Chapter 9

THE VOYAGES OF ULYSSES, omitting...

Even partial consent, however, now fails us. The island of Æolus and the country of the Læstrygonians have been placed in almost as many sites as there have been writers upon theOdyssey. I shall return to these on a later page, as also to the island of Favognana and the Cyclopes. My present object is to show how much of the voyage we may consider as known, how much as supported by considerable authority, and how much we have yet to find.

The partial consent which we lost at the cave of Polyphemus returns to us with the island of Circe, the Sirens and the Wandering Cliffs, which are generally considered to have been the Lipari islands, and universal consent rejoins us for Scylla and Charybdis. I can hardly say that consent is universal for placing the cattle of the Sun on the West coast of Sicily, somewhere about Tauromenium now Taormina; but it is very general, and is so obviously well founded that I shall claim this point as certain; for the name of the island sufficiently indicates Sicily, the winds that detain Ulysses show him to have been on a West coast, and the South wind that blew him back to Charybdis in a night shows that he was supposed to be at no great distance South of the Straits of Messina.

The island of Calypso has been generally held to be Malta, but on no foundation either internal or external to theOdyssey, I shall, therefore, consider Calypso's island as yet to find.

I have no consent for Scheria being Trapani, but after what I have written above shall claim this point too as certain. The map, therefore, which I here give will show the reader how we stand as regards assent and otherwise ascertained points. I have used strong lines for the parts of the voyage that may be claimed as certain, interrupted lines for the parts that are backed by considerable authority, and dotted lines for those which I would supply. I have made Ulysses approach Trapani from the South, on the strength of Calypso's directions to him that he was to sail towards the Great Bear, keeping it on his left hand (v. 276, 277).[3]This indicates certainly aNortherly, and one would say a N.N. Easterly, course; at any rate such a course would in no way conflict with Calypso's instructions. Perhaps I had better give the words of the poem which run:—

He sat keeping his eyes upon the Pleiades,[4]late setting Boötes, and on the Bear, also called the Wain, which turns round and round facing Orion, and alone never sinks beneath the sea—for Calypso had bidden him steer by this, keeping it on his left hand (v. 272-277).

All the places in Ulysses' voyage have been generally referred to some actual locality, which was present to the writer's mind either under its own or a fictitious name; and when we have once got into Sicilian waters, all those about which is there is any considerable amount of consent, or which we may now, with or without consent, claim as ascertained—I mean Circe's island, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the Thrinacian island, Scheria and Ithaca are on, or hard by, the coast of Sicily. Is not the temptation irresistible to think that the three unknown sites—the island of Æolus, the Land of the Læstrygonians and the island of Calypso—are also real places however fictitious the names may be, and to hold that they should be looked for on, or near, the coast of Sicily in the same order as that in which we find them described?

If, on the hypothesis that Favognana and Mt. Eryx are the true sites of the island on which Ulysses and his men hunted the goats, and of the cave of Polyphemus, we are immediately led to others, in due order of sequence, which commend themselves as being those of the island of Æolus, the Land of the Læstrygonians, Circe's island, the other established sites, andlastly Calypso's island, should we not conclude, at any rate provisionally, that the hypothesis is a true one?

I will so conclude, and proceed to look for the island of Æolus in some island, apparently solitary, a good way to the West of the Lipari islands, and at no great distance from Mt. Eryx.

I should first correct a very general misapprehension. The word πλωτῇ (x. 3) has been unduly pressed into meaning that the island floated about, and thus changed its place. But if so singular a phenomenon were intended more would have been made of it. It would not have been dealt with in a single word, admitting easy explanation as mere metaphor. No one presses the "swiftly moving" islands of xv. 299 into meaning that the islands actually moved. All that is meant is that they "seemed to move" as the ship flew past them, and so with the island of Æolus—"it seemed to float on the horizon." It shows no signs of having moved during the month that Ulysses stayed on it, and when he returns to it after an absence of three weeks, we have no hint given of its having changed its place.[5]I conclude, therefore, that it was as fixed as any other island, and proceed to look for it.

This is no hard matter, for the island of Ustica offers itself at once. In clear weather it can be faintly seen from Mt. Eryx, and would naturally have impressed itself on the mind of a writer to whom Eryx and its neighbourhood was all in all. It is in the quarter from which the winds blow most fiercely on Trapani during the winter months, and may fitly have been selected by a Trapanese writer as the home of the winds. The distance, a long way West of the Lipari islands, and a greatly longer distance West of Ithaca, is all as it should be. I accept it, therefore, and go on to look for the land of the Læstrygonians, and their city Telepylus, at some point on the North coast of Sicily between Ustica and the Lipari islands.

The name of the Læstrygonians or Workers in Stone,[6]like all names of places or people inside Sicily, is fictitious. If there had ever been any people really so called in Sicily Thucydides would have been able to find out some little, at any rate, about them; whereas he declares (vi. 2) that he cannot do so, and subrisively refers his readers to the poets, or whatever other source of information they can command. Clearly he does not believe in them except as poetical fictions concerning the most ancient inhabitants of Sicily—of whom none are known to him as more ancient than the Sicans.

But why should not the writer of theOdysseybe referring under names of her own coinage to these same Sicans, for both the Cyclopes and the Læstrygonians? The name of the Læstrygonian city, Telepylus, is certainly fictitious. It means "with gates far asunder," which can only be anex post factoname: a city receives its name long before it is known what it will prove to be in the matter of growth. All that we can gather from the name is that the writer of theOdysseyintended her audience to understand that the city was large.

Its inhabitants, like the Cyclopes, are giants and ogres. They being giants, we should look for remains of megalithic buildings, and being ogres we should suspect identity of race between them and the Cyclopes whom they so closely resemble. The writer hates them both, and looks down upon the Cyclopes much as the Normans looked down upon the Saxons for some generations after the Conquest.

The Cyclopes appear to have been subdued and outlawed; not so the Læstrygonians. These last are a flourishing and very industrious people, who work by night as well as by day (x. 84-86). There is a poor little prehistoric joke about them, to the effect that in their country a man could earn double wages if he could only do without sleep. Moreover they were so wealthy and luxurious that they used to have relays of freshmilk (x. 82, 83), instead of being contented with a morning supply, as Sicilian towns generally are even at the present day. More than this I cannot collect about them from theOdyssey.

WALL AT CEFALÙ, RISING FROM THE SEA.

MEGALITHIC REMAINS ON THE MOUNTAIN BEHIND CEFALÙ.

Can we, then, find a place answering to the description of Telepylus, on the North coast of Sicily between Ustica and the island of Lipari? I have no hesitation in saying that Cefalù will give us all we want. It has two fine examples of megalithic work. They must both of them be centuries earlier than theOdyssey. They are about three quarters of a mile apart, one, a wall rising from the sea, the other a building on the hill, behind the town, in part polygonal, and very rude, and in part of much later and singularly exquisite work—the later work being generally held to be of the Mycenæan age.

