Infidel, the tribute of death and pillage had at one time nearly left
the island a desert, and Venetian chronicles report the repeopling of it
by a Slavonic colony; but there is good evidence, as we shall see
presently, that there was never quite an end of the original stock.
Though one does see occasionally strongly Slavonic faces, the population
is now in language and manners purely Greek, with some of the worst
traits of the race strongly developed. By good chance I found an old
acquaintance in Mr. Caravia, a deputy for Ithaca to the Greek Assembly,
then in vacation, and I had a letter to Aristides Dendrinos, the
principal personage of the island; and through their united attentions
we were made as much at home in Ithaca as possible. But the Ithacans are
shrewd folk, sharp dealers who look at foreigners as the Hebrews did on
the Egyptians, as made to be spoiled; and we were unlucky enough to have
arrived in the Greek Lent, which, as they observe it, is equal to
starvation to outsiders. The excellent wine of Ithaca, one of the best
of Greek wines, is quite worthy its ancient reputation; but flesh was
unattainable, and fish so rare, owing to the people’s habit of killing
them with dynamite, that we could not get enough for a breakfast. The
fowls in Greek lands, living an outcast life, never fed, but expected to
grow, as the partridges do, on the bounties of nature, hardly offer a
compensation for the trouble of picking their bones. They combine all
the misfortunes of the wild and domesticated conditions, with none of
the advantages of either, and offer a scant resource to the caterer. We
made haste to see what was to be seen in Ithaca, and study our great
predecessor’s footprints, but we found the learning harder than the
living. The island Greek is quick-witted, and, like the Irishman, never
confesses himself at fault in anything you want to know, especially in
things connected with ancient history or archæology. He solves the
hardest and most obscure problem by a bold dash, and is even surer than
Schliemann in his breezy inductions. It is amusing and cheering to see a
man so cock-sure of what archæology has puzzled over so many years. On
inquiring for a guide to shorten my researches (for, though Homer is
guide-book enough for Ithaca, one may be a long time in tracing out the
Odyssean movements by the poem), every one was ready to show me
everything. Before leaving I found an intelligent guide, as such go, in
one Angelo Persego, whose name I record for the benefit of such of my
readers as may be tempted (out of the Greek Lent) to visit Ithaca. But
here let me drop a word of advice for all voyagers in Greek lands. Take
a guide for lodgings and living, but never place any confidence in his
identifications or local traditions. He may be right, but the chances
are nine to one he is not. He may even have been over the ground before,
but his assurance to that effect is no evidence. I found the men I
selected utterly ignorant, as usual, of almost all I wanted to learn;
but I found a little book by G. F. Bowen, one time Fellow of Brasenose
and President of the Ionian University, which, though dated in 1850,
gives a sufficient clue to the topography to enable one to dispense with
a guide, except to find the best roads.
Vathy does not occur in the Odyssey under any name, nor is there any
trace of antique structures about it. In the illustration the narrow
entrance at the right is Vathy; the cove in the centre, with the island
off it, is the port of Phorcys, where Ulysses was landed, and which, for
the uses of ancient mariners, who beached their ships instead of
anchoring them, was a better port than Vathy. It corresponds in the
minutest detail to Homer’s account of it,—a smooth, sandy beach,
complete shelter from all winds, and only varying in any particulars in
its surroundings by a greater distance from the grotto where the
Phæacians hide the presents Ulysses brings with him; but of this more is
to be said.
The Odyssey gives no intimation of any city near the landing-place. The
port of Ulysses’ own capital was much nearer Phæacia, and the ship might
have landed him at his own door. The reason of this excessive caution
was that during so long a time he had had no news from home, and his
Phæacian friends knew that he might find his city in the hands of an
enemy.
[Illustration: PORT OF PHORCYS AND NERITON, FROM THE MOUTH OF ULYSSES’
CAVE.]
