the N.W. corner of Sicily as revealed to us in theOdyssey—always assuming that the pedigree of Alcinous and Arete in Book vii. is in its main facts historic—with the account given by Thucydides concerning the earliest history of the same district.

In theOdysseywe have seen the Sicans (whom I think that I have sufficiently identified) as originally in possession of Mt. Eryx under a king whose Odyssean name is Eurymedon. He, it seems, was overthrown, and the power of his people was broken, by enemies whose name is not given, about a hundred years before the writing of theOdyssey, as nearly as we can gather from the fact of his having been Nausicaa's great great grandfather.

The writer of theOdysseywrote in a language mainly Ionian, but containing a considerable Æolian element. It must be inferred, therefore, that her family and audience—that is to say the Phæacians—spoke a dialect in which these characteristics are to be found. The place of all others where such a dialect might be looked for is Phocæa, a little South of the Troad; for Phocæa was an Ionian city entirely surrounded on its land sides by Æolian territory. I see from Professor Jebb'sIntroduction to Homer[8]that Aristarchus when editing theIliadandOdyssey, and settling the text to all intents and purposes as we now have it, by comparison of the best copies known, made most frequent use of the civic edition of Marseilles which contained bothIliadandOdyssey. It will be remembered that Marseilles was a Phocæan Colony.

The name Phæacians is not unsuggestive of a thin disguise for Phocæans; lines iv. 441-443, moreover, will gain greatly in point, if we imagine that the seals, or Phocæ, with their disgusting smell, are meant for the writer's countrymen whom she evidently dislikes, and that the words, "who, indeed, would go to bed with a sea monster if he could help it?" are her rejoinder to the alleged complaint of the young Phæacians that she would marry none of them (vi. 276 &c.). Apart, therefore, from any external evidence, I should suspect the Phæacians to have been Phocæans, who had settled on this part of the island.[9]From the fact that the Phæacians in the time of theOdysseywere evidently dominant on Mt. Eryx as well as at Trapani, I conclude that they must have had, to say the least of it, a considerable share in the overthrow of Eurymedon and of the Sican power in that part of the island. If they had allies with them, these allies seem to have gone on to other sites on which Elymite cities are known to have existed, for we find no reference in theOdysseyto any other people as sharing Hypereia and Scheria with the Phæacians.

Though the power of the Sicans at Eryx was broken, and the Phæacians were established at Hypereia, also on the top of Mt. Eryx and less than a mile from the Sican city, the Sicans were still troublesome neighbours; there seems, however, to have been a marriage between some chief man among the Phæacians and Peribœa, youngest daughter of the old king Eurymedon, and this no doubt would lead to some approach to fusion between the two peoples. The offspring of this marriage, Nausithous, is said in the poem to have been by Neptune, from which I infer that the marriage may have been of a more or less irregular kind, but there can be no doubt that Nausithous came of a Phæacian father and would speak the Phæacian dialect, which the Sicans, though in all probability a Greek-speakingrace, cannot be supposed to have done. Nausithous seems to have been a capable man; finding the continued raids of semi-outlawed Sicans still harassing, perhaps, also, induced by the fact that the promontory on which Trapani stands was better suited to a race of mariners than the lofty and inhospitable top of Mt. Eryx, he moved his people down to the seaside and founded the city that now bears the name of Trapani—retaining, however, the site of Hypereia as his own property on which his pigs and goats would feed, and to which also his family would resort, as the people of Trapani still do, during the excessive heat of summer.

The reader will have noted that Eumæus, who we must never forget is drawn not from Ithaca but from Mt. Eryx, when watching over his pigs by night thought it necessary to be fully armed (xiv. 526). He seems also from xvi. 9, to have had neighbours, from which we may infer that the old Sican city of Eryx was not yet entirely abandoned; nevertheless, Eumæus would not be there at all unless the fusion between the Sicans and the Phocæans had been fairly complete. The Sicans appear in theOdysseyunder the names of Cyclopes and Læstrygonians, and the Sicels are not yet come. This is all that we can collect from theOdyssey.