The city, therefore, must have been for those days extensive. The whole modern town is called among the common people Portazza,i.e., portaccia, or "wide gate," which is too like a corrupt mistranslation of Telepylus to allow of my passing it over.

There can, I think, be no doubt that Eryx and Cefalù were built in a very remote age by people of the same race. I have seen no other megalithic remains in Sicily than at the two places just named; I have seen remains of ancient buildings at Collesano about fifteen miles S.W. of Cefalù, which are commonly called Cyclopean, but they are very doubtful, and Dr. Orsi suspects them, I have little doubt correctly, to be Byzantine. I have also seen a few, neither striking nor yet certain ones, at Capo Schisò near Taormina. What little is left of the walls of Segesta is of a greatly later age, and I find it very difficult to think that Segesta was in existence when theOdysseywas being written.[7]I have heard of the remains of a Cyclopean acropolis behind Termini, a monograph about which by Sigr. Luigi Mauceri will be found in the British Museum. At Isnello two hours inland from Collesano a very early necropolis has been discovered not long since, and theefforts of local archæologists will, I doubt not, lead to the finding of others at or near many of the little known mountain sites in the North of Sicily; Dr. Orsi, indeed, has recently discovered the remains of a megalithic house at Pantalica some forty miles inland from Syracuse. No megalithic work, however, that has yet been found will compare in importance with the remains at Eryx and Cefalù, nor does it seem likely that any other such remains will be discovered.

Bearing in mind, then, the situation of Cefalù both as regards Ustica and Lipari, the affinity between its founders and those of Eryx as evidenced by existing remains, its great extent, and the name it still bears among the common people, I do not hesitate to accept it as the city of the Læstrygonians, nor does it affect me that the details of the harbour as given in theOdysseyhave no correspondence with the place itself. I may mention that when my friend, Mr. H. F. Jones, and myself were at Cefalù in the spring of 1896, we met a flock of goats coming into the town to be milked about five in the afternoon, and on our return from a walk we met another flock coming out after having been just milked. These two flocks must have met, and the shepherds must have saluted one another as in x. 82, 83, but unfortunately we did not happen to be at their point of meeting.

On enquiry we found that relays of fresh milk come into the town from six till eight in the morning, and from five till seven in the afternoon, and were told that there was no other town known to our informant which had more than a morning supply. At Trapani, a town with 30,000 inhabitants, there is no evening supply, and though I have no doubt that fresh milk can be had in the evening at Palermo, Catania, and Syracuse, it is not easily procurable even in these large towns, while in smaller ones, so far as I know them, it is not to be had at all. At Rome I asked the landlord of my hotel whether the goats came to be milked in the evening as in the morning, and he said it would be only in exceptional cases that they would do so.

I have now only to find the island of Calypso, which in theOdysseyis called the "navel" of the sea (i. 50), a metaphorabsolutely impossible of application to any but a solitary island, and prohibitive of either Gozo or Malta, or of the other two small islands of the same group. Calypso lives by herself and is cut off from every one else—Ulysses cannot be supposed to have other islands in sight as he sits on the sea shore weeping and looking out upon the waves. Moreover, Scheria being fixed at Trapani, Ulysses could never get there from either Gozo or Malta if he followed the directions of Calypso and steered towards the Great Bear, keeping it on his left hand. We are, therefore, compelled to look for some other island, which shall be more solitary and more S.S.W. of Trapani.

The island of Pantellaria fulfils both these conditions; true, in clear weather the coast of Africa can sometimes be just made out—I have seen it from Pantellaria, but it is not sufficiently near or sufficiently often seen to have obtruded itself on Ulysses' notice; still less so is Mt. Eryx, which can also be seen sometimes, but very rarely. No doubt the island is represented as being a good deal further off Scheria than it really was, but the liberty taken in this respect is not greater than is generally conceded in poetry.

As, therefore, the writer begins the voyage, when Ulysses is once clear of Trapani, with an island interesting to herself and her audience as being well within their ken, so she ends it with another island which has like claims on her and their attention.

[1]In theOdysseymore generally called Same.

[2]The name Favognana is derived from Favonius, this wind blowing on to Trapani from off the island. It is, however, also and perhaps most frequently called Favignana.

[3]Gr. Τὴν γὰρ δή μιν ἄνωγε Καλυψὼ δῖα θεάων ποντοπορευέμεναι ἐπ᾽ ἀριστερὰ χειρὸς ἔχοντα.

[4]We may neglect the Pleiades, as introduced simply because they are in the Iliadic passage (xviii. 486-489) which the writer of theOdysseyis adopting with no other change than taking out the Hyades and Orion, and substituting Boötes. This she was bound to do, for she could not make Ulysses steer towards both the Bear and Orion, when she is just going to tell us, as theIliaddoes, that Orion is on the other side of the sky. The Pleiades she has allowed to stand—which of us knows in what quarter of the heavens (let alone the Precession of the Equinoxes) they are to be looked for?—and it is made quite clear that the Bear is the constellation by which Ulysses is steering.

[5]At Messina a few months since I saw a printed handbill about the hours when the boat would start for Reggio, in which Italy was called "Terra firma," as though a sense of instability attached itself to any island.

[6]The name seems derived from λᾶας, τρυγάω, and αἶα, Œnotria is from οἶνος, τρυγάω, and αἶα. I have read, but forget where, that Œnotria is only a Greek rendering of Italia, which is derived fromvites, alo, and some Latin equivalent for αἶα. The modern Italian wordlastricare, "to pave roads with stone," is probably derived from the same roots asLæstrygonian.

[7]Segesta would have been seen from the top of Mt. Eryx gleaming in the summer sunset, and I think there would have been some kind of allusion to it.

FURTHER DETAILS REGARDING THE VOYAGES OF ULYSSES, TO CONFIRM THE VIEW THAT THEY WERE MAINLY A SAIL ROUND SICILY, BEGINNING AND ENDING WITH MT. ERYX AND TRAPANI.

What I have said in the preceding chapter should be enough to establish that the course taken by Ulysses was the one indicated in my map, but I have remarks to make on the Cyclopes, the wall round the island of Æolus, the Sirens, the Wandering Cliffs, and other matters connected with the voyages which I have reserved in order to keep the general view more broad and simple.

The habitat of the Cyclopes on Mt. Eryx is the point which it is most incumbent on me to establish, for if this be conceded, and both Scylla and Charybdis, and Scheria be taken as found, all the other places fall so spontaneously on to the sites I have marked for them, that I fear no dispute concerning them. Let us turn, then, to Favognana and accept it for the moment as the island on which Ulysses hunted the goats.

Why, I wonder, was the author so careful to invoke a thick darkness, so pompous and circumstantial, and to pilot Ulysses into the harbour of this island by divine assistance, rather than permit him to look about him and see the land, which was "not very far" off.

