CHAPTER II.
The changes of the conditions of existence in what we call civilization resemble, a good deal more than we generally imagine, the progress of a horse in a tread-mill. Comparing the evidences of a higher prosperity which history affords with what we now find in Ithaca, we have ample ground to suppose that, while our part of the world has made certain advances, this has rather retrograded. A scanty population, the greater part of the island indeed uninhabited; ruins of great cities where now there is not a shepherd’s hut; a wretched, sordid life in which not even poetry, the offspring of sorrow, can find a foothold; utter insignificance in the world of men,—this is what the island of Ulysses, which fills so large a part of the Old World’s poetry, shows us to-day.
We woke like Ulysses under the shadow of Neriton, but not like him under the olive’s shade. Our yacht was anchored in a tranquil and land-locked bay, Port Vathy (the deep), round the shores of which stretch and gleam, white in the sun, the houses of the modern capital of Ithaca, a dull, utterly uninteresting town, neither whose past nor present is worth a note.
Devastated by Turks and corsairs by turns, conquered by Christian and Infidel, the tribute of death and pillage had at one time nearly left the island a desert, and Venetian chronicles report the repeopling of it by a Slavonic colony; but there is good evidence, as we shall see presently, that there was never quite an end of the original stock. Though one does see occasionally strongly Slavonic faces, the population is now in language and manners purely Greek, with some of the worst traits of the race strongly developed. By good chance I found an old acquaintance in Mr. Caravia, a deputy for Ithaca to the Greek Assembly, then in vacation, and I had a letter to Aristides Dendrinos, the principal personage of the island; and through their united attentions we were made as much at home in Ithaca as possible. But the Ithacans are shrewd folk, sharp dealers who look at foreigners as the Hebrews did on the Egyptians, as made to be spoiled; and we were unlucky enough to have arrived in the Greek Lent, which, as they observe it, is equal to starvation to outsiders. The excellent wine of Ithaca, one of the best of Greek wines, is quite worthy its ancient reputation; but flesh was unattainable, and fish so rare, owing to the people’s habit of killing them with dynamite, that we could not get enough for a breakfast. The fowls in Greek lands, living an outcast life, never fed, but expected to grow, as the partridges do, on the bounties of nature, hardly offer a compensation for the trouble of picking their bones. They combine all the misfortunes of the wild and domesticated conditions, with none of the advantages of either, and offer a scant resource to the caterer. We made haste to see what was to be seen in Ithaca, and study our great predecessor’s footprints, but we found the learning harder than the living. The island Greek is quick-witted, and, like the Irishman, never confesses himself at fault in anything you want to know, especially in things connected with ancient history or archæology. He solves the hardest and most obscure problem by a bold dash, and is even surer than Schliemann in his breezy inductions. It is amusing and cheering to see a man so cock-sure of what archæology has puzzled over so many years. On inquiring for a guide to shorten my researches (for, though Homer is guide-book enough for Ithaca, one may be a long time in tracing out the Odyssean movements by the poem), every one was ready to show me everything. Before leaving I found an intelligent guide, as such go, in one Angelo Persego, whose name I record for the benefit of such of my readers as may be tempted (out of the Greek Lent) to visit Ithaca. But here let me drop a word of advice for all voyagers in Greek lands. Take a guide for lodgings and living, but never place any confidence in his identifications or local traditions. He may be right, but the chances are nine to one he is not. He may even have been over the ground before, but his assurance to that effect is no evidence. I found the men I selected utterly ignorant, as usual, of almost all I wanted to learn; but I found a little book by G. F. Bowen, one time Fellow of Brasenose and President of the Ionian University, which, though dated in 1850, gives a sufficient clue to the topography to enable one to dispense with a guide, except to find the best roads.
Vathy does not occur in the Odyssey under any name, nor is there any trace of antique structures about it. In the illustration the narrow entrance at the right is Vathy; the cove in the centre, with the island off it, is the port of Phorcys, where Ulysses was landed, and which, for the uses of ancient mariners, who beached their ships instead of anchoring them, was a better port than Vathy. It corresponds in the minutest detail to Homer’s account of it,—a smooth, sandy beach, complete shelter from all winds, and only varying in any particulars in its surroundings by a greater distance from the grotto where the Phæacians hide the presents Ulysses brings with him; but of this more is to be said.