Awaking, then, from the sleep in which he had been so gently landed by
the crew of the Phæacian ship, he finds himself in a strange land, as he
supposed, and in complete solitude, and arms himself with his habitual
cunning, distrusting everything. When Athena comes to him in the form of
a shepherd, he asks where he is; and being told that he is at last in
the long-sought Ithaca, he is transported with joy, but conceals his
emotion and addresses the goddess with these hasty words, disguising the
truth and telling his story falsely, always turning in his mind many
artifices: “I, too, have heard, in the far-off, immense island of Crete,
of the island of Ithaca. It is, then, in that country that I have
arrived with my treasures. I have left an equal part to my children
because I fly from my native land, where I killed the dear son of
Idomeneus,” etc., etc., going on with a long history to account for his
presence in Ithaca, a place unknown to him, which fable he only drops
when Athena throws off her disguise; but he still is unconvinced that he
is in Ithaca. She calls his attention to Neriton in front of him, and
having convinced him, helps him hide his treasures in the grotto, when
they sit down under the olive-tree over its entrance, and she tells him
how matters stand at home, and contrives plans for getting rid of the
pretendants, who would, no doubt, put an end to him if he fell into
their hands. This seems to be his conviction, for he exclaims: “Great
gods! if you had not enlightened me I should have perished in my palace,
like Agamemnon. Come, let us plan a means by which I may revenge myself
on them all.” This hint of the fate of Agamemnon, whose end he had
learned, is the clue to his cautious deportment. They plan as follows:
He will be disguised by Athena, so that not even his wife shall know
him, and will then go to Eunæus, who keeps his swine by the Raven’s
Cliff, near Arethusa’s fountain, and wait with him studying up the
position, while she goes off to Lacedæmon to bring back Telemachus, whom
she had sent there nominally to get news of his father, but really, as
she informs Ulysses, to give him an opportunity, hitherto wanting, to
see the world and acquire renown. Here they separate, and Ulysses takes
the secret path.
The position of the grotto makes the only difficulty in tracing all his
movements; for it is not, as one would expect from the text, at the head
of the port, strictly speaking, but at the head of the little ravine
which ends in the port, a good quarter of an hour’s walk from the shore,
even making allowance for all the recession of the water-line, which has
evidently been considerable. The grotto itself corresponds exactly with
the description, and can be entered by mortals only in the usual way, by
the small opening which looks toward the port. “It has two entrances:
one, turned toward the breath of Boreas, is for human use; the other,
toward that of Notos, is more divine. Never man enters by that; it is
the way of the immortals.” The human entrance is a low, almost invisible
opening, or at least, easily passed without notice, at a short distance.
Even now, when all vegetation has disappeared from around it, and the
olive-trees come only half-way up the hill, it would easily be hidden by
a large stone, as Minerva hides it. The entrance, low and precipitous,
widens rapidly within, and we descend by what might once have been
artificially prepared steps to a vault-like cave, sixteen to twenty feet
in diameter, with a curious recess at the farther end, and at the top of
the vault another opening, like the top window of the Pantheon of Rome,
or any of the circular temples whose form was derived from the vaulted
tomb or treasury of Pelasgic architecture. At first sight I thought this
opening might have been artificial, but on close examination I saw that
the formation of the rock led to it naturally, and that, hardly large
enough to admit a human body readily, it could only, if enlarged, be
entered by a person’s being let down with a cord. This is the
“immortals’ entrance.” Under this opening lies a huge heap of stones,
the accumulation of centuries, for the lower portions are cemented
together by the stalagmitic deposit from the rock above; and the walls
of the grotto, despite the breaking off of every attackable stalactite,
are also formed of carbonate of lime so deposited. The difference
between the actual distance from the water’s edge to the grotto and that
which is indicated by the narrative of the Odyssey is not more than a
fair poetic license would permit; or the memory of the narrator, having
known the localities, might well in a few years of absence leave out
this short distance.
The Odyssean topography is greatly confused to the modern traveler by
the fact that the Homeric city undoubtedly stood at the northern end of
the island, and far remote from the modern city as well as from the
landing-place of Ulysses and the pig-pens of Eumæus. The view from the
grotto gives us, at the left, a bay of which Vathy and Phorcys are
tributaries. This cuts the island nearly in two, a narrow ridge of rock
only connecting its two great masses. On the north is the site of the
Homeric city, as I shall presently show; but on the south are the
Raven’s Cliff and the fountain of Arethusa, together with an ancient
ruin known by the people as the “Castle of Ulysses.” These ruins are of
the earliest form of Pelasgic, commonly named Cyclopean, though there is
no justification for any distinction between the “Pelasgic” and the
“Cyclopean,” or any proper distinction of styles, as they run into each
other, from the form shown at “Ulysses’ Castle” to the most elaborate
and carefully fitted polygonal which we shall find at Samé on the
opposite shore of Cephalonia. The walls of Ulysses’ Castle are of great
extent, and portions still remaining near the summit are well preserved,
some fragments being nearly twenty feet high. It must have been the work
of a powerful tribe and a great stronghold. Seen from the sea, it shows
on a sharp conical rock precipitously trending down to the shore. The
Odyssey in no manner makes allusion to this, either as city or as ruin.