The answer is "not very far" to seek. If Ulysses had seen the main land of Sicily as he approached it from that of the Lotus-eaters, he would have been sure to have followed it up, and in this case he would have been taken straight into Trapani harbour. Now, though the writer, as all the audience would know, had already dealt with Trapani, as the last point in all Ulysses' voyages, Ulysses himself ought not to know anything about it till he comes to it in due course.

The cave of Polyphemus—still called among the peasantsla grotta di Polifemo—was some six or seven miles North ofTrapani; Ulysses had got to be taken there, and if possible, without unsettling either his own mind or that of the audience by showing him a city which eight years later he was to know as Scheria. He could, with the help of a little mist, be just supposed to go from the island of Favognana to the promontory of Pizzolungo and the cave of Polyphemus, without seeing the city of the Phæacians if he did not look particularly hard in that direction, but even Ulysses would have been compelled to take note of Scheria if he had been allowed to go on till he reached its harbour. It was better, therefore, that some god should take him to the island without letting him see any other land at all, and hence the intense darkness which the writer has been so careful to describe. We shall see that later on (as regards the supposed time, though earlier in the structure of her poem) she invokes a darkness which makes it impossible for Ulysses to form any idea of his whereabouts, in exactly the same place, and for the same reasons (v. 291-294)—for here too it is necessary to get Ulysses from a point South of Trapani, to another on the North side of it without seeing the town.

My map of the Ægadean islands (p. 177) combined with that of Trapani and Mt. Eryx (p. 164) will show the course Ulysses would make from Favognana to theGrotta di Polifemo—which is [by] far the largest cave near Trapani, and is still used as a place in which to keep a large flock of sheep by night. The two rocks which Polyphemus threw should be seen, the first as the Asinelli,[1]and the second as the two small islands called Formiche, which, being close together, are taken as one.

I find, therefore, in the care taken to prevent Ulysses from seeing Trapani, a considerable argument for the belief that Favognana was the island where Ulysses hunted the goats, and that the cave of Polyphemus was on Mt. Eryx.

Another indication, though one of no great strength, seems to suggest that the Cyclopes were still near neighbours of the Phæacians.

At the beginning of Book vi. we learn that the Phæacians used to live at a place called Hypereia, "near the lawless Cyclopes," but had of late years been moved to Scheria, which, as I have said, means Jutland. In a passage which I have not given in my abridgement Alcinous says casually (vii. 205, 206) that the Phæacians are as closely related to the gods as the Cyclopes and the giants are. Passing over the fact that Alcinous, being grandson to Neptune, was half nephew to Polyphemus, the spontaneousness with which the Cyclopes rise to his mind suggests that though less near than they had been, they were still about the nearest neighbours that he had.

The giants are only the Cyclopes over again, and are doubtless the descendants of the people who built the noble megalithic walls of Eryx. Hypereia, or Upper-town, was probably at the Eastern end of the top of Mt. Eryx on a site where a very ancient wall, of totally different character to those of the Sican city at the West end of the mountain, may yet be traced. The remains of this wall are just above theRuccazzù dei Corvi, in Count Pepoli's grounds, and were first shown me by the Count. A stranger is little likely to find them unless conducted by one who has seen them.

As regards Hypereia I would repeat that all the names of places in Sicily with one partial exception are fictitious, even Trinacria, which Thucydides tells us was the most ancient name of Sicily, becoming "the Thrinacian," or "three-pointed," island; whereas as soon as we are outside Sicily the names are real. This affords ground for thinking that the writer was drawing real people as well as real places, and travestying them under flimsy disguises that she knew her audience would see through. Once only is the mask dropped for a moment, when Ulysses says that he had just come from Sicania (xxiv. 307), but this does not count, for Ulysses is supposed to be lying.

The name Cyclopes, for example, or "round faces"—for there is nothing in the word to show that it means anything else than this, and I see from Liddell & Scott that Parmenides calls the moon Cyclops—is merely an author's nick name. If μήλωψ means "apple-faced," κύκλωψ should mean "circle-faced."As there is nothing in the word, so neither is there in theOdyssey, to suggest that the Cyclopes were a people with only one round eye in the middle of their foreheads. Such a marked feature does not go without saying,[2]and that it did not go with the earliest Greek artists appears from the fact that they always gave Polyphemus two eyes. It is not till Roman times that he becomes monophthalmic, and theOdysseygives him eyebrows in the plural (ix. 389), which involve eyes in the plural also. True, the writer only blinds one eye, but she could trust to the sympathetic inflammation which so serious an injury would excite in the other eye, and would consider that she had sufficiently blinded both by roasting one of them. One eye alone was blinded, not because Polyphemus had not got two, but because his pole had not got two prongs, and the writer saw neither how to get a bifurcated instrument into the cave, nor how to wield it now that so many of the men had been eaten.

"Cyclopes," therefore, we may be sure, means nothing more than "moon-faced." The name Polyphemus is found as that of a hero in theIliad, and is perhaps a pseudonym for the local giant (if there was one) taken from that poem. "Whatever his name may have been, and whether he was a pre-Odyssean giant, or whether the writer of theOdysseycalled him into being, he exists now under the name of Conturràno. I have sometimes wondered whether this name may have any connection with the Greek words κόντος and οὐρανός, and may indicate that the giant was so tall as to be able to knock a hole in the sky with his staff. Should this be so, his name, as likely as not was Conturràno, or something near it, in the days of theOdyssey, and it was with the κόντος commemorated in his own name that Ulysses blinded him. The giant has grown greatly since theOdysseywas written, and large as thegrotta di Polifemois, he could never get inside it; for he restshis feet on the plain while he props his stomach on the top of Mt. Eryx, and bending forward plunges his huge hands into the sea between Bonagia and Cofàno, to catch tunnies. When disturbed he tears great rocks from the top of Mt. Eryx, and dashes them at all who interrupt him.

To repeat and to sum up, for I will argue this point no further; I take the Cyclopes to be the conquered remnant of the old Sican inhabitants of Mt. Eryx. They owe their gigantic stature to the huge size of the stones with which the walls of their city on Mt. Eryx were built. These stones show few or no signs of having been worked with a tool of hardened bronze or iron, save in so far as the Phœnicians may have trimmed them here and there when they rebuilt the walls, in part,de novo, with stones some of which bear quarry-men's marks in Phœnician characters.[3]The old Sican work, a good deal of which has been allowed to stand, belongs to the true megalithic age, when it was cheaper to carry than to cut; later generations, failing to consider the revolution which the introduction of improved methods of cutting had effected, argued that the men who built with such large stones must have been large men, whereas in reality they were only economical men.

