The cave of Polyphemus--still called amo_The Authoress of the Odyssey Where and when she wrote, who she was, the use she made of the Iliad, and how the poem grew under her hands

Polifemo_--was some six or seven miles North of Trapani; 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 the _Grotta 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

the _Ruccazzù 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 the _Odyssey_, 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 the _Odyssey_ gives 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 the

_Iliad_, 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 the

_Odyssey_ called 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 the _Odyssey_, and it

was with the κόντος commemorated in his own name that Ulysses blinded

him. The giant has grown greatly since the _Odyssey_ was written, and

large as the _grotta di Polifemo_ is, he could never get inside it;

for he rests his 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.

[Illustration: H. FESTING JONES, ESQ. (height 6 ft. 2 in.) IN FLUTE OF

COLUMN AT SELINUNTE.]

[Illustration: 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 the _Odyssey_ tallies with that of the

modern Sicilian brigands published in the _Times_ of 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.

The _Odyssey_ says 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 called _le grotte

degli Scurati_ on Cofàno about fifteen miles North of Trapani. There

was, however, nothing of the Cyclops about them. Their caves were most

beautifully clean and as comfortable as 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 the _Odyssey_ as against only six in the _Iliad_,

which, allowing for the greater length of the last named poem, is

about in the proportion of 10:1. We may surmise, therefore, that the

_Odyssey_ hails from a district in which caves abounded.

As regards "the wall of bronze" which the writer of the _Odyssey_

tells 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 it that 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 to look 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 hunted the 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 the _Odyssey_, 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 the _Odyssey_ are 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 torvo

Ætnæos 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.

CHAPTER XI.

WHO WAS THE WRITER?

I believe the reader will by this time feel no doubt, from my earlier

Chapters that the _Odyssey_ was 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 in

_Il_. xx. 200-241. Moreover, she must be a sufficiently intimate member

of the household to be able to laugh at its head as much as she chose.

No pedigree of any of the other _dramatis personæ_ of the _Odyssey_

is 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 that she 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

in _Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe_, or _Pilgrim'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 be made

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

way they 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--or _vice 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 the _Odyssey_

are of all of them Scherian. 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 corresponds perfectly 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 the _Odyssey_ are 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 the _Odyssey_. The fact that in the washing day episode, so far as

possible, we find Nausicaa, all Nausicaa, and nothing but Nausicaa,

among the female _dramatis 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. 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 the _Odyssey_ has 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 the _Odyssey_. Would he refuse so to credit

her merely because all he happened to know about her for certain was

that she once went out washing clothes 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 the _Odyssey_. 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 the _Odyssey_.

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 the

_barocco_, to Turner and the modern drop scene. There is not a trace of

the _barocco_ in 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 the _Odyssey_ was 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 the _Odyssey_. 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 the _Odyssey_ should 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 some paradox of my own, but

on taking up the _Odyssey_ he 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. The _Odyssey_ is far too easy,

simple, and straight-forward for the understanding of scholars--as I

said in my _Life of Dr. Butler of Shrewsbury_, if it had been harder

to understand, it would have been sooner understood--and yet I do not

know; the _Iliad_ is 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 the _Odyssey_ here 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.

CHAPTER XII.

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 the _Odyssey_ was 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 the _Odyssey_, 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 the _Odyssey_ was

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 the _Odyssey_ as in the eleventh century B.C.

I will begin by giving my reasons for thinking that the _Odyssey_ must

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 Syrian island 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 the _Odyssey_ are

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 the _Odyssey_ was 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 confirmed by 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 the Museum 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.

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 the _Odyssey_. 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 in _Aci reale, Aci Castello_, and _Aci 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 the _Odyssey_ would

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 the _Odyssey_ to a time before B.C. 1000.

For the _Odyssey_ conveys 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 the _Odyssey_; 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 the _Odyssey_

and the _Iliad_. The development of myth and of the Epic cycle, of

which we find abundant traces in the _Odyssey_, 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 the _Iliad_.