We will now see what support the sketch given above will derive from Thucydides (vi. 2). According to him the Læstrygonians and the Cyclopes, mentioned as the earliest inhabitants of Sicily, are mere poetical fictions. This, however, does not preclude their having had their prototype in some real Sicilian people who bore another name; and at any rate, however fictitious they may be, he locates them in Sicily.

He continues that the oldest historic inhabitants of the island were the Sicans, who by their own account had been there from time immemorial. This he denies, for he says they were Iberians, and he says it as though he had satisfied himself after due inquiry, but since he gives no hint as to the date of their arrival, he does not impugn their statement that their settlement in the island dated from a remote time. It is most likely that he is right about the Sicans having come from Spain; and indeed at Tarragona, some fifty or sixty milesNorth of the mouth of the river Iberus, there are megalithic walls that bear, so far as I can judge from photographs, a very considerable analogy with those of Eryx. In Thucydides' own times there were still Sicans in the Western part of Sicily.

He then goes on to say that after the fall of Troy, but he does not say how much after, some of the Trojans who had escaped the Greeks migrated to Sicily. They settled in the neighbourhood of the Sicans and were all together called Elymi, their cities being Eryx and Segesta. There were also settled with them—but whether at the same date, or earlier or later, and if so, how much, Thucydides does not say—certain Phocians of the Trojan branch,i.e., Phocæans—Phocæa having been founded by Phocians from the gulf of Corinth under the leadership of the Athenian chiefs Philogenes and Damon (Strab. xiv. § 633;Pausan. VII. 3, §5; cf.Herod, I. 146). These Phocæans had been carried first by a tempest to Libya,[10]and thence to Sicily.

We need not follow him to the arrival of the Sicels, for I have already, I hope, satisfied the reader that theOdysseybelongs to a pre-Sicelian age, and I am only dealing with the period which theOdysseyand Thucydides cover in common.

I should perhaps put it beyond doubt that Thucydides means Phocæans and not Phocians. In the first place it is difficult to understand how Phocians, who were on the Achæan side (Il. II. 518), should amalgamate with Trojans; and in the next Thucydides' words cannot be made to bear the meaning that is generally put upon them, as though the Phocians in question were on their way back from Troy to Phocis. His words are Φωκέων τινες τῶν ἀπὸ Τροίας, and this cannot be construed as though he had said Φωκέων τινες τῶν ἀνερχομένων ἐν νόστῳ ἀπὸ Τροίας. If ἀπό is to imply motion from, it should have a verb or participle involving motion before it; without this it is a common way of expressing residence in a place. For example, Ὀρέστης ἤλυθεν ... ἀπ᾽ Ἀθηνάων (iii. 307) means Orestescame from Athens, whereas Ὀρέστης ὁ ἀπ᾽ Ἀθηνάων would mean "Orestes the Athenian, or quasi-Athenian," as Λακεδαιμόνιοι οἱ ἀπὸ Σπάρτης means "the Lacedæmonians who live at Sparta." Neither of these last two passages can be made to bear the meaning "Orestes, who was on his way from Athens," or "the Lacedæmonians, who were on their way from Sparta." The reader who looks out ἀπὸ in Liddell & Scott will find plenty of examples. To Thucydides, Phocæans in Asia Minor and Phocians on the gulf of Corinth would be alike Phocians in virtue of common descent, but to avoid misapprehension he calls the Phocæans "Phocians of the Trojan stock," by "Trojan" meaning not very far from Troy. It should be noted that the Phocians of the gulf of Corinth are called Φωκῆες, not Φωκέες inIl. IX. 517, XV. 516, XVII. 307. I see that Dobree (Adversaria in Thucyd.) is suspicious of the reading Φωκέων in the passage of Thucydides which we are now considering. He evidently considers that Φωκέων must mean Phocians from the gulf of Corinth, and so it would, if it were not qualified by the words τῶν ἀπὸ Τροίας which negative the possibility of European Phocians being intended.

Thucydides says nothing about any invasion of Sicily by a people called Elymi. He does not see the Elymi as anything more than the combined Asiatic and Sican peoples, who came to be called Elymi. If he had believed in the Elymi as a distinct batch of immigrants he would have given us a line or two more about them.

