Bœotia, about the same time, according to the common opinion, with
the earliest appearances of the Hellenic race in the Greek peninsula.
We have no reason to suppose that they were themselves of Hellic
extraction: but we find them invested with the same marks of political
superiority as the Hellenic families, and figuring among the Greek
sovereigns in successive generations. They must have ejected previous
occupants: for Amphion and Zethus first settled and fortified Thebes,
and they were the sons of Jupiter and Antiope[415].
Ino Leucothee, the daughter of Cadmus, was already a deity in the time
of Homer. She appears in that capacity to Ulysses, when he is tossed
upon the waters between Ogygia and Phæacia; that is to say, when he
was still beyond the limits of the Greek or Homeric world, and within
the circle of those traditions, lying in the unknown distance, which
the Greeks could only derive from the most experienced and daring
navigators of the time; namely, the Phœnicians. This appears to mark
Ino herself, and therefore her father Cadmus, as of Phœnician birth.
And accordingly we may set down the position of this family in Greece,
as the earliest token of relations between Phœnicia and Greece.
It is followed by one more significant still, and more clearly attested
in Homer. Minos, a Phœnician, appears in Crete and founds an empire:
he marries his daughter Ariadne to the Athenian hero Theseus; and so
quickly does this empire assume the national character, that in the
time of the _Troica_, Hellenic races are established in the island, the
Cretan troops are numbered without distinction among the followers of
Agamemnon; and Idomeneus, only the grandson of Minos, appears to be as
Grecian as any of the other chiefs of the army. The grandfather himself
is appointed to act as judge over the shades of Greeks in the nether
world[416]: and his brother Rhadamanthus has a post of great dignity,
if of inferior responsibility, in being intrusted with the police of
Elysium[417].
Nowhere is Homer’s precision more remarkable, than in the numerous
passages where he appears before us as a real geographer or
topographer. Indeed, by virtue of this accuracy, he enables us to
define with considerable confidence the sphere of his knowledge and
experience; by which I mean not only the countries and places he had
visited, but those with respect to which he had habitual information
from his countrymen, and unrestricted opportunities of correcting
error. In the direction of the west, it seems plain that he knew
nothing except the coast of Greece and the coastward islands. Phæacia
hangs doubtfully upon his horizon, and it is probable that he had only
a very general and vague idea of its position. Towards the north, there
is nothing to imply, that his experimental knowledge reached beyond the
Thracian coast and, at the farthest, the Sea of Marmora. He speaks of
Ida, as if its roots and spurs comprised the whole district, of which
in that quarter he could speak with confidence[418]. To the east, he
probably knew no region beyond Lycia on the coast of Asia Minor, and to
the south Crete was probably his boundary: though he was aware, by name
at least, of the leading geographical points of a maritime passage, not
wholly unfrequented, to the almost unknown regions of Cyprus, Phœnicia,
and Egypt. The apparent inconsistency however of his statements[419]
respecting the voyage to Egypt, affords proof that it lay beyond the
geographical circle, within which we are to consider that his familiar
knowledge and that of his nation lay.
While he is within that circle, he is studious alike of the distances
between places, the forms of country, and the physical character of
different districts: but, when he passes beyond it, he emancipates
himself from the laws of space. The points touched in the voyage
of Ulysses are wholly irreconcilable with actual geography, though
national partialities have endeavoured to identify them with a view to
particular appropriation. Some of them, indeed, we may conceive that he
mentally associated with places that had been described to him: nay, he
may have intended it in all: but the dislocated knowledge, which alone
even the navigators of the age would possess, has suffered, by intent
or accident, such further derangement in its transfer to the mind of
Homer, that it is hopeless to adjust his geography otherwise than by a
free and large infusion of fictitious drawing. This outer sphere is,
however, peopled with imagery of deep interest. For the purposes of
the poem, the whole wanderings both of Menelaus and Ulysses lie within
it, and beyond the limits of ordinary Greek experience. And throughout
these wanderings the language of Homer is that of a poet who, as to
facts, was at the mercy of unsifted information; of information which
he must either receive from a source not liable to check or scrutiny,
or else not receive at all: and who wisely availed himself of that
character of the marvellous with which the whole was overspread, to
work it up into pictures of the imagination, which were to fill both
his contemporaries and all succeeding generations with emotions of
interest and wonder.