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's

_History 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 authority here, 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 the _Iliad_, 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 the _Iliad_ hardly 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 the _Iliad_ is 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 the _modus in quo_ had

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 the _Iliad_ is almost as unfathomable as the

simplicity of the _Odyssey_ has 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 fall of 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 the _Little

Iliad_, given in the fragment of Proclus. The wild story of the wooden

horse only emphasises the fact that nothing more reasonable was known.

[Illustration: WALL AT HISSARLIK, SHOWING CONTRAST BETWEEN WEATHERED

AND PROTECTED COURSES.]

[Illustration: 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 the

_Iliad_. 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 the _Iliad_ will be about 1150; and that of the _Odyssey_ about 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 the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, the statement of

Thucydides that the last and greatest inroad of the Sicels occurred

about 1030 B.C., and our conclusion that the _Odyssey_ was written

before that date, into line with one another.

The date 1050 B.C. will explain the absence of all allusion in the

_Odyssey_ to Utica, the land near which, on certain rare days, can be

seen from Mt. Eryx. The Phœnicians are known in the _Odyssey_, 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 the _Odyssey_

I 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 the _Odyssey_.

* * * * *

Let us now compare the history of the N.W. corner of Sicily as revealed

to us in the _Odyssey_--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 the _Odyssey_ we 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 the _Odyssey_, as

nearly as we can gather from the fact of his having been Nausicaa's

great great grandfather.

The writer of the _Odyssey_ wrote 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's _Introduction to Homer_[8] that Aristarchus

when editing the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, 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 both _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. 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 the _Odyssey_ were

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 the _Odyssey_ to 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-speaking race, 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 the

_Odyssey_ under the names of Cyclopes and Læstrygonians, and the Sicels

are not yet come. This is all that we can collect from the _Odyssey_.

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 miles North 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 the _Odyssey_ belongs to

a pre-Sicelian age, and I am only dealing with the period which the

_Odyssey_ and 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 Orestes came 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 in

_Il_. 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 the _Odyssey_, 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 migrate to Eryx as

well as the Phocæans, whereas the writer of the _Odyssey_ mentions

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 the _Odyssey_ should 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 (_Æn_ v.

755-761), for at the close of _Æn_. 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's _Introduction 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.

CHAPTER XIII.

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 the _Odyssey_ was

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 they proceeded to do--to call their island Scheria,

in spite of its offering no single point of correspondence with the

description given in the _Odyssey_.

I grant that no explicit tradition exists to the effect that the

_Odyssey_ as 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 the _Odyssey_, 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 the _Odyssey_.

The British Museum possesses a unique example of a small bronze coin

which is classed with full confidence among those of 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.

[Illustration: Enlarged to about double the actual diameter.]

The reader will see that the obverse bears the legend IAKIN, and the

reverse a representation of the brooch described by Ulysses (_Od_. xix.

225-231). A translation of this passage is given on page 80. (Search for:

"I will tell you," replied Ulysses)

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 be

IAKIN, or ΓIAKIN--Γ being the older form of Π. Possibly from a desire

to be right in either case, the Museum catalogue gives it as IAKIN in

the illustration, and ΓIAKIN in 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 that IAKIN is 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 called ΠΙΑΚΗΝΟΙ; so that the

coin, if it was one of theirs, should bear the legend ΓΙΑΚΗΝ instead of

the alleged ΓIAKIN. 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 got IAKIN into another part) that

the legend was ΓΙΑΚΗΝ, 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 obviously IAKIN.

This is an abbreviation for ΙΑΚΙΝΩΝ, as ΕΡΥΚΙΝ and ΚΕΝΤΟΡΙΠΙΝ are for

ΕΡΥΚΙΝΩΝ and ΚΕΝΤΟΡΙΠΙΝΩ, not to quote further examples. It means that

the people who struck it were called ΙΑΚΙΝΕΣ, and though we cannot

determine the precise name of their city we may infer with confidence

that it was some derivative of ΙΑΚΟΣ, which is given in Liddell and

Scott as meaning Ionian. The name may very likely have been ΙΑΞ though

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 the

_Odyssey_; 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 more than 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 the

_Odyssey_ will stand perfectly well without the coin, the coin cannot

stand without involving the existence of an Ionian city near Eryx which

claimed connection with the _Odyssey_. 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 the _Odyssey_ on 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 the _Odyssey_, 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 the _Odyssey_ had been

written; what I have said about the coin IAKIN is said more in the

interests of the coin than of the _Odyssey_, which is a more potent

and irrefragable proof of its own _provenance_ and 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 the _Odyssey_ itself. 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

of _degli 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 the _Odyssey_. 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's _Dictionary of Classical Geography_, under Corcyra,

where full references will be found.