It is just possible that the known connection between Phocians and Phocæans may explain why Ulysses' maternal grandfather should have been made to live on Mt. Parnassus,[11]which is in Phocis. Ulysses, to the writer of theOdyssey, was a naturalised Phæacian, for her native town had become in her eyes both Scheria and Ithaca. It would not be unnatural, therefore, that she should wish to connect his ancestry with Phocis, the ancestral seat of the Phocæans.

Returning to Thucydides, the only point in which he varies the Odyssean version is that he makes other Trojans migrateto Eryx as well as the Phocæans, whereas the writer of theOdysseymentions only the Phæacians without saying anything about their having been of Phocæan descent. She has, however, betrayed herself very sufficiently. Thucydides again does not tell us that the Phocæans re-settled themselves at Drepanum, but a man who is giving a mere outline of events which happened some seven hundred years before he was writing, can hardly be expected to give so small a detail as this. The wonder is that theOdysseyshould bear him out and confirm his accuracy in so striking a way as it does. We now, therefore, see that instead of there being any cause for surprise at finding an Ionic-Æolian poem written near Mt. Eryx, this is the very neighbourhood in which we might expect to find one.

Finally, let us turn to Virgil. His authority as a historian is worthless, but we cannot suppose that he would make Æneas apparently found Drepanum, if he held the presence of a Greek-speaking people at Drepanum even before the age of Homer to be so absurd as it appears to our eminent Homeric scholars. I say "apparently found Drepanum," for it is not quite easy to fix the site of the city founded by Æneas (Ænv. 755-761), for at the close ofÆn. III. Anchises dies at Drepanum, as though this city was already in existence. But whether the city founded by Æneas was actually Drepanum, or another city hard by it, it is clear that Virgil places Greek-speaking people at Drepanum, or close to it, immediately after the fall of Troy. He would hardly do this unless Drepanum was believed in his time to be a city of very great antiquity, and founded by Greek-speaking people. That the Trojan language was Greek will not be disputed.

[1]Introduction to Homer, Ed. 1888, pp. 172, 173.

[2]On its earlier coins Syracuse not unfrequently appears as Syra.

[3]The fact that Σικανίης (xxiv. 397) should not have got corrupted into Σικελίης—which would scan just as well—during the many centuries that the island was called Σικελία, suggests a written original, though I need hardly say that I should not rely on so small a matter if it rested by itself.

[4]See Prof. Jebb'sIntroduction to Homer, ed. 1888, Note I on p. 43.

[5]Murray, 1830.

[6]The Mycenæan Age, by Dr. Chrestos Tsountas and Dr. J. Irving Manatt, Macmillan, 1897, p. 369.

[7]The dark line across my illustration is only due to an accident that happened to my negative. I believe (but am not quite sure, for my note about it was not written on the spot) that the bit of wall given in my second illustration has nothing to do with the Iliadic wall, and is of greatly later date. I give it to show how much imagination is necessary in judging of any wall that has been much weathered.

[8]Ed. 1888, note on p. 91.

[9]Herodotus tells us (I. 163) that the Phocæans were the first people to undertake long voyages, exploring the Tuscan sea, and going as far as Cadiz. He says that their ships were not the round ones commonly used for commerce, but long vessels with fifty oarsmen. The reader will recollect that this feature of Phocæan navigation is found also among the Phæacians, who sent Ulysses to the place that we are to take as Ithaca, in a vessel that had fifty oarsmen.

[10]One cannot help wondering whether the episode of the Lotus-eaters may not be due to the existence of traditions among the Phæacians that their ancestors had made some stay in Libya before reaching Sicily.

[11]Od. xix. 410, 432.

FURTHER EVIDENCE IN SUPPORT OF AN EARLY IONIAN SETTLEMENT AT OR CLOSE TO TRAPANI.

I am often asked how I explain the fact that we find no trace in ancient authors of any tradition to the effect that theOdysseywas written at Drepanum or that the writer was a woman. This difficulty is laid before me as one that is almost fatal. I confess, however, that I find it small in comparison with that of explaining how both these facts should have failed of being long since rediscovered. Neptune indeed did not overwhelm Scheria under Mt. Eryx, but he, or some not less spiteful god, seems to have buried both it and its great poetess under another mountain which I fear may be found even more irremoveable—I mean a huge quasi-geological formation of academic erudition.