As soon as it became cheaper to cut than to carry, the huge unwieldy blocks that we see at Eryx, at Cefalù, and at Segni, Arpino, Allatri, and many another city in Southern Italy, became obsolete, but it was still long before all irregularity in the courses was abandoned for that perfect regularity which we find at Syracuse, Selinunte, the temple of Segesta, and nearly all the Greek and Roman architecture of historic times. Indeed I know many buildings as late as the tenth century after Christ, in which the courses are far from regular; nevertheless the tendency, almost immediately after cutting had become cheaper, was towards greater regularity of courses and the use of smaller stones, until there arose another megalithicism, of a kind diametrically opposed to that of the earlier builders—I mean the megalithicism of display.

H. FESTING JONES, ESQ. (height 6 ft. 2 in.) IN FLUTE OF COLUMN AT SELINUNTE.

REMAINS OF MEGALITHIC WALLS ON MT. ERYX.

There are stones at Selinunte, used in buildings of the fifth century before Christ, that are larger than the largest at Eryx or Cefalù; there are columns thirteen feet in diameter at the base, and in a flute of which my friend Mr. H. F. Jones could stand; but they are written all over in clear though invisible characters with the word "Glory," whereas the stones at Eryx bear not less clearly the word "Economy." I do not think that any true megalithic polygonal walls not worked with metal can be dated much later than 2000 B.C. By the time we reach such buildings as the Treasury of Atreus at Mycene, or the Iliadic wall of Hissarlik (which, however, is built in far less regular courses), cutting, whether with chisels of hardened bronze, or more probably by that time with iron, has ceased to be troublesome; nevertheless as late as Hesiod, who is not generally dated earlier than 1000 B.C., the memory of an age when "as yet swart iron was not," had not been lost. (Works and Days, 148-151.)

Furthermore, I would ask the reader to remark how closely the description of the Cyclopes in theOdysseytallies with that of the modern Sicilian brigands published in theTimesof September 24th, 1892.

The writer—Mr. Stigand—says:—

S. Mauro, the headquarters of the brigands, is a town on the top of a mountain 3000 feet high, and in sight of Geraci Siculo, another town of about the same height, and of Pollina, also on the summit of another mountain. The roads among the mountains, connecting these towns, are mere mule paths. The mountains abound in caves known only to the brigands and shepherds.

TheOdysseysays of the Cyclopes:—

They have neither places of assembly nor laws, but they live in caves on the tops of high mountains; each one of them rules over his own wife and children, and they take no account of any one else (ix. 112-115).

I saw several families of cave-dwellers at a place calledle grotte degli Scuration Cofàno about fifteen miles North of Trapani. There was, however, nothing of the Cyclops about them. Their caves were most beautifully clean and as comfortableas the best class of English cottages. The people, who were most kind and hospitable, were more fair than dark, and might very well have passed for English. They provided us with snow white table cloths and napkins for the lunch which we had brought from Trapani, and they gave us any quantity of almonds fried in a little salt and butter; most unexpected of all, the salt they brought us was mixed with chervil seed. There was an atrocious case of brigandage on Cofàno about a fortnight later than our pic-nic. A Palermo merchant was kept a whole month on the mountain till he was ransomed, but I am sure that our cave-dwellers had nothing to do with it. The caves bore traces of prehistoric man by way of ancient meals now petrified.

It is noticeable that forms of the word σπέος or ἄντρον (cave) appear forty-five times in theOdysseyas against only six in theIliad, which, allowing for the greater length of the last named poem, is about in the proportion of 10:1. We may surmise, therefore, that theOdysseyhails from a district in which caves abounded.

As regards "the wall of bronze" which the writer of theOdysseytells us ran round the island of Æolus, it is hard to say whether it was purely fiction or no. We may be sure that it was no more made of bronze than Æolus was king of the winds, but all round the island of Marettimo, wherever the cliffs do not protect it naturally, there existed a wall of long pre-Odyssean construction, traces of which were shown me by Sigr. Tedesco and Professor Spadaro, without whose assistance I should not have observed them. I have sometimes wondered whether the writer may not have transferred this wall to Ustica, as we shall see later that she transferred the hump on Thersites' back to that of Eurybates; but no traces of any such wall exist so far as I know on Ustica, nor yet on the islands of Favognana or Levanzo. The ancient name of Marettimo was Hiera, and about 1,900 feet above the sea I was shown ruins (not striking) of exceedingly ancient walls on a small plateau which the inhabitants dare not cross by night, and which is believed to have been the site of the cult that gave its name to the island.

What I have to say about Circe's island is so speculative that I write it in fear and trembling. I see that Circe's house is, like Eumæus's pig farm, "in a place that can be seen from far" (x. 211), and I see also that Ulysses approaches it "over the top of the mountain" (x. 281), as he does Eumæus's hut (xiv. 2). I remember the pigs, and I cannot refrain from thinking that though the writer tells us in the first instance that the island was a low one (x. 196), her inability to get away from her own surroundings is too much for her, and she is drifting on to the top of Mt. Eryx and Eumæus's pig farm. She does not mean to have pigs at first—the men whom Circe bewitched on previous occasions were turned into wolves and lions—but the force of association is too strong for her, and Ulysses' men are turned into pigs after all.

The fall of Elpenor from the top of Circe's house is a very singular way of killing him. If he had been at Eumæus's hut she could not have killed him more naturally than by letting him tumble off the precipice that overhangs it, and on the top of which the temple of Venus stood in later ages. I suspect, not without shame, that the wall of Circe's house is made to do duty for this precipice.

On the island of Panaria, anciently Enonymus, among the Lipari group, there is a small bay called La Caletta dei Zummari, which suggests a corruption of Cimmerii, but I have already explained that no attempt should be made to localise the journey to Hades.

The two Sirens can be placed with, I should say, confidence, on the island of Salina anciently called Didyme from the two high mountains, each about 3000 feet high, of which it consists. Sudden cat's paws of very violent wind descend at times from all high points near the sea in this part of the Mediterranean, as from Cofàno near Trapani, where there is a saying among the fishermen "ware Cofàno." My friend, Signor E. Biaggini, whose loss I have to deplore within the last twelve months, and who has furnished me over and over again with local details, told me that he once was all but capsized by a gust from Cofàno, that came down on his boat in perfectly calm weather, and lasted hardly more than a few seconds. I take itthat the two Sirens—who are always winged in the earlier Greek representations of them—were, as indeed their name suggests, the whistling gusts or avalanches of air that descended without the slightest warning from the two mountains of Didyme. The story turned from poetry into prose means, "Woe to him who draws near the two treacherous mountains of Didyme; the coast is strewn with wreckage, and if he hears the wind from off them shriek in his rigging his bones will whiten the shore." The reader will remember that the Sirens' island is very near Circe's.

Speaking of the Æolian islands Admiral Smyth says:—

Whether from the heat of the water by volcanic springs, the steam of Vulcanella, the incessant hot injections from Stromboli, or all of them added to the general temperature, it is certain that there are more frequent changes in this group than in the neighbourhood (The Mediterranean, Parkers, 1854, p. 250).