_Limits of Greek navigation._
In Homer we find that Greek navigation already extends, yet it is very
slightly, beyond the limits of Greek settlement. The Pseudo-Ulysses of
the Fourteenth Odyssey made nine voyages[420], ἀνδρὰς ἐς ἀλλοδάπους;
and at length, inspired as he says by a wild impulse from on high,
he planned and executed a voyage to Egypt. But he is represented
as a Cretan, and the early fame of Crete in navigation is probably
due to its connection through Minos with Phœnicia. Here too the
representation is, that he is a Cretan of the highest class, the
colleague of Idomeneus in his command[421], and thus, according to the
law of poetical likelihood, to be understood as probably of a family
belonging to the Phœnician train of Minos. The Thesprotian ship of the
Fourteenth Odyssey trades for corn to Dulichium only. The Taphians,
indeed, who from the xenial relation of their lord, Mentes[422], to
Ulysses, must in all likelihood have lived in the neighbourhood of
Ithaca, are represented as making voyages not only to an unknown
Temese, which was in foreign parts (ἐπ’ ἀλλοθρόους ἀνθρώπους[423]), but
likewise to Phœnicia; the latter voyage, however, is only mentioned in
connection with the purpose of piracy[424]. But these Taphians appear
to have formed an insignificant exception to the general rule: we do
not hear any thing of them in the great armament of the Iliad. Speaking
generally, we may say that the Achæans had no foreign navigation: it
was in the hands of the Phœnicians.
_The Outer Geography Phœnician._
It is to that people that we must look as the established merchants,
hardiest navigators, and furthest explorers, of those days. To them
alone as a body, in the whole Homeric world of flesh and blood, does
Homer give the distinctive epithet of ναυσικλυτοὶ ἄνδρες[425]. He
accords it indeed to the airy Phæacians, but in all probability that
element of their character is borrowed from the Phœnicians[426], and
if so, the reason of the derivation can only be, that the Phœnicians
were for that age the type of a nautical people. To them only does he
assign the epithets, which belong to the knavery of trade, namely,
πολυπαίπαλοι and τρωκταί. When we hear of their ships in Egypt or
in Greece, the circumstance is mentioned as if their coming was in
the usual course of their commercial operations. Some force also, in
respect to national history, may be assigned to the general tradition,
which almost makes the Mediterranean of the heroic age ‘a Phœnician
lake:’ to their settlements in Spain, and the strong hold they took
upon that country; and to the indirect Homeric testimony, as well as
the judgment of Thucydides, respecting the maritime character of the
Minoan empire.
Again, Homer knew of a class of merchants whom he calls πρηκτῆρες
in the Eighth Odyssey (v. 152). But where Eumæus enumerates the
δημιόεργοι, or ‘trades and professions’ of a Greek community, there are
no πρηκτῆρες among them[427]. Again, as the poet knew of the existence
of this class on earth, so he introduced them into his Olympian heaven,
where gain and increase had their representative in Mercury. From
whence could the prototype have been derived, except from intercourse
with the Phœnicians?
But the imaginative geography of the Odyssey goes far beyond the
points, with which Homer has so much at least of substantive
acquaintance, as to associate them historically with the commerce or
politics of the age. The habitations of the Cyclops, the Læstrygones,
the Lotophagi, of Æolus, the Sirens, Calypso, and Circe, may have
had no ‘whereabout,’ no actual site, outside the fancy of Homer;
still they must have been imagined as repositories in which to lodge
traditions which had reached him, and which, however fabulously
given, purported to be local. Again, with respect to the tradition
of Atlas, it is scarcely possible to refuse to it a local character.
He knows the depths of every sea, and he holds or keeps the pillars
that hold heaven and earth apart. This must not be confounded with the
later representations of Atlas carrying the globe, or with his more
purely geographical character, as representing the mountain ranges of
Northern Africa. Here he appears[428] as the keeper of the great gate
of the outer waters, namely, of the Straits of Gibraltar: that great
gate being probably the point of connection with the ocean, and that
outer sea being frequented exclusively by the Phœnicians, who in all
likelihood obtained from Cornwall the tin used in making the Shield of
Agamemnon, or in any of the metal manufactures of the period. Rocks
rising on each side of a channel at the extreme point of the world, as
it was known to Greek experience, or painted in maritime narrative,
could not be represented more naturally than as the pillars which hold
up the sky. This figure follows the analogy of the pillars and walls
of a house, supporting the roof, and placed at the extremities of the
interior of its great apartment[429]. With equal propriety, those who
are believed alone to have reached this remote quarter, and to frequent
it, would be said to hold those pillars[430].