The objection is without sufficient foundation in its implied facts; for that the Phæacians were a real people who lived at a place bearing the name of Drepane (which is near enough to Drepanum for all practical purposes),[1]has never been lost sight of at all—except by those who find it convenient to lose sight of it. Thucydides (i. 25) tells us that the inhabitants of Corfu were the descendants of the Phæacians, and the rock into which their ship was turned as it was entering the harbour after having escorted Ulysses to Ithaca is still shown at Corfu—as an island 58 feet high with a monastery on the top of it. But the older name of Corfu was Drepane,[2]and when the Carthaginians had established themselves at the Sicilian Drepanum, it would be an easy matter for the inhabitants of the Corfu Drepane to claim Phæacian descent, and—as theyproceeded to do—to call their island Scheria, in spite of its offering no single point of correspondence with the description given in theOdyssey.

I grant that no explicit tradition exists to the effect that theOdysseyas a whole was written at or in Corfu, but the Phæacian episode is the eye of the poem. I submit, then, that tradition both long has, and still does, by implication connect it with a place of which the earliest known name was to all intents and purposes the same as that of the town where I contend that it was written.

The Athenian writers, Thucydides included, would be biassed in favour of any site which brought Homer, as they ignorantly called the writer of theOdyssey, nearer their own doors. The people, moreover, of Eryx and Segesta, and hence also of Drepanum, were held to be barbarians, and are so called by Thucydides himself (vi. 2); in his eyes it would be little less than sacrilege to hesitate between the Corfu Drepane and the Sicilian Drepanum, did any tradition, however vague, support Corfu. But it is not likely that Thucydides was unaware of the Sicilian claim not only to the Phæacian episode, but to the entire poem, for as late as 430 B.C., only a little before the date of his own work, there were still people on or near Mt. Eryx who present every appearance of having claimed it, as I will almost immediately show.

As for losing sight of its having been written by a woman, the people who could lose sight of the impossibility of its having been written by Homer could lose sight of anything. A people who could not only do this, but who could effectually snuff out those who pointed out their error, were not likely to know more about the difference underlying the two poems than the average English layman does about those between the synoptic gospels and that of St. John.

I will now return to my assertion that in the time of Thucydides there seem to have been not a few who knew of, and shared in, the claim of Drepanum to the authorship of theOdyssey.

The British Museum possesses a unique example of a small bronze coin which is classed with full confidence among thoseof Eryx and Segesta. It is of the very finest period of the numismatic art, and is dated by the museum authorities as about 430 B.C.

The reader will see that the obverse bears the legendIAKIN, and the reverse a representation of the brooch described by Ulysses (Od. xix. 225-231). A translation of this passage is given onpage 80.

The cross line of the A is not visible in the original, but no doubt is felt at the Museum about its having existed.

There seems, however, to be more doubt whether the legend should beIAKIN, orΓIAKIN—Γ being the older form of Π. Possibly from a desire to be right in either case, the Museum catalogue gives it asIAKINin the illustration, andΓIAKINin the descriptive letterpress. The one reading will do nearly as well as the other for my argument, which only requires that the coin should belong to the Eryx and Segesta group and be dated about 430 B.C.—neither of which points are doubted. I will, however, give the reasons that convince me thatIAKINis the true reading.

Firstly, neither I nor some artist friends of mine whose opinion is infinitely better worth having than my own, can find any traces of a Γ between the lowermost boss and the neck. I am aware that some experts of the highest competence profess to be able to detect such traces, but the artist who figured the coin in the Museum Catalogue evidently could not do so, and the experts do not seem to have had such confidence in their own opinion as to make him alter his drawing.

Secondly, the composition is obviously and intentionally symmetrical. It would be abhorrent to the instincts of the man who could design so exquisite a coin to destroy its balance by crowding a Γ into the place which must be assigned to it if it exists at all.