Speaking, again, of the Straits of Messina, he says:—

Precautions should also be taken against the heavy gusts, which at times, from the mountainous nature of the coasts, rush down the Fuimare, and are dangerous to small vessels. I have twice, with grief, seen the neglect of them prove fatal (Sicily and its Islands, Murray, 1824, p. 111).

The reason why the poetess found herself in such difficulties about the Wandering Cliffs, is because the story, as Buttmann has said, does not refer to any two islands in particular, but is derived from traveller's tales about the difficulties of navigating the Lipari islands as a whole. "They close in upon you," it was said, "so quickly one after another that a bird can hardly get through them." The "hurricanes of fire," moreover (xii. 68), suggest an allusion to the volcanic nature of the Æolian islands generally. Still more so does the dark cloud that never leaves the top of Scylla's rock (xii. 74) neither in summer nor winter.

The terrors of Scylla and Charybdis are exaggerated in the same poetic vein as the Sirens and the Wandering Cliffs. Instead of its being possible to shoot an arrow from the one to the other, they are about eight miles apart. We ought not tolook for the accuracy of one of Mr. Murray's handbooks in a narrative that tells us of a monster with six heads and three rows of teeth. It is enough if there are a few grains of truth, and these there are: for Scylla is a high rock looking West, and Charybdis is (for those days) a formidable whirlpool, on the other side the Straits, off lower ground, and hard by the approach to a three pointed island. According to Admiral Smyth it is just outside Messina harbour, and is now called Galofaro. Admiral Smyth says of it:—

To the undecked boats of the Rhegians, Locrians, Zancleans and Greeks, it must have been formidable for even in the present day small craft are sometimes endangered by it, and I have seen several men-of-war, and even a seventy-four-gun, ship, whirled round on its surface; but by using due caution there is generally very little danger or inconvenience to be apprehended (Sicily and its Islands, Murray, 1824, p. 123).

I do not doubt that the Galofaro is the nucleus round which the story of Charybdis gathered, but I have seen considerable disturbance in the sea all through the Straits of Messina. Very much depends upon the state of the winds, which sometimes bank the water up in the angle between the toe of Italy and the North coast of Sicily, on which a current and strong eddies occur in the Straits of Messina. At other times there is hardly anything noticeable.

Passing over the nine days drifting in the sea, which take Ulysses from Charybdis to the island of Calypso,i.e. Pantellaria—and we may be sure he would have been made to take longer time if the writer had dared to keep him longer without food and water—it only remains for me to deal at somewhat fuller length than I have yet done with the voyage from Pantelleria to Trapani. On the eighteenth day after Ulysses had left Pantellaria, steering towards the Great Bear, but keeping it on his left, he saw the long low line of the Lilybæan coast rising on the horizon. He does not appear to have seen the island of Favognana, which must have been quite near, and it was perhaps as well that he did not, for he could hardly have failed to recognise it as the one on which he had huntedthe goats some eight or nine years previously, and this might have puzzled him.

But though he is allowed to see the land he must not be permitted to follow it up, or, as I have explained already, he would have gone straight into the harbour of Scheria, whereas he is particularly wanted to meet Nausicaa on the North side of the town, and to know nothing about Scheria till she brings him to it. Neptune, therefore, is made to catch sight of him at this moment and to raise a frightful hurricane; sea and sky become obscured in clouds, with a darkness as dense as night (v. 291-294), and thus Ulysses is carried a long distance apparently to the North, for when he has been taken far enough, Minerva blows him two days and two nights before a North wind, and hence Southwards, till he reaches the harbour near which Nausicaa can meet him.

There are no other such noticeable darknesses in theOdyssey, as this and the one of Book ix. 144, alluded to on p. 188. They both occur in the same place, and for the same reason—to keep the town of Scheria in reserve.

I have now shown that all the Ithacan scenes of theOdysseyare drawn with singular fidelity from Trapani and its neighbourhood, as also all the Scherian; moreover, I have shown that the Ionian islands are in reality drawn from the Ægadean group off Trapani; lastly I have shown that the voyage of Ulysses in effect begins with Trapani and ends with Trapani again. I need not deal with Pylos and Lacedæmon beyond showing that they were far removed from the knowledge of either writer or audience.

There is not a single natural feature mentioned in either case. The impossible journey of Telemachus and Pisistratus from Pheræ to Lacedæmon in a chariot and pair over the lofty, and even now roadless, range of Mt. Taygetus, causes no uneasiness to the writer. She gives no hint of any mountain to be crossed—from which we may infer, either that she knew nothing of the country between Pylos and Lacedæmon, or that at any rate her audience would not do so. It may, however,be remarked that the West wind which Minerva provided in order to take Telemachus from Ithaca to Pylos, was more suitable for taking him from Sicily. A North wind would have been better for him if he had been coming from the real Ithaca, but Minerva manages things so strangely that I would not press this point.

[1]The Asinelli is a single islet much in the shape of a ship heading straight for Favognana. There is nothing plural about it, and one does not see why it should have a plural name. Who were the "asses" or "fools"?

[2]Virgil does not let it pass unnoticed. He writes:—"Cernimus adstantes nequidquam lumine torvoÆtnæos fratres,....Æn. III. 667, 678.He calls the Cyclopes "Ætnæan" because he places them on Mt. Etna.

[2]Virgil does not let it pass unnoticed. He writes:—

"Cernimus adstantes nequidquam lumine torvoÆtnæos fratres,....Æn. III. 667, 678.

He calls the Cyclopes "Ætnæan" because he places them on Mt. Etna.

[3]There is no Phœnician work in the bastion shown in my illustration, the restorations here are medieval.

I believe the reader will by this time feel no doubt, from my earlier Chapters that theOdysseywas written by one woman, and from my later ones that this woman knew no other neighbourhood than that of Trapani, and therefore must be held to have lived and written there.

Who, then, was she?

I cannot answer this question with the confidence that I have felt hitherto. So far I have been able to demonstrate the main points of my argument; on this, the most interesting question of all, I can offer nothing stronger than presumption.

We have to find a woman of Trapani, young, fearless, self-willed, and exceedingly jealous for the honour of her sex. She seems to have moved in the best society of her age and country, for we can imagine none more polished on the West coast of Sicily in Odyssean times than the one with which the writer shews herself familiar. She must have had leisure, or she could not have carried through so great a work. She puts up with men when they are necessary or illustrious, but she is never enthusiastic about them, and likes them best when she is laughing at them; but she is cordially interested in fair and famous women.