Even in a less imaginative age than that of Homer, the love of the
marvellous, both by the givers and by the receivers of information,
would act powerfully in colouring all narratives, of which the scene
was laid in tracts unknown except to the narrator. But a more powerful
motive might be found in that spirit of monopoly, which is so highly
characteristic of the earlier stages, in particular, of the development
of commerce[431]. To clothe their relations in mystery and awe, by the
aid both of natural and supernatural wonders, would be, for a people
possessed of an exclusive navigation, a powerful means of deterring
competitors, and of maintaining secure hold upon profits either
legitimate or piratical.
We have before us these facts in evidence: on the one hand, a people
who in maritime enterprise had far surpassed all others, and had a
virtual monopoly of the knowledge of the waters and countries lying
beyond a certain narrow circle. Then, on the other hand, we have
a multitude of adventures laid by Homer in this outer sphere, and
associated wholly with the persons and places that belong to it. Upon
these grounds it seems hardly possible to avoid the conclusion, that
the Phœnicians must have been the people from whom Homer drew, whether
directly or mediately, his information respecting the outer circle of
the geography of the Odyssey. Such is the judgment of Strabo. He says
τοὺς δὲ Φοίνικας λέγω μηνυτάς; he considers that even before the time
of Homer they were masters of the choice parts of Spain and Africa: and
it appears that the traces of their colonization remained until his
day[432].
_Traditions of the Outer Geography._
But further; the traditions themselves bear other unequivocal marks,
besides their lying in parts known to Phœnicians only, of a Phœnician
character; and whether these marks were attached by Homer, or came
ready made into his hands, has no bearing upon the present argument.
I have spoken of the tradition of Atlas; and of the likelihood that
the Phœnicians would cast a veil over the regions of which they knew
the profitable secrets. In conformity with these ideas, the island of
Ogygia is the island of Calypso, the Concealer: and this Calypso is the
daughter of Atlas.
Phæacia is, in the Odyssey, the geographical middle term between the
discovered and the undiscovered world; Ogygia is the stage beyond
it, and the stage on this side of it is Ithaca. I do not understand
the Phæacians to be a portrait of the Phœnicians[433]: but the very
resemblance of name is enough to show that Homer had this people in
his eye when he endowed his ethereal islanders with the double gift,
first, of unrivalled nautical excellence, and, secondly, of forming the
medium of communication between the interior space bounded by the Greek
horizon, and the parts which lay beyond it.
_Minos the ὀλοόφρων._
But in many instances we find Homer’s peculiar and characteristic use
of epithets the surest guide to his meaning. Now in Minos we have,
according to Homer, a firmly grounded point of contact with Phœnicia.
Of Minos, as the friend of Jupiter, and the Judge of the defunct, we
must from the poems form a favourable impression. Yet is Ariadne Μίνωος
θυγάτηρ ὀλοόφρονος. What is the meaning of the word ὀλοόφρων? I think
an examination of the use of kindred words will show, that in the mind
of Homer it does not mean anything actually wicked or criminal, but
hard, rigid, inexorable; or astute, formidable to cope with, one who
takes merciless advantage, who holds those with whom he deals to the
letter of the bond; and, in consequence, often entails on them heavy
detriment.
In this view, it would be an epithet natural and appropriate for a
people, who represented commerce at a time when it so frequently
partook of the characters of unscrupulous adventure, war, and plunder;
and an epithet which might pass to Minos as one of the great figures
in their history, or as a conqueror. Again, it is worth while to
review Homer’s use of the adjective ὀλοός. This epithet is applied by
him to the lion, the boar, and the water-snake[434]. Achilles, when
complaining of Apollo for having drawn him away from the Trojan wall,
calls him θεῶν ὀλοώτατε πάντων[435]. Menelaus, combating with Paris,
when his sword breaks in his hand, complains of Jupiter that no god
is ὀλοώτερος[436]. Philætius, in the Twentieth Odyssey, astonished
that Jupiter does not take better care of good men, uses the same
words[437]. And Menelaus applies the same epithet to Antilochus, who
has stolen an advantage over him in the chariot-race[438]. In the
positive degree, it is applied to old age, fire, fate, night, battle,
to Charybdis (Od. xii. 113), and even to the hostile intentions of a
god, such as the ὀλοὰ φρονέων of Apollo (Il. xvi. 701), and in θεῶν
ὀλοὰς διὰ βουλὰς (Od. xi. 275).