Thirdly, Piacus, to which town the coin had been ascribed by the dealer from whom the Museum bought it, is mentioned very briefly by Stephanus Byzantinus, but by no other writer, as a Sicilian city, and he expressly states that its citizens were calledΠΙΑΚΗΝΟΙ; so that the coin, if it was one of theirs, should bear the legendΓΙΑΚΗΝinstead of the allegedΓIAKIN.Stephanus Byzantinus did not write till about 500 A.D., and in the absence of any statement from him to the effect that Piacus was an old city, it argues some recklessness to conclude that it had existed for at least a thousand years when he mentioned it; there is no evidence from any quarter to support such a conclusion, and a safer one will be that the dealer above referred to, not knowing where the coin came from, and looking for a city in Stephanus Byzantinus, found he could get nothing nearer than Piacus—whereon he saw a Γ as the smallest thing he could do in Πs, into his coin, and sold it to the British Museum probably for a song as compared with the value which it now proves to have. Thus the Museum authorities having got it into part of their notes (for they seem to have gotIAKINinto another part) that the legend wasΓΙΑΚΗΝ, have very naturally been led to see more on the coin than those who have no notes will quite bear them out in seeing. But I will add no more. The legend is obviouslyIAKIN.

This is an abbreviation forΙΑΚΙΝΩΝ, asΕΡΥΚΙΝandΚΕΝΤΟΡΙΠΙΝare forΕΡΥΚΙΝΩΝandΚΕΝΤΟΡΙΠΙΝΩ, not to quote further examples. It means that the people who struck it were calledΙΑΚΙΝΕΣ, and though we cannot determine the precise name of their city we may infer with confidence that it was some derivative ofΙΑΚΟΣ, which is given in Liddell and Scott as meaning Ionian. The name may very likely have beenΙΑΞthough I cannot find any authority for the existence of such a town.

I hold, therefore, that as late as B.C. 430 there was near Trapani a town still more or less autonomous, which claimed Ionian descent and which also claimed to be in some special way connected with theOdyssey; for I am assured that nothing would be allowed on a coin except what had an important bearing on the anterior history of those who struck it. Admitting that the reverse of the coin in question must be taken as a reproduction of Ulysses' brooch—and I found no difference of opinion among the numismatists at the Museum on this head—it is hard to see what more apposite means of saying "Odyssey" upon a coin can be suggested than to stamp it with the subject which invites numismatic treatment morethan any other in the whole poem. It seems to me, then, that though the theory that there was an Ionian city in the neighbourhood of Eryx which could claim connection with theOdysseywill stand perfectly well without the coin, the coin cannot stand without involving the existence of an Ionian city near Eryx which claimed connection with theOdyssey. Happily, though the coin is unique, there is no question as to its genuineness.

To those, therefore, who ask me for monuments, ruins of buildings, historical documents to support a Sicano-Ionian civilisation near Eryx in times heretofore prehistoric, I reply that as late as 430 B.C. all these things appear to have existed. Letting alone the testimony of Thucydides, surely an Ionian coin is no small historical document in support of an Ionian city. A coin will say more in fewer words and more authoritatively than anything else will. The coin in question cannot belong to an Ionian colony on Mt. Eryx or thereabouts recently established in 430 B.C. We should have heard of such a colony; how inconceivable again is the bringing in of theOdysseyon this supposition. If the city existed at all it can only have done so as a survival of the Phocæan settlement of which Thucydides tells us.

I want no evidence for the survival of such a settlement in later times; it is not incumbent upon me to show whether it survived or no; the abundant, I might almost say super-abundant, coincidences between all both Scherian and Ithacan scenes in theOdyssey, and Trapani with its immediate neighbourhood, is enough to demonstrate the Trapanese origin of the poem. Its pre-Syracusan and pre-Sicelian indications fix it as not later than about 1050 B.C., its dialect, Ionic-Æolian, connects it with the Phocæans above referred to. It does not concern me to show what became of these Phocæans after theOdysseyhad been written; what I have said about the coin IAKIN is said more in the interests of the coin than of theOdyssey, which is a more potent and irrefragable proof of its ownprovenanceand date than any coin struck some 600 years later can conceivably be. Still, the coin being there, I use it to answer those who demand some evidence external to theOdysseyitself. When they ask me where are my monuments, I answer that they are within the coin, circumscribed by the small cincture of an inch and a half at most. For a coin is a city in little; he who looks on one beholds a people, an evidence of title, a whole civilisation with its buildings of every kind. Destroy these, but so long as a single one of its coins remains, the city though dead is yet alive, and the fact of its having had buildings that could become ruinous is as palpable as though the ruins themselves had come down to us.