I think she should be looked for in the household of the person whom she is travestying under the name of King Alcinous. The care with which his pedigree and that of his wife Arete is explained (vii. 54-77), and the warmth of affectionate admiration with which Arete is always treated, have the same genuine flavour that has led scholars to see true history and personal interest in the pedigree of Æneas given inIl. xx. 200-241. Moreover, she must be a sufficiently intimate member of the household to be able to laugh at itshead as much as she chose. No pedigree of any of the otherdramatis personæof theOdysseyis given save that of Theoclymenus, whose presence in the poem at all requires more explanation than I can give. I can only note that he was of august descent, more than sub-clerical, and of a different stamp from any other character to whom we are introduced.

The fact that the writer should be looked for in a member of King Alcinous' household seems further supported by the zest with which this household and garden are described (vii. 81-132), despite the obviously subrisive exaggeration which pervades the telling. There is no such zest in the description of any other household, and the evident pleasure which the writer takes in it is more like that of a person drawing her own home, than either describing some one else's or creating an imaginary scene. See how having begun in the past tense she slides involuntarily into the present as soon as she comes to the women of the house and to the garden. She never does this in any other of her descriptions.

Lastly, she must be looked for in one to whom the girl described as Nausicaa was all in all. No one else is drawn with like livingness and enthusiasm, and no other episode is written with the same, or nearly the same, buoyancy of spirits and resiliency of pulse and movement, or brings the scene before us with anything approaching the same freshness, as that in which Nausicaa takes the family linen to the washing cisterns. The whole of Book vi. can only have been written by one who was throwing herself into it heart and soul.

All the three last paragraphs are based on the supposition that the writer was drawing real people. That she was drawing a real place, lived at that place, and knew no other, does not admit of further question; we can pin the writer down here by reason of the closeness with which she has kept to natural features that remain much as they were when she pourtrayed them; but no traces of Alcinous's house and garden, nor of the inmates of his household will be even looked for by any sane person; it is open, therefore, to an objector to contend that though the writer does indeed appear to have drawn permanent features from life, we have no evidence thatshe drew houses and gardens and men and women from anything but her own imagination.

Granted; but surely, in the first place, if we find her keeping to her own neighbourhood as closely as she can whenever the permanency of the features described enables us to be certain of what she did, there is a presumption that she was doing the same thing in cases where the evidence has been too fleeting to allow of our bringing her to book. And secondly, we have abundant evidence that the writer did not like inventing.

Richly endowed with that highest kind of imagination which consists in wise selection and judicious application of materials derived from life, she fails, as she was sure to do, when cut off from a base of operation in her own surroundings. This appears most plainly in the three books which tell of the adventures of Ulysses after he has left Mt. Eryx and the Cyclopes. There is no local detail in the places described; nothing, in fact, but a general itinerary such as she could easily get from the mariners of her native town. With this she manages to rub along, helping herself out with fragments taken from nearer home, but there is no approach to such plausible invention as we find inGulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, orPilgrim's Progress; and when she puts a description of the land of Hades into the mouth of Circe (x. 508-515)—which she is aware must be something unlike anything she had ever witnessed—she breaks down and gives us a scene which carries no conviction. Fortunately not much detail is necessary here; in Ithaca, however, a great deal is wanted, and feeling invention beyond her strength she does not even attempt it, but has recourse with the utmost frankness to places with which she is familiar.

Not only does she shirk invention as much as possible in respect of natural features, but she does so also as regards incident. She can vilipend her neighbours on Mt. Eryx as the people at Trapani continue doing to this day, for there is no love lost between the men of Trapani and those of Mte. S. Giuliano, as Eryx is now called. She knows Ustica: the wind comes thence, and she can make something out of that; then there is the other great Sican city of Cefalù—a point can bemade here; but with the Lipari islands her material is running short. She has ten years to kill, for which, however, eight or eight-and-a-half may be made to pass. She cannot have killed more than three months before she lands her hero on Circe's island; here, then, in pity's name let him stay for at any rate twelve months—which he accordingly does.

She soon runs through her resources for the Sirens' island, and Scylla and Charybdis; she knows that there is nothing to interest her on the West coast of Sicily below Taormina—for Syracuse (to which I will return) was still a small pre-Corinthian settlement, while on the South coast we have no reason to believe that there was any pre-Hellenic city. What, she asked herself, could she do but shut Ulysses up in the most lonely island she could think of—the one from which he would have the least chance of escaping—for the remainder of his term? She chose, therefore, the island which the modern Italian Government has chosen, for exactly the same reasons, as the one in which to confine those who cannot be left at large—the island of Pantellaria; but she was not going to burden Calypso for seven long years with all Ulysses' men, so his ship had better be wrecked.

This way out of the difficulty does not indicate a writer of fecund or mature invention. She knew the existence of Sardinia, for Ulysses smiles a grim Sardinian smile (xx. 302). Why not send him there, and describe it with details taken not from the North side of Trapani but from the South? Or she need not have given details at all—she might have sent him very long journeys extending over ever so many years in half a page. If she had been of an inventive turn there were abundant means of keeping him occupied without having recourse to the cheap and undignified expedient of shutting him up first for a year in one island, and then for seven in another. Having made herself so noble a peg on which to hang more travel and adventure, she would have hung more upon it, had either strength or inclination pointed in that direction. It is one of the commonplaces of Homeric scholars to speak of the voyages of Ulysses as "a story of adventurous travel." So in a waythey are, but one can see all through that the writer is trying to reduce the adventurous travel to a minimum.

See how hard put to it she is when she is away from her own actual surroundings. She does not repeat her incidents so long as she is at home, for she has plenty of material to draw from; when she is away from home, do what she may, she cannot realise things so easily, and has a tendency to fall back on something she has already done. Thus, at Pylos, she repeats the miraculous flight of Minerva (iii. 372) which she had used i. 320. On reaching the land of the Læstrygonians Ulysses climbs a high rock to reconnoitre, and sees no sign of inhabitants save only smoke rising from the ground—at the very next place he comes to he again climbs a high rock to reconnoitre, and apparently sees no sign of inhabitants but only the smoke of Circe's house rising from the middle of a wood. He is conducted to the house of Alcinous by a girl who had come out of the town to fetch a pitcher of water (vii. 20); this is repeated (x. 105) when Ulysses' men are conducted to the house of the Læstrygonian Antiphates, by a girl who had come out of the town to fetch a pitcher of water. The writer has invented a sleep to ruin Ulysses just as he was well in sight of Ithaca (x. 31, &c.). This is not good invention, for such a moment is the very last in which Ulysses would be likely to feel sleepy—but the effort of inventing something else to ruin him when his men are hankering after the cattle of the Sun is quite too much for her, and she repeats (xii. 366) the sleep which had proved so effectual already. So, as I have said above, she repeats the darkness on each occasion when Ulysses seems likely to stumble upon Trapani. Calypso, having been invented once, must do duty again as Circe—orvice versâ, for Book x. was probably written before Book v.