But the characteristic force of the epithet applied to Minos becomes
most clear, and its effect in stamping a Phœnician character upon
certain traditions undeniable, when we examine the remaining instances
of its use; and likewise that of the cognate, indeed nearly synonymous,
phrase ὀλοφώïα εἰδώς.
Only two persons besides Minos receive in Homer the epithet
ὀλοόφρων[439]. One of them is Atlas, the father of Calypso: the other
is Æetes, the brother of Circe. Again, the phrase ὀλοφώïα εἰδὼς
is applied to Proteus[440]; and it is used nowhere else except by
Melanthius, where he means to describe Eumæus as a person dangerous
and to be suspected[441]. Again, the ὀλοφώïα of Proteus are his
tricks[442]: and moreover we have the ὀλοφώïα δήνεα of Circe[443].
Thus it would appear that Homer virtually confines these epithets
within one particular circle of traditions; for Proteus, Æetes, Circe,
Atlas, all belong to the Outer Geography of the Odyssey[444]: and the
use of one of them for Minos, with his already presumable Phœnician
extraction[445], leads us, in concurrence with many other signs, to
conclude that the epithet is strictly characteristic, and the circle
of traditions Phœnician. One of the slightest, is also perhaps one of
the most curious and satisfactory signs of the Phœnicianism of the
whole scheme. Tiresias is employed in the Eleventh Odyssey to predict
to Ulysses his coming fortunes: and in doing it he uses many of the
very lines, which are afterwards prophetically spoken by Circe. Now
why is Tiresias made the informant of Ulysses? He is nowhere else
mentioned in the poems; yet he is introduced here, in possession of
the only gift of prophecy permitted in the nether world. Why have we
not rather Amphiaraus, or Polupheides, those Seers at the top of all
mortal renown[446]? Surely there can be but one reason; namely, that
Tiresias was a Theban, a native of the only Greek State, except Crete,
where he could have been the subject of a Phœnician dynasty[447]. It
was doubtless this Phœnician connection, which qualified him to speak
of regions, of which a Greek Seer would, in right of his nation, have
possessed no knowledge.
Nor is it only upon the epithets that we may rely; but upon the
characters, too, of those to whom they are appropriated. They are full
of the elements of cunning and deception. Proteus, Circe, Calypso,
the Sirens, the Læstrygones, the Cyclopes, all partake of this
element, while in some it is joined with violence, and in others
with refinement or sensuality. In all of these we recognise so many
variations of the one Phœnician type.
It has been observed, that Virgil seems to recognise Proteus as an
eastern counterpart of Atlas, in the lines
Atrides Protei Menelaus ad usque columnas, &c.
This is a recognition by Virgil of the Phœnician character of the
tradition: but I see no evidence that Homer meant to place Proteus and
Atlas in relations to one another as representing the East and West of
the Mediterranean, though this theory is adopted by Nägelsbach[448] and
others.
The office of the god Mercury, and his relationship to Calypso, will be
found to confirm these conclusions[449].
_Commercial aptitude of modern Greeks._
The moral signs of the Greek character, though not identical with
those of the Phœnician, yet establish a resemblance between them; in
so far that both possessed vigour, hardihood, and daring, and that
the intelligence, which directed and sustained these great qualities,
was susceptible of alliance with craft. In the censure upon the
πρηκτῆρες, which Homer has conveyed through the mouth of Euryalus,
we may read a genuine effusion of his own nature: but the gifts of
Mercury to Autolycus appear to show, that the Phœnician character
easily amalgamated with the Greek by its cunning, as well as by its
strength. And certainly we may well marvel at the tenacity of tissue,
with which these characters were formed, when we find that still, after
the lapse of three thousand years, one race is distinguished beyond
all others for aptitude and energy in prosecuting the pursuits of
honourable commerce; that in England, now the centre of the trade of
the whole world, the Greeks of the present day alike excel all other
foreigners who frequent her great emporia, and the children of her own
energetic and persevering people; themselves perhaps the offspring of
the Thesprotians, who went for corn to Dulichium; of the Taphians, who
carried swarthy iron to Temese; of the Cretans, who made much money in
Egypt; and of the Lemnians, who obtained metals, hides, captives, and
even oxen, in return for their wine, from the jovial Greeks of the army
before Troy.