The Odyssey gives no intimation of any city near the landing-place. The port of Ulysses’ own capital was much nearer Phæacia, and the ship might have landed him at his own door. The reason of this excessive caution was that during so long a time he had had no news from home, and his Phæacian friends knew that he might find his city in the hands of an enemy.
PORT OF PHORCYS AND NERITON, FROM THE MOUTH OF ULYSSES’ CAVE.
Awaking, then, from the sleep in which he had been so gently landed by the crew of the Phæacian ship, he finds himself in a strange land, as he supposed, and in complete solitude, and arms himself with his habitual cunning, distrusting everything. When Athena comes to him in the form of a shepherd, he asks where he is; and being told that he is at last in the long-sought Ithaca, he is transported with joy, but conceals his emotion and addresses the goddess with these hasty words, disguising the truth and telling his story falsely, always turning in his mind many artifices: “I, too, have heard, in the far-off, immense island of Crete, of the island of Ithaca. It is, then, in that country that I have arrived with my treasures. I have left an equal part to my children because I fly from my native land, where I killed the dear son of Idomeneus,” etc., etc., going on with a long history to account for his presence in Ithaca, a place unknown to him, which fable he only drops when Athena throws off her disguise; but he still is unconvinced that he is in Ithaca. She calls his attention to Neriton in front of him, and having convinced him, helps him hide his treasures in the grotto, when they sit down under the olive-tree over its entrance, and she tells him how matters stand at home, and contrives plans for getting rid of the pretendants, who would, no doubt, put an end to him if he fell into their hands. This seems to be his conviction, for he exclaims: “Great gods! if you had not enlightened me I should have perished in my palace, like Agamemnon. Come, let us plan a means by which I may revenge myself on them all.” This hint of the fate of Agamemnon, whose end he had learned, is the clue to his cautious deportment. They plan as follows: He will be disguised by Athena, so that not even his wife shall know him, and will then go to Eunæus, who keeps his swine by the Raven’s Cliff, near Arethusa’s fountain, and wait with him studying up the position, while she goes off to Lacedæmon to bring back Telemachus, whom she had sent there nominally to get news of his father, but really, as she informs Ulysses, to give him an opportunity, hitherto wanting, to see the world and acquire renown. Here they separate, and Ulysses takes the secret path.
The position of the grotto makes the only difficulty in tracing all his movements; for it is not, as one would expect from the text, at the head of the port, strictly speaking, but at the head of the little ravine which ends in the port, a good quarter of an hour’s walk from the shore, even making allowance for all the recession of the water-line, which has evidently been considerable. The grotto itself corresponds exactly with the description, and can be entered by mortals only in the usual way, by the small opening which looks toward the port. “It has two entrances: one, turned toward the breath of Boreas, is for human use; the other, toward that of Notos, is more divine. Never man enters by that; it is the way of the immortals.” The human entrance is a low, almost invisible opening, or at least, easily passed without notice, at a short distance. Even now, when all vegetation has disappeared from around it, and the olive-trees come only half-way up the hill, it would easily be hidden by a large stone, as Minerva hides it. The entrance, low and precipitous, widens rapidly within, and we descend by what might once have been artificially prepared steps to a vault-like cave, sixteen to twenty feet in diameter, with a curious recess at the farther end, and at the top of the vault another opening, like the top window of the Pantheon of Rome, or any of the circular temples whose form was derived from the vaulted tomb or treasury of Pelasgic architecture. At first sight I thought this opening might have been artificial, but on close examination I saw that the formation of the rock led to it naturally, and that, hardly large enough to admit a human body readily, it could only, if enlarged, be entered by a person’s being let down with a cord. This is the “immortals’ entrance.” Under this opening lies a huge heap of stones, the accumulation of centuries, for the lower portions are cemented together by the stalagmitic deposit from the rock above; and the walls of the grotto, despite the breaking off of every attackable stalactite, are also formed of carbonate of lime so deposited. The difference between the actual distance from the water’s edge to the grotto and that which is indicated by the narrative of the Odyssey is not more than a fair poetic license would permit; or the memory of the narrator, having known the localities, might well in a few years of absence leave out this short distance.