Such frequent examples of what I can only call consecutive octaves indicate a writer to whom invention does not come easily, and who is not likely to have recourse to it more than she can help. Having shown this as regards both places and incidents, it only remains to point out that the writer's dislike of invention extends to the invention of people as well as places. The principal characters in theOdysseyare of all of themScherian. Nestor, Ulysses, Menelaus and Alcinous are every one of them the same person playing other parts, and the greater zest with which Alcinous is drawn suggests, as I have said in an earlier Chapter, that the original from whom they are all taken was better known to the writer in the part of Alcinous than in that of any of the other three. Penelope, Helen, and Arete are only one person, and I always suspect Penelope to be truer to the original than either of the other two. Idothea and Ino are both of them Nausicaa; so also are Circe and Calypso, only made up a little older, and doing as the writer thinks Nausicaa would do if she were a goddess and had an establishment of her own. I am more doubtful about these two last, for they both seem somewhat more free from that man-hatred which Nausicaa hardly attempts to conceal. Still, Nausicaa contemplates marrying as soon as she can find the right person, and, as we have seen, neither Circe nor Calypso had a single man-servant of their own, while Circe was in the habit of turning all men who came near her into pigs or wild beasts. Calypso, moreover, is only made a little angry by being compelled to send Ulysses away. She does not seem to have been broken-hearted about it. Neither of them, therefore, must be held to be more fond of men than the convenience of the poem dictated. Even the common people of Ithaca are Scherians, and make exactly the same fault-finding ill-natured remarks about Penelope (xxiii. 149-151) as the Phæacians did about Nausicaa in Book vi. 273-288.

If, then, we observe that where the writer's invention is more laboured she is describing places foreign to her own neighbourhood, while when she carries conviction she is at or near her own home, the presumption becomes very strong that the more spontaneous scenes are not so much invention as a rendering of the writer's environment, to which it is plain that she is passionately attached, however much she may sometimes gird at it. I, therefore, dismiss the supposition of my supposed objector that the writer was not drawing Alcinous' household and garden from life, and am confirmed in this opinion by remembering that the house of Ulysses correspondsperfectly with that of Alcinous—even to the number of the women servants kept in each establishment.

Being limited to a young woman who was an intimate member of Alcinous' household, we have only to choose between some dependant who idolised Nausicaa and wished to celebrate her with all her surroundings, or Nausicaa (whatever her real name may have been) herself. Or again, it may be urged that the poem was written by some bosom friend of Nausicaa's who was very intimate with the family, as for example Captain Dymas's daughter.

The intimate friend theory may be dismissed at once. High spirited girls, brilliant enough to write theOdysseyare not so self effacing as to keep themselves entirely out of sight. If a friend had written the washing day episode, the friend would have come a washing too—especially after having said she would in Nausicaa's dream.

If, again, a dependant had written it, Nausicaa would neither have had the heart nor the power to suppress her altogether; for if she tried to do so the dependant—so daring and self-willed as the writer proves herself to be—would have been more than a match for her mistress. We may be sure that there were not two such spirits in Trapani, as we must suppose if we make Nausicaa able to bow the will of the authoress of theOdyssey. The fact that in the washing day episode, so far as possible, we find Nausicaa, all Nausicaa, and nothing but Nausicaa, among the femaledramatis personæ, indicates that she was herself the young woman of Trapani, a member of the household of King Alcinous, whom we have got to find, and that she was giving herself the little niche in her work which a girl who was writing such a work was sure to give herself.

A dependant would not have dared to laugh at Alcinous with such playful malice as the writer has done. Again she would have made more of Nausicaa herself in the scenes that follow. At present she is left rather as a ragged edge, and says good bye to Ulysses in Book viii. 460, &c., with much less detail, both as regards her own speech and that of Ulysses in reply, than a courtier-like dependant would have permitted.She does not hear Ulysses' account of his adventures—which she might perfectly well have done under her mother's wing. She does not appear to take her meals with the rest of the family at all. When she returns from washing, Eurymedusa brings her supper into her own room. She is not present at any of Alcinous' banquets, nor yet at the games, and her absence from the farewell scene in Book xiii. is too marked to be anything but intentional. It seems as though she wished the reader to understand that she lived apart, and however much she might enjoy an outing with her maids, would have nothing to do with the men who came night after night drinking her father's best wine, and making havoc of his estate. She almost calls these people scoundrels to their faces by saying that they always made the final drink offering of the evening not to Jove but to Mercury, the god of thieves (vii. 137) In passing, I may say that the strangeness of the manner in which Nausicaa says good bye to Ulysses is one of the many things which convince me that theOdysseyhas never been recast by a later hand. A person recasting the work would have been tolerably sure to have transferred the leave-taking to Book xiii.

Nausicaa, again, would have been more than human if she had permitted any one but herself to put into her month the ill-natured talk about her which she alleges to pass current among the Phæacians. She would not mind saying it herself when her audience, private or public, would know that she was doing so, but a dependant would have been requested to be less pungent.

I admit as I have already done that these arguments are not absolutely demonstrative, but it being, I may say, demonstrated that we must choose between Nausicaa and some other young woman of Trapani who lived in, or was very closely intimate with, the household of King Alcinous, I have no hesitation in saying that I think Nausicaa herself more likely than this other unknown young woman to have been the writer we are seeking.

Let the reader look at my frontispiece and say whether he would find the smallest difficulty in crediting the original of the portrait with being able to write theOdyssey. Would he refuse so to credit her merely because all he happened to know about her for certain was that she once went out washingclothes with her attendants? Nausicaa enjoyed a jaunt on a fine spring morning and helped her maids at the washing cisterns; therefore it is absurd to suppose that she could have written theOdyssey. I venture to think that this argument will carry little weight outside the rank and file of our Homerists—greatly as I dislike connecting this word however remotely with theOdyssey.

No artist can reach an ideal higher than his own best actual environment. Trying to materially improve upon that with which he or she is fairly familiar invariably ends in failure. It is only adjuncts that may be arranged and varied—the essence may be taken or left, but it must not be bettered. The attempt to take nature and be content with her save in respect of details which after all are unimportant, leads to Donatello, Giovanni Bellini, Holbein, Rembrandt, and De Hooghe—the attempt to improve upon her leads straight to Michael Angelo and thebarocco, to Turner and the modern drop scene. There is not a trace of thebaroccoin my frontispiece; we may be confident, therefore, that such women, though doubtless comparatively rare, yet existed, as they exist in Italy now, in considerable numbers. Is it a very great stretch of imagination to suppose that one among them may have shown to equal advantage whether as driver, washerwoman, or poetess? At the same time I think it highly probable that the writer of theOdysseywas both short and plain, and was laughing at herself, and intending to make her audience laugh also, by describing herself as tall and beautiful. She may have been either plain or beautiful without its affecting the argument.