The more we attempt an examination of the geography of the Odyssey, the
more we find that, impossible as it is to reconcile with the actual
distribution of earth and sea, it has marks of being derived from the
nation, who navigated in the remote waters where its scenes are laid.
The fundamental article of the whole is the circumscription of the
known seas by the great river Ocean, which, alike in the Iliad and
the Odyssey, flows round and round the earth, returning upon itself,
ἀψόρροος[450], like what is called an endless rope. And the two keys,
as I believe, to the comprehension of it are to be found in the double
hypothesis,
(1) That Homer placed to the northward of Thrace, Epirus, and the
Italian peninsula, an expanse, not of land, but of sea, communicating
with the Euxine. Or, to express myself in other words, that he greatly
extended the Euxine westwards, perhaps also shortening it towards
the east; and that he made it communicate, by the Gulfs of Genoa and
Venice, with the southern Mediterranean.
(2) That he compounded into one two sets of Phœnician traditions
respecting the Ocean-mouth, and fixed the site of them in the North
East.
It would carry us too far from the line of ethnological inquiry, were
I now to examine the extensive question with which these propositions
are connected. I will only observe in this place, that all the features
of this outer geography, when viewed at large, are of such a nature
as to favour, or perhaps rather to compel, the supposition, that it
was founded on foreign, that is to say, on Phœnician information. Its
extended range, its reach, by the routes of Menelaus on the one side,
and of Ulysses on the other, over all the points of the compass, its
vague, indeterminate, and ungeographical character as to distances and
directions, and yet its frequent, though inconsistent and confused,
resemblances at almost every point to some actual prototype, of which
the poet may have had possibly or probably a vision in his eye;--all
this agrees with the belief, that it represents a highly manufactured
work, made up from Phœnician materials, and can scarcely agree with any
thing else.
Reserving this much agitated subject for a fuller separate discussion,
I will here only proceed to consider that limited portion of it which
bears upon ethnology; I mean the evidence afforded us by Homer in the
Odyssey, and particularly in connection with the Wanderings, as to
the site and character (1) of the Siceli and of Sicania: (2) of the
Thesprotians and Epirus: and (3) with respect to the family of Cadmus,
which general tradition connects immediately with Phœnicia in the
person of its founder, and which Homer, by indirect testimony, I think,
justifies us in considering as derived from that source.
_The Siceli and Sicania._
Notwithstanding his use of the name Thrinacie, the poet appears to
have had no geographical knowledge of Sicily, at least beyond its
shape; for I think it may be shown that he places the site of the
island in the immediate neighbourhood of the Bosphorus. But he might
still have heard of the eastern coast of Italy immediately adjoining,
afterwards the country of the Bruttii, which forms the sole of the foot
rudely described by the configuration of southern Italy. For this coast
is much nearer to Greece; it probably would be taken by mariners on
their way from Greece to Sicily, and might be visited by them before
they had pushed their explorations to the more distant point. The
Athenian fleet in the Peloponnesian war touched first at the Iapygian
promontory, and then coasted all the way[451]. This possibility grows
nearly into a certainty, when we find that Homer speaks of a race,
evidently as transmarine, which from history would appear probably to
have inhabited that region at some early period.
I venture to argue that this Bruttian coast, the sole of the Italian
foot, reaching from the gulf of Tarentum down to Rhegium, is the
country which appears to us in the Odyssey under the name of Sicania.
In the fabulous account which Ulysses gives of himself to his father
Laertes before the Recognition, he speaks as follows:
εἶμι μὲν ἐξ Ἀλύβαντος, ὅθι κλυτὰ δώματα ναίω,
υἷος Ἀφείδαντος Πολυπημονίδαο ἄνακτος·
αὐτὰρ ἐμοί γ’ ὄνομ’ ἐστὶν Ἐπήριτος· ἀλλά με δαίμων
πλάγξ’ ἀπὸ Σικανίης δεῦρ’ ἐλθέμεν οὐκ ἐθέλοντα·
νηὺς δέ μοι ἥδ’ ἕστηκεν ἐπ’ ἀγροῦ νόσφι πόληος[452].