CHAPTER XIV.

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 the _Odyssey_

had the _Iliad_ before 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 the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ I 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 an _Odyssey_ in

which all the Iliadic passages are printed in a slightly different

type and with a reference, somewhat in the style of the extracts

from _Il_. I. and XXIV. here given. The passages are to be

found at the end of Dunbar's _Concordance 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 the _Odyssey_ I propose to print

them in another type and give the references to the _Iliad_. In

the translation of the _Iliad_ there is no use in doing this, for no

one supposes that Homer took anything from the _Odyssey_.

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

the _Iliad_ of the writer of the _Odyssey_ was our own _Iliad_.

I will begin by giving two passages from the _Iliad_, one

from Book I., and the other from Book XXIV., the references

in all cases being to the _Odyssey_. These are perhaps fuller of

lines adopted by the writer of the _Odyssey_ than any others in

the _Iliad_, though there are some that run them closely. Lines

or parts of lines in the smaller type do not occur in the _Odyssey_.

The first passage that I will call attention to is _Iliad_ i.

455-485, which is as follows:--

ἠδ' ἒτι καὶ νῦν μοι τόδ' ἐπικρήηνον ἐέλδωρ· [1]

ἤδη νῦv Δαναοῖσιν ἀεικέα λοιγὸν ἄμυνον."

[2] ὦς ἔφατ' εὐχόυενος τοû δ' ἔκλυε φοῖβος Άπόλλων.

[3] αὐτὰρ ἐπει ρ ενξαν καὶ οὐλοχύτας προβάλοντο,} [4]

αὐέρσυν μὲν πρῶτα καὶ ἔσφαξαν καὶ ἔδειραν, }

{μηρούς τ' ἐξέταμον κατά τε κνίση ἐκάλυψαν }

{δίπτυχα ποιήσαντες, ἐπ' αὐτῶν δ' ὠμοθέτησαν.}

{καῖε δ' ἐπὶ σχίζῃς ὁ γέρων, ἐπὶ δ' αἴθοπα οἶνον

[5] {λεῖβε· νέοι δὲ παρ᾿ αὐτὸν ἔχον πεμπώβολα χερσίν.

{αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ κατὰ μῆρα κάη καὶ σπλάγχνα πάσαντο, }[6]

[7]{{μίστυλλόν τ' ἄρα τἇλλα καὶ ἀμφ' ὀβελοῖσιν ἔπειραν,}

{ ὤπτησάν τε περιφραδέως, ἐρύσαντό τε πάντα.

αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ παύσαντο πόνου τετύκοντό τε δαῖτα, } [8]

[9] δαίνυντ', οὐδέ τι θυμὸς ἐδεύετο δαιτὸς ἐίσης. }

αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ πόσιος καὶ ἐδητύος ἐξ ἔρον ἔντο, }

[10]{κοῦροι μὲν κρητῆρας ἐπεστέψαντο ποτοῖο, } [11]

{νώμησαν δ' ἄρα πᾶσιν ἐπαρξάμενοι δεπάεσσιν }

οἱ δὲ πανημέριοι μολπῇ θεὸν ἱλάσκοντο,

καλὸν ἀείδοντες παιήονα, κοῦροι Άχαιῶν,

μέλποντες ἑκάεργον· ὁ δὲ φρένα τέρπετ' ἀκούων.