The Odyssean topography is greatly confused to the modern traveler by the fact that the Homeric city undoubtedly stood at the northern end of the island, and far remote from the modern city as well as from the landing-place of Ulysses and the pig-pens of Eumæus. The view from the grotto gives us, at the left, a bay of which Vathy and Phorcys are tributaries. This cuts the island nearly in two, a narrow ridge of rock only connecting its two great masses. On the north is the site of the Homeric city, as I shall presently show; but on the south are the Raven’s Cliff and the fountain of Arethusa, together with an ancient ruin known by the people as the “Castle of Ulysses.” These ruins are of the earliest form of Pelasgic, commonly named Cyclopean, though there is no justification for any distinction between the “Pelasgic” and the “Cyclopean,” or any proper distinction of styles, as they run into each other, from the form shown at “Ulysses’ Castle” to the most elaborate and carefully fitted polygonal which we shall find at Samé on the opposite shore of Cephalonia. The walls of Ulysses’ Castle are of great extent, and portions still remaining near the summit are well preserved, some fragments being nearly twenty feet high. It must have been the work of a powerful tribe and a great stronghold. Seen from the sea, it shows on a sharp conical rock precipitously trending down to the shore. The Odyssey in no manner makes allusion to this, either as city or as ruin. Ulysses passes very near it going south, leaving it on the right, apparently ignoring its existence. This makes it tolerably clear that it had been so long in ruin that it was in no way to be connected with the Odyssean dynasty or colonization even, or that it was constructed after the Homeric epoch. The latter hypothesis is untenable, because we find in many parts, especially in the Argolid, ruins clearly contemporary with this, which are in the Hellenic traditions regarded as the work of a vanished and semi-divine race of giants, the Cyclopes or the “divine Pelasgi;” while, of the Homeric epoch, as distinguished from the Pelasgic, which preceded it, and the Hellenic, which followed it, we have no recognizable remains, and the cities known to have existed, such as the Ithaca of Ulysses, have left no ruin durable enough to show in our time. This indicates a state of civilization in which the great necessity of strong walls as a defense had passed, or that, by the use of cement, walls were made so light in structure that they were efficient for the day, but perished utterly in the intervening time, which again is an untenable hypothesis, because we find cement used nowhere in Greece in work known to be earlier than the third century B. C. I leave the question of the identity of the Odyssean epoch with that of the composition of the poem at present untouched. I am dealing only with the poem which philologists suppose to have been composed about 850 B. C. That the author knew Ithaca perfectly, I think we shall see, and that consequently the ruins of the Pelasgic epoch, when not continuously inhabited (as were Nericus and Samé, the former of which Laertes conquered, and the latter of which sent the largest deputation of “kings” as suitors for Penelope, the foundations of both being Pelasgic), were already so lost in the twilight of prehistory as to be without any meaning to the author of the Odyssey. The city whose ruins are now called the Castle of Ulysses was as unknown to the epoch of Homer as to ours. No one in the whole action of the Odyssey goes in or out of its gates, or turns aside from his path to speak of or visit it. “Kings” were as common as rascals in those days, but that two important cities should exist contemporaneously in the small island of Ithaca, and that the people of Ulysses should live in one, pasture their hogs on the territory of the other, and ignore its existence, is impossible. This does not prevent Schliemann from identifying the house walls, which remain to a small height, with the pig-pens of Eumæus, or a huge stump near the citadel, with the tree from which Ulysses had made his bed (Ithaca, Peloponnesus and Troy).
That this part of the island was nearly or quite unpopulated is made more than probable by the facts that no mention is made of any city or people here; that the only features mentioned are the wildness, and forests abandoned to feeding of pigs; and that Ulysses selects this part for his concealment. The path Ulysses probably followed from the port of Phorcys to the Raven’s Cliff is by far too hard for dilettante following; it is not only impassable to beasts of burden, but, I should say, difficult for a pedestrian. There is a road carriageable for a few miles from Vathy along the ridge southward, and then a fair bridle-path to the cliff, which, had we known it, would have led us somewhere near the location of Eumæus’s sties; but the guide my friends had recommended me, on his personal assurance, did not know the road, and we went wandering across fields and over hills, abandoning our quadrupeds at the moment when they would have been our best guides; and, finally, the fellow had to go to a ploughman scratching the earth with a crooked stick behind a yoke of year-old heifers, and inquire his way. I exhausted my modern Greek in exasperated vituperation of his pretentious ignorance, and took the lead, as I generally have had to do on similar occasions.