Ulysses passes very near it going south, leaving it on the right,
apparently ignoring its existence. This makes it tolerably clear that it
had been so long in ruin that it was in no way to be connected with the
Odyssean dynasty or colonization even, or that it was constructed after
the Homeric epoch. The latter hypothesis is untenable, because we find
in many parts, especially in the Argolid, ruins clearly contemporary
with this, which are in the Hellenic traditions regarded as the work of
a vanished and semi-divine race of giants, the Cyclopes or the “divine
Pelasgi;” while, of the Homeric epoch, as distinguished from the
Pelasgic, which preceded it, and the Hellenic, which followed it, we
have no recognizable remains, and the cities known to have existed, such
as the Ithaca of Ulysses, have left no ruin durable enough to show in
our time. This indicates a state of civilization in which the great
necessity of strong walls as a defense had passed, or that, by the use
of cement, walls were made so light in structure that they were
efficient for the day, but perished utterly in the intervening time,
which again is an untenable hypothesis, because we find cement used
nowhere in Greece in work known to be earlier than the third century B.
C. I leave the question of the identity of the Odyssean epoch with that
of the composition of the poem at present untouched. I am dealing only
with the poem which philologists suppose to have been composed about 850
B. C. That the author knew Ithaca perfectly, I think we shall see, and
that consequently the ruins of the Pelasgic epoch, when not continuously
inhabited (as were Nericus and Samé, the former of which Laertes
conquered, and the latter of which sent the largest deputation of
“kings” as suitors for Penelope, the foundations of both being
Pelasgic), were already so lost in the twilight of prehistory as to be
without any meaning to the author of the Odyssey. The city whose ruins
are now called the Castle of Ulysses was as unknown to the epoch of
Homer as to ours. No one in the whole action of the Odyssey goes in or
out of its gates, or turns aside from his path to speak of or visit it.
“Kings” were as common as rascals in those days, but that two important
cities should exist contemporaneously in the small island of Ithaca, and
that the people of Ulysses should live in one, pasture their hogs on the
territory of the other, and ignore its existence, is impossible. This
does not prevent Schliemann from identifying the house walls, which
remain to a small height, with the pig-pens of Eumæus, or a huge stump
near the citadel, with the tree from which Ulysses had made his bed
(_Ithaca, Peloponnesus and Troy_).
That this part of the island was nearly or quite unpopulated is made
more than probable by the facts that no mention is made of any city or
people here; that the only features mentioned are the wildness, and
forests abandoned to feeding of pigs; and that Ulysses selects this part
for his concealment. The path Ulysses probably followed from the port of
Phorcys to the Raven’s Cliff is by far too hard for dilettante
following; it is not only impassable to beasts of burden, but, I should
say, difficult for a pedestrian. There is a road carriageable for a few
miles from Vathy along the ridge southward, and then a fair bridle-path
to the cliff, which, had we known it, would have led us somewhere near
the location of Eumæus’s sties; but the guide my friends had recommended
me, on his personal assurance, did not know the road, and we went
wandering across fields and over hills, abandoning our quadrupeds at the
moment when they would have been our best guides; and, finally, the
fellow had to go to a ploughman scratching the earth with a crooked
stick behind a yoke of year-old heifers, and inquire his way. I
exhausted my modern Greek in exasperated vituperation of his pretentious
ignorance, and took the lead, as I generally have had to do on similar
occasions.
There was a pretty little valley on our way, the only arable or fruitful
land in this part of the island; all else was bare and bleak. A few
tough-lived shrubs, broom and gorse, arbutus, and some others I did not
know, wring a scanty subsistence from the clefts between the rocks, and
in a mass of almost unmitigated limestone was cloven a ravine. The
roughness of Ithaca was proverbial even in Homeric days, since Athena,
while disguised as a shepherd, replies to Ulysses, “If it [Ithaca] is
rocky, if it breeds not horses in its moderate space, it is not quite
barren,” etc. One might well select this scene as one of tranquil
beauty, with the faint glimpses of the dreamy inner sea above its valley
distance, and the golden grain-fields as I saw them, interspersed with
vineyards and olive-orchards.