The exact situation of this city Iax, Iacus, or Iace, cannot be determined, but I incline to place it about a mile or a mile and a half East of Trapani at or near a place called Argenteria. This place is said to have yielded silver, but no one believes that it ever did so. It is a quarry and by no means a large one, just at the beginning of the rise to Mt. Eryx. Some say that Argenteria is a corruption of Cetaria and refers to a monster fish that was killed here, though how it got so far from the sea is not apparent; I think it much more likely, however, that it is a corruption of Iacinteria and that Iax, or Iace, was a quasi-autonomous suburb of Drepanum to which the Greek inhabitants were permitted to retire when the Carthaginians took possession of the parts of the town bordering on the harbour.

My friend Signor Sugameli of Trapani, whose zeal in this matter so far outstrips even my own, that I would gladly moderate it if I knew how to do so, assures me that in his younger days he used to employ a stone in building that the mason told him came from a quarry at the foot of Mt. Eryx called Dacinoi or D'Acinoi. This was years before any one thought of bringing Ionians to Trapani. Signor Sugameli suggested that possibly the name might be a corruption of D'Alcinoo—but we may be sure that whatever else Alcinous's name may have been it was not Alcinous. I asked Signor Sugameli to produce the mason, but he could neither find him nor hear of the quarry Dacinoi. Nevertheless I feel sure that he was told what he said he was, and as the quarry cannot have been far from the Argenteria, I think it probable that its name was a corruption ofdegli Iacinoi.

Whether this is sound or not, I do not doubt that the Iacenses who figure so largely in Sicilian history during the Eleventh Century of our own era are to be connected with the Ionian settlement that produced theOdyssey. The Iacenses were then settled chiefly about forty miles East of Trapani, but the interval of some 1400 years and more between the date of the coin Iakin and the conquest of Sicily by the Normans will leave plenty of time for them to have spread or migrated.

[1]Drepanum means a curved sword or scymitar. Drepane is a sickle.

[2]See Smith'sDictionary of Classical Geography, under Corcyra, where full references will be found.

THAT THE ILIAD WHICH THE WRITER OF THE ODYSSEY KNEW WAS THE SAME AS WHAT WE NOW HAVE.

It remains for me to show that the writer of theOdysseyhad theIliadbefore her to all intents and purposes as we now have it, and to deal with the manner in which the poem grew under her hands.

In my own copies of theIliadandOdysseyI have underlined all the passages that are common to both poems, giving the references. It is greatly to be wished that one or other of our University presses would furnish us with anOdysseyin which all the Iliadic passages are printed in a slightly different type and with a reference, somewhat in the style of the extracts fromIl. I. and XXIV. here given. The passages are to be found at the end of Dunbar'sConcordance to the Odyssey, but the marking of them as they occur in the course of the poem will be more instructive. In my translations of the poems (now finished) I have translated identical passages as nearly as possible in identical words. In theOdysseyI propose to print them in another type and give the references to theIliad. In the translation of theIliadthere is no use in doing this, for no one supposes that Homer took anything from theOdyssey. The publication, however, of these translations must, I fear, be postponed, but I will give in this Chapter as many instances as I think will be sufficient to satisfy the reader that theIliadof the writer of theOdysseywas our ownIliad.

I will begin by giving two passages from theIliad, one from Book I., and the other from Book XXIV., the references in all cases being to theOdyssey. These are perhaps fuller of lines adopted by the writer of theOdysseythan any others in theIliad, though there are some that run them closely. Lines or parts of lines in the smaller type do not occur in theOdyssey.

The first passage that I will call attention to isIliadi. 455-485, which is as follows:—

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