There was a pretty little valley on our way, the only arable or fruitful land in this part of the island; all else was bare and bleak. A few tough-lived shrubs, broom and gorse, arbutus, and some others I did not know, wring a scanty subsistence from the clefts between the rocks, and in a mass of almost unmitigated limestone was cloven a ravine. The roughness of Ithaca was proverbial even in Homeric days, since Athena, while disguised as a shepherd, replies to Ulysses, “If it [Ithaca] is rocky, if it breeds not horses in its moderate space, it is not quite barren,” etc. One might well select this scene as one of tranquil beauty, with the faint glimpses of the dreamy inner sea above its valley distance, and the golden grain-fields as I saw them, interspersed with vineyards and olive-orchards.
RAVEN’S CLIFF AND THE FOUNTAIN OF ARETHUSA.
The glen of the Raven’s Cliff becomes a wild gorge below the fountain of Arethusa, and descends abruptly to the sea. Above, a stripe of bare, pale-gray rock down the cliff shows that in winter it is the location of a cataract, though, when I visited the locality, dry as summer dust. The fountain of Arethusa is situated about half-way from the cliff to the sea, and bears the evidences of an immense antiquity. Remains of an architectural surrounding are still to be seen, which, with some foundations of walls of the Roman period, evidently of a temple to the nymph or local goddess, and “Ulysses’ Castle,” are the only traces of ruin discoverable in this lobe of the island. The recess of the fountain has once been much larger, but the slow process of depositing the calcareous incrustation which forms its walls has gone on so long that only a small deep basin remains, from which the people draw the water with a cord and bucket. Its niche is cushioned with moss and maidenhair ferns, and the soft porous rock is always moist with the filtering through of the water. A wooden trough is placed for the watering of the sheep and goats which take the place of the hogs of Eumæus, for this is the only perennial source of water in the region.
An old woman, wrinkled and bowed, looking like one of the Fates, sat near the fountain, combing the wool she had washed at it; and on the opposite side the nymph of the fountain, in the shape of a young matron of some neighboring hamlet, was washing her clothes. The wash was boiling when we came up, over a fire of brambles and weeds; but the utensil which took the place of the bronze caldron of the antique house-mother was an American petroleum-can, with a wire bale fitted in rudely, and the stamp of the New York Refining Company was still visible on the tin. We talk of the omnipresence of gold, of the omnipotence of cotton; but in my wanderings on the earth I have found places where the people did not know the value of a piece of gold, and wore nothing but the homespun and woven wool of their flocks and flax of their fields, while I have never found one that did not know petroleum; and I have learned that the petroleum-can is a more universal concomitant of civilization than English cutlery or American drillings.
The pens of Ulysses’ pig-herd were at the top of the cliff, where a plain of small extent and soil of scanty depth still maintains an olive-grove, sole representative of the forest of oaks whose acorns fattened the swine for the revels of the suitors of Penelope.
Here Ulysses finds Eumæus, and here, in his anxiety to convince him of the truth of his prediction of the return of the wanderer, he says: “If he return not as I declare, let your servants seize me and throw me over the high rock, that vagabonds may learn in future to abstain from useless falsehoods.”
FROM AN OLD GREEK VASE.
THE SITE OF ITHACA—PORT POLIS.
To return to the city of Ithaca, Ulysses must retrace his steps past the port of Phorcys, and follow the ridge of rock which connects the divisions of the island past the mass of Neriton. His landing-place was on the east side of the island, the port of the ancient city Ithaca on the west; and there are now on the road between, several villages, the representatives, perhaps, of the ancient towns from which Ulysses drew his quota of men for the Trojan campaign, “Crocyles and the rocky Ægilipos.” It was in one of these villages that Schliemann, visiting the island for the first time, in his Homeric enthusiasm, as the villagers, in their habitual curiosity to see the stranger, came out to gaze and question, taking the assemblage as a demonstration in his honor, and determined to show them how well he estimated the dignity of an heir of the Odyssean glory, mounted on a table and translated from Homer the passages which record Laertes’ emotions on the return of his long-lost son. “They wept with emotion,” says the naïf Doctor; and he rewarded them by some hundred lines more. Remembering this incident, I inquired about the matter, and found that it had excited much merriment in the cultivated circles of Vathy, and, as I expected, the other side in the rencontre preserved a very different recollection of the Doctor’s achievement, and that the tears were of merriment rather than of pathos. No one in the assemblage could understand a word of the Greek in the Doctor’s pronunciation of it.