[Illustration: RAVEN’S CLIFF AND THE FOUNTAIN OF ARETHUSA.]
The glen of the Raven’s Cliff becomes a wild gorge below the fountain of
Arethusa, and descends abruptly to the sea. Above, a stripe of bare,
pale-gray rock down the cliff shows that in winter it is the location of
a cataract, though, when I visited the locality, dry as summer dust. The
fountain of Arethusa is situated about half-way from the cliff to the
sea, and bears the evidences of an immense antiquity. Remains of an
architectural surrounding are still to be seen, which, with some
foundations of walls of the Roman period, evidently of a temple to the
nymph or local goddess, and “Ulysses’ Castle,” are the only traces of
ruin discoverable in this lobe of the island. The recess of the fountain
has once been much larger, but the slow process of depositing the
calcareous incrustation which forms its walls has gone on so long that
only a small deep basin remains, from which the people draw the water
with a cord and bucket. Its niche is cushioned with moss and maidenhair
ferns, and the soft porous rock is always moist with the filtering
through of the water. A wooden trough is placed for the watering of the
sheep and goats which take the place of the hogs of Eumæus, for this is
the only perennial source of water in the region.
An old woman, wrinkled and bowed, looking like one of the Fates, sat
near the fountain, combing the wool she had washed at it; and on the
opposite side the nymph of the fountain, in the shape of a young matron
of some neighboring hamlet, was washing her clothes. The wash was
boiling when we came up, over a fire of brambles and weeds; but the
utensil which took the place of the bronze caldron of the antique
house-mother was an American petroleum-can, with a wire bale fitted in
rudely, and the stamp of the New York Refining Company was still visible
on the tin. We talk of the omnipresence of gold, of the omnipotence of
cotton; but in my wanderings on the earth I have found places where the
people did not know the value of a piece of gold, and wore nothing but
the homespun and woven wool of their flocks and flax of their fields,
while I have never found one that did not know petroleum; and I have
learned that the petroleum-can is a more universal concomitant of
civilization than English cutlery or American drillings.
The pens of Ulysses’ pig-herd were at the top of the cliff, where a
plain of small extent and soil of scanty depth still maintains an
olive-grove, sole representative of the forest of oaks whose acorns
fattened the swine for the revels of the suitors of Penelope.
Here Ulysses finds Eumæus, and here, in his anxiety to convince him of
the truth of his prediction of the return of the wanderer, he says: “If
he return not as I declare, let your servants seize me and throw me over
the high rock, that vagabonds may learn in future to abstain from
useless falsehoods.”
[Illustration: FROM AN OLD GREEK VASE.
THE SITE OF ITHACA—PORT POLIS.]
To return to the city of Ithaca, Ulysses must retrace his steps past the
port of Phorcys, and follow the ridge of rock which connects the
divisions of the island past the mass of Neriton. His landing-place was
on the east side of the island, the port of the ancient city Ithaca on
the west; and there are now on the road between, several villages, the
representatives, perhaps, of the ancient towns from which Ulysses drew
his quota of men for the Trojan campaign, “Crocyles and the rocky
Ægilipos.” It was in one of these villages that Schliemann, visiting the
island for the first time, in his Homeric enthusiasm, as the villagers,
in their habitual curiosity to see the stranger, came out to gaze and
question, taking the assemblage as a demonstration in his honor, and
determined to show them how well he estimated the dignity of an heir of
the Odyssean glory, mounted on a table and translated from Homer the
passages which record Laertes’ emotions on the return of his long-lost
son. “They wept with emotion,” says the naïf Doctor; and he rewarded
them by some hundred lines more. Remembering this incident, I inquired
about the matter, and found that it had excited much merriment in the
cultivated circles of Vathy, and, as I expected, the other side in the
rencontre preserved a very different recollection of the Doctor’s
achievement, and that the tears were of merriment rather than of pathos.
No one in the assemblage could understand a word of the Greek in the
Doctor’s pronunciation of it.