[12]{ἧμος δ' ἠέλιος κατέδυ καὶ ἐπὶ κνέφας ἦλθεν, } [13]

{δὴ τότε κοιμήσαντο παρὰ πρυμνήσια νηός. } [14]

{ἦμος δ' ἠριγένεια φάνη ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ήώς,...... } [15]

καὶ τότ' ἔπειτ' ἀνάγοντο μετὰ στρατὸν εὐρὺν Ἀχαιῶν·

[16] τοῖσιν δ' ἴκμενον οὖρον ἴει ἑκάεργος Ἀπόλλων.

οἱ δ' ἱοτὸν στήσαντ' ἀνά θ' ἱστία λευκὰ πέτασσαν· [17]

{ἐν δ' ἄνεμος πρῆσεν μέσον ἱστίον, ἀμφὶ δὲ κῦμα

[18]{στείρῃ πορφύρεον μεγάλ' ἴαχε νηὸς ἰούσης·

{ἡ δ' ἔθεεν κατὰ κῦμα διαπρήσσουσα κέλευθον.

αὐτὰρ ἐπεί ῥ' ἴκοντο κατὰ στρατὸν εὐρὺν Ἀχαιῶν,

[19] νῆα μὲν οἴ γε μέλαιναν ἐπ' ἠπείροιο ἔρυσσαν

[sidenote 1: _cf_. iii. 418]

[sidenote 2: _cf_. iii. 385]

[sidenote 3: iii. 447]

[sidenote 4: _cf_. xii. 359-361]

[sidenote 5: _cf_. iii 456-462]

[sidenote 6: _cf_. xii. 364, 365]

[sidenote 7: xiv. 430, 431 _cf_. also xix. 423]

[sidenote 8: _cf_. xvi. 478-480]

[sidenote 9: xix. 425 i. 150 & elsewhere]

[sidenote 10: i. 148 iii. 339, 340]

[sidenote 11: xxi. 271, 272 vii. 183]

[sidenote 12: _cf_. xix. 426-428]

[sidenote 13: _cf_. iii. 329]

[sidenote 14: _cf_. xii. 31, 32]

[sidenote 15: 20 times in _Od_. only twice in _Il_.]

[sidenote 16: _cf_. ii. 420 xv. 292]

[sidenote 17: iv. 783]

[sidenote 18: 427-429]

[sidenote 19: xvi. 325]

I should perhaps tell the reader that the first Book of the

_Iliad_ is one of the few which modern criticism allows to remain

in the possession of the poet who wrote what Professor Jebb

calls the "primary" _Iliad_.

The second of the two passages above referred to is _Iliad_

XXIV. 621-651, which runs:--

ἦ καὶ ἀναΐξυς όιν ἄργυφον ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεὺς

σφάξ'· ἕταροι δ' ἔδερόν τε καὶ ἄμφεπον εὖ κατὰ κόσμον,

[1] {μίστυλλόν τ' ἄρ' ἐπισταμένως πεῖράν τ' ὀβελοῖσιν,

{ὤπτησάν τε περιφραδέως ἐρύσαντό τε πάντα.

Αὐτομέδων δ' ἄρα σῖτον ἑλὼν ἐπένειμε τραπέζῃ

καλοῖς ἐν κανέοισιν· ἀτὰρ κρέα νεῖμεν ᾿Αχιλλεύς.

[2] {οἱ δ' ἐπ' ὀνείαθ' ἑτοῖμα προκείμενα χεῖρας ἴαλλον.

{αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ πόσιος καὶ ἐδητύος ἐξ ἔρον ἔντο,

ἦ τοι Δαρδανίδης Πρίαμος Θαύμαζ' Ἀχιλῆα,

ὃσσος ηνἔ οἶός τε· Θεοῖσι γὰρ ἄντα ἐῴκειν·

αὐτὰρ ὁ Δαρδανίδην Πρίαμον Θαύμαζεν Ἀχιλλεύς,

εἰσορόων ὄψιν τ' ἀγαθὴν καὶ μῦθον ἀκούων.

αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ τάπησαν ἐς ἀλλήλους ὁρόωντες, [3]

τὸν πρότερος προσέειπε γέρων Πρίαμος θεοειδής,

"λέξον νῦν με τάχιστα, διοτρεφές, ὄφρα καὶ ἤδη

ὔπνῳ ὕπο γλυκερῷ ταρπώμεθα κοιμηθέντε· [4]

οὐ γάρ πω μύσαν ὄσσε ὑπὸ βλεφάροισιν ἐμοῖσιν,

ἐξ οὗ σῇς ὑπὸ χερσὶν ἐμὸς πάις ὤλεσε θυμόν,

ἀλλ' αἰεὶ στενάχω καὶ κήδεα μυρία πέσσω,

αὐλῆς ἐν χόρτοισι κυλινδόμενος κατὰ κόπρον.

νῦν δὴ καὶ σίτου πασάμην καὶ αἴθοπα οἶνον

λαυανίης καθέηκα· πάρος γε μὲν οὔ τι πεπάσμην."

ἦ ῥ', Ἀχιλεὺς δ᾿ ἑτάροισιν ἰδὲ δμωῇσι κέλευσεν } [5]

[6] {δέμνι' ὑπ' αἰθούσῃ θέμεναι καὶ ῥήγεα καλὰ }

{πορφύρε' ἐμβαλέειν, στορέσαι τ' ἐφύπερθε τύπητας,}

{χλαίνας τ' ἐνθέμεναι οὔλας καθύπερθεν ἕσασθαι. }

{αἱ δ' ἴσαν ἐκ μεγάροιο δάος μετὰ χερσὶν ἔχυσαι, }

{αἶψα δ' ἄρα στόρεσαν δοιὼ λέχε' ἐγκονέουσαι.

[7] τὸν δ' ἐπικερτομέων προσέφη πόδας ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεύς·

"ἐκτὸς μὲν δὴ λέξο, γέρον φίλε, μή τις Ἀχαιῶν

ἐνθάδ᾿ ἐπέλθῃσιν βουληφόος, οἵ τέ αἰεὶ

..............................................

[sidenote 1: _cf_. xiv. 430-431 & xix. 422, 423]

[sidenote 2: i. 149, 150 & many other places]

[sidenote 3: _cf_. iv. 47 & x 181]

[sidenote 4: _cf_. iv. 294, 295 & xxiii. 254, 255]

[sidenote 5: iv. 296-300]

[sidenote 6: _cf_. vii. 336-340]

[sidenote 7: _cf_. xxii. 194]

Professor Jebb is disposed to attribute _Il_. XXIV. to the writer of

_Il_. IX., which he does not ascribe to Homer, and would date _circ_.

B.C. 750-600. I regret that I can go no further with him than that

_Il_. XXIV. and _Il_. IX. are by the same hand.

It is beyond my scope to point out the slight and perfectly unimportant

variations from the _Iliad_ which are found in some of the Odyssean

lines to which I have given a reference; they are with hardly an

exception such as are occasioned by difference of context. Though

unimportant they are not uninteresting, but I must leave them for the

reader to examine if he feels inclined to do so.

He will observe that some lines are nearly and some quite common to

the two extracts above given, and I should add that not a few other

lines are repeated elsewhere in the _Iliad_, but enough remains that

is peculiar to either of the two extracts to convince me that the

writer of the _Odyssey_ knew them both. And not only this, but they

seem to have risen in her mind as spontaneously, and often no doubt as

unconsciously, as passages from the Bible, Prayer-book, and Shakspeare

do to ourselves.

If, then, we find the writer so familiar with two such considerable

extracts from the first and last Books of the _Iliad_--for I believe

the reader will feel no more doubt than I do, that she knew them, and

was borrowing from them--can we avoid thinking it probable that she

was acquainted, to say the least of it, with the intermediate Books?

Such surely should be the most natural and least strained conclusion to

arrive at, but I will proceed to shew that she knew the intermediate

Books exceedingly well.

The Authoress of the Odyssey Where and when she wrote, who she was, the use she made of the Iliad, and how the poem grew under her hands · 第 26 / 27 章

The cave of Polyphemus--still called among the peasants _la grotta di