I wish I could find some one who would give me any serious reason why Nausicaa should not have written theOdyssey. For the last five years I have pestered every scholar with whom I have been able to scrape acquaintance, by asking him to explain why theOdysseyshould not have been written by a young woman. One or two have said that they could see none whatever, but should not like to commit themselves to a definite opinion without looking at the work again. One well-known and very able writer said that when he had first heard of the question as being mooted, he had supposed it to be someparadox of my own, but on taking up theOdysseyhe had hardly read a hundred lines before he found himself saying "Why of course it is." The greater number, however, gave me to understand that they should not find it a difficult matter to expose the absurdity of my contention if they were not otherwise employed, but that for the present they must wish me a very good morning. They gave me nothing, but to do them justice before I had talked with them for five minutes I saw that they had nothing to give with which I was not already familiar. TheOdysseyis far too easy, simple, and straight-forward for the understanding of scholars—as I said in myLife of Dr. Butler of Shrewsbury, if it had been harder to understand, it would have been sooner understood—and yet I do not know; theIliadis indeed much harder to understand, but scholars seem to have been very sufficiently able to misunderstand it.

Every scholar has read a Book or two of theOdysseyhere and there; some have read the whole; a few have read it through more than once; but none that I have asked have so much as been able to tell me whether Ulysses had a sister or no—much less what her name was. Not one of those whom I have as yet had the good fortune to meet in England—for I have met with such in Sicily—have saturated themselves with the poem, and that, too, unhampered by a single preconceived idea in connection with it. Nothing short of this is of the smallest use.

THE DATE OF THE POEM, AND A COMPARISON OF THE STATE OF THE NORTH WESTERN PART OF SICILY AS REVEALED TO US IN THE ODYSSEY, WITH THE ACCOUNT GIVEN BY THUCYDIDES OF THE SAME TERRITORY IN THE EARLIEST KNOWN TIMES.

The view that theOdysseywas written at Trapani will throw unexpected light upon the date of the poem. We can never date it within a hundred years or so, but I shall attempt to show that we must place it very little, if at all, later than 1050, and not earlier than 1150 B.C.

I see that I may claim Professor Jebb's authority as to some extent, at any rate, supporting the later of these two dates. He writes:—

With regard to the age of theOdyssey, we may suppose that the original "Return" was composed in Greece Proper as early as the Eleventh Century B.C., and that the first enlargement had been made before 850 B.C.[1]

I have shown why I cannot admit that any part of theOdysseywas written in Greece Proper, and while admitting that the poem has been obviously enlarged by the addition of Books i.-iv. and line 187 of Book xiii.-xxiv., with which I will deal fully in a later Chapter—I cannot think that the enlargement was by another hand than that of the authoress of the poem in its original form. Nevertheless I am glad to claim Professor Jebb's support as far as it goes, for dating the inception of theOdysseyas in the eleventh century B.C.

I will begin by giving my reasons for thinking that theOdysseymust at any rate be earlier than 734 B.C.

When Eumæus is telling the story of his childhood to Ulysses (xv. 403 &c.), he says that he was born in the Syrianisland over against Ortygia, and I have rendered "the Syrian island" "the island of Syra," guided by the analogy of the "Psyrian island" (iii. 171), which unquestionably means the island of Psyra.

The connection of an island Syra with a land Ortygia, suggests Syracuse, in spite of the fact that in reality Ortygia was an island, and Syracuse both on the island and on the adjacent mainland—for as I have already too often said all Sicilian places in theOdysseyare travestied, however thinly.

The impression that Syracuse[2]is being alluded to is deepened by our going on to read that "the turnings of the sun" are "there"—which I presume may be extended so as to mean "thereabouts." Now what are "the turnings of the sun"? I looked in Liddell and Scott, for whose work no one can feel a more cordial admiration, nor deeper sense of gratitude, and found that the turnings of the sun are "the solstices, or tropics,i.e., the turning points of midsummer and midwinter." This may do very well as regards time, but not as regards place. In reference to the Odyssean passage, I read that "the turning of the sun denotes a point in the heavens probably to the Westward."

But we want the sun to turn not at a point in the heavens, but in the neighbourhood of Syra and Ortygia, and to do so here in a way that he does not do elsewhere. The simplest way of attaining this end will be to suppose that the writer of theOdysseywas adopting a form of speech which we often use on a railway journey, when we say that the sun has turned and is coming in at the other window—meaning that the line has taken a sharp turn, and that we are going in a new direction. Surely I am not wrong in thinking that the author meant nothing more recondite than that near the two places named the land turns sharply round, so that sailors who follow it will find the sun on the other side of their ship from what it has hitherto been.

A glance at the map will show that the site which the combination of Syra and Ortygia has suggested is confirmedby the fact that shortly South of it the coast of Sicily turns abruptly round, and continues thenceforward in a new direction. Indeed it begins to turn sharply with the promontory of Plemmyrium itself. Eumæus, therefore, should be taken as indicating that he was born at the place which we know as Syracuse, and which was then, so he says, an aggregate of two small towns, without many inhabitants. It seems to have been a quiet easy-going little place, where every one had enough to eat and drink, and nobody died except of sheer old age, diseases of all kinds being unknown. Business must have been carried on in a very leisurely fashion, for it took the Phœnicians a twelvemonth to freight their vessel, and the largest ship of those times cannot have been very large.

This is not the description of a busy newly founded settlement, as Syracuse would be in 734 B.C. Still less will it apply to any later Syracusan age. The writer modernises when dealing with an earlier age as frankly as Shakspeare: I have never detected a trace in her of any archæological instinct. I believe, therefore, that she was telling what little she knew of the Syracuse of her own day, and that that day was one prior to the arrival of the Corinthian Colony. I think it likely also that she made Eumæus come from Syracuse because she felt that she rather ought to have done something at Syracuse during the voyage of Ulysses, but could not well, under the circumstances, break his journey between Charybdis and Calypso's Island. She, therefore, took some other way of bringing Syracuse into her story.

It may be urged that we have no other evidence of any considerable civilisation as having existed at Syracuse before the one founded by the Corinthians, and as regards written evidence this is true, so far at least as I know; but we have unwritten evidence of an even more conclusive kind. The remains of pottery and implements found at, or in the near neighbourhood of, Syracuse go back in an unbroken line from post-Roman times to the age of stone, while commerce with the Peloponese, at any rate from the Mycenæan age, is shown by the forms and materials of the objects discovered in countless tombs. I had the advantage of being shown over theMuseum at Syracuse by Dr. Orsi, than whom there can be no more cautious and capable guide on all matters connected with the earliest history of Sicily, and he repeatedly insisted on the remoteness of the age at which commerce must have existed between the South East, and indeed all the East, coast of Sicily, and the Peloponese. The notion, therefore, too generally held in the very face of Thucydides himself, that there were no people living at or near Syracuse till the arrival of the Corinthians must be abandoned, and I believe we may feel confident that in the story of Eumæus we have a peep into its condition in pre-Corinthian times.

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