In the nomenclature of the two principal higher villages of the northern
section, I found a curious survival of archaic language, which, so far
as I could learn, is as incomprehensible as Homer, in the original, to
the inhabitants. The villages are Anoï and Exoï, which are clearly from
the archaic and (except in the Cretan mountains) obsolete words _ano_
and _exo_, used as _haw_ and _gee_ are by us in driving oxen, and of
course meaning originally right and left, and these indicate site
survivals of early towns or villages. But of Ithaca the _city_, the home
of Ulysses, not a trace remains except the name _Polis_ (city, _the_
city par excellence), which is applied to a locality where not even an
ancient wall shows a claim to the appellation. The fragments of
substructure shown on the hill above and near the village of Stavros are
undoubtedly mediæval, and belong to the piratical city which was
established here, and which was destroyed in the latter part of the
sixteenth century. I searched in vain for anything to indicate the date
of the ancient city, but here, doubtless, was the home of Ulysses. Its
little port is of the nature demanded by ancient mariners,—a smooth
beach in a cove, with the island of Cephalonia opposite and near enough
to shut off any great violence of sea or wind. Homer relates that the
suitors, when Telemachus had gone to Pylos to get news of his father,
sent out a ship with some of their number to intercept and kill him on
his return, and that this ship lay in watch at an island off the port
where the return of Telemachus’s ship could be seen from afar and
prevented. Opposite Port Polis is a rock, probably the remnant of that
island; for, as the material of it is a conglomerate easily subdued by
the elements and decomposing rapidly, it must have been once a
considerable island, and it is now the only remnant of rock or island
which occupies any such relative position.
In searching around the neighborhood for traces of antiquity I was
accosted by a peasant, who told me that there had been found a stone
with some letters on it, and I made haste to hunt it out. They (for
there were two fragments) were at the bottom of a heap of stone which
had been exhumed from under a land-fall, and which were evidently part
of a very ancient building. I hired the men who gathered round to remove
the heap, and photographed the stones, which had been originally one.
The inscription is in the early style of Greek epigraphy, boustrophedon,
_i. e._, going alternately from left to right and right to left, as oxen
go when ploughing. It is the oldest known inscription in the Ithacan
alphabet.
I placed a copy of the photograph in the hands of Professor Comparetti
of Florence, amongst others, and received from him the following, read
at a meeting of the Academy of the Lincei:—
[Illustration: INSCRIPTION FOUND AT POLIS.]
“Since I have hitherto spoken of inscriptions very old or archaic, as we
say, it will be permitted me to close this communication by presenting
to the Academy a curious inscription of this kind recently discovered in
Ithaca and communicated to me by a diligent and cultivated visitor to
the Greek lands, the American, Mr. Stillman, who made in Ithaca a
photograph of the inscription, and, having unsuccessfully asked an
interpretation of several scholars, applied to me. He has permitted me
to make communication to this Academy, putting at my disposition also
the negative of his photograph, from which are printed the copies I
present. The inscription is tolerably roughly cut in a friable stone,
broken in two, worn by time and water. The photograph, which is never
the best means of representing monuments of this kind even in
experienced hands, presents some confusion and obscurity in parts; but
this is the only difficulty in the epigraph.... I saw at once that this
was an inscription of which there was already some notice in a book
published by the Phœnix of discoverers of antiquities, Schliemann, in
1868, ‘Ithaca, Peloponnesos, and Troy.’ Rich as he is in fancy,
Schliemann is ready to believe any story, and at once convinced himself
that he had discovered the inscription of a very old sarcophagus, and
found an honest workman who helped him to complete the idea, showing him
the bones found in it by him. And in his book, together with this and
other news, he communicated the inscription such as he read it. Of the
two fragments, however, he only saw that at the right, and this he read
very badly, seeing letters where none are, and imagining incredible
forms of letters. Kirchhoff in his ‘Studien zur Geschichte des
Griechischen Alphabets’ sought to apply this monument to his purposes,
but could make nothing of it, and it would have been impossible to get
anything from it. Now, thanks to the intelligent care of Mr. Stillman,
we have before us the monument as it is; he knew nothing of Schliemann;
when he saw the inscription, he saw that it was incomplete, and seeking
amongst the stones, found the other piece, and, divining justly its
relation, united them and took the photograph which now permits us to
utilize what we may call his discovery.