In the nomenclature of the two principal higher villages of the northern section, I found a curious survival of archaic language, which, so far as I could learn, is as incomprehensible as Homer, in the original, to the inhabitants. The villages are Anoï and Exoï, which are clearly from the archaic and (except in the Cretan mountains) obsolete words ano and exo, used as haw and gee are by us in driving oxen, and of course meaning originally right and left, and these indicate site survivals of early towns or villages. But of Ithaca the city, the home of Ulysses, not a trace remains except the name Polis (city, the city par excellence), which is applied to a locality where not even an ancient wall shows a claim to the appellation. The fragments of substructure shown on the hill above and near the village of Stavros are undoubtedly mediæval, and belong to the piratical city which was established here, and which was destroyed in the latter part of the sixteenth century. I searched in vain for anything to indicate the date of the ancient city, but here, doubtless, was the home of Ulysses. Its little port is of the nature demanded by ancient mariners,—a smooth beach in a cove, with the island of Cephalonia opposite and near enough to shut off any great violence of sea or wind. Homer relates that the suitors, when Telemachus had gone to Pylos to get news of his father, sent out a ship with some of their number to intercept and kill him on his return, and that this ship lay in watch at an island off the port where the return of Telemachus’s ship could be seen from afar and prevented. Opposite Port Polis is a rock, probably the remnant of that island; for, as the material of it is a conglomerate easily subdued by the elements and decomposing rapidly, it must have been once a considerable island, and it is now the only remnant of rock or island which occupies any such relative position.
In searching around the neighborhood for traces of antiquity I was accosted by a peasant, who told me that there had been found a stone with some letters on it, and I made haste to hunt it out. They (for there were two fragments) were at the bottom of a heap of stone which had been exhumed from under a land-fall, and which were evidently part of a very ancient building. I hired the men who gathered round to remove the heap, and photographed the stones, which had been originally one. The inscription is in the early style of Greek epigraphy, boustrophedon, i. e., going alternately from left to right and right to left, as oxen go when ploughing. It is the oldest known inscription in the Ithacan alphabet.
I placed a copy of the photograph in the hands of Professor Comparetti of Florence, amongst others, and received from him the following, read at a meeting of the Academy of the Lincei:—
INSCRIPTION FOUND AT POLIS.
“Since I have hitherto spoken of inscriptions very old or archaic, as we say, it will be permitted me to close this communication by presenting to the Academy a curious inscription of this kind recently discovered in Ithaca and communicated to me by a diligent and cultivated visitor to the Greek lands, the American, Mr. Stillman, who made in Ithaca a photograph of the inscription, and, having unsuccessfully asked an interpretation of several scholars, applied to me. He has permitted me to make communication to this Academy, putting at my disposition also the negative of his photograph, from which are printed the copies I present. The inscription is tolerably roughly cut in a friable stone, broken in two, worn by time and water. The photograph, which is never the best means of representing monuments of this kind even in experienced hands, presents some confusion and obscurity in parts; but this is the only difficulty in the epigraph.... I saw at once that this was an inscription of which there was already some notice in a book published by the Phœnix of discoverers of antiquities, Schliemann, in 1868, ‘Ithaca, Peloponnesos, and Troy.’ Rich as he is in fancy, Schliemann is ready to believe any story, and at once convinced himself that he had discovered the inscription of a very old sarcophagus, and found an honest workman who helped him to complete the idea, showing him the bones found in it by him. And in his book, together with this and other news, he communicated the inscription such as he read it. Of the two fragments, however, he only saw that at the right, and this he read very badly, seeing letters where none are, and imagining incredible forms of letters. Kirchhoff in his ‘Studien zur Geschichte des Griechischen Alphabets’ sought to apply this monument to his purposes, but could make nothing of it, and it would have been impossible to get anything from it. Now, thanks to the intelligent care of Mr. Stillman, we have before us the monument as it is; he knew nothing of Schliemann; when he saw the inscription, he saw that it was incomplete, and seeking amongst the stones, found the other piece, and, divining justly its relation, united them and took the photograph which now permits us to utilize what we may call his discovery.
“The epigraph is certainly very old, besides being boustrophedon. This is shown particularly by the forms of the sigma and iota. It was cut roughly and by hands little used to such work, without any care for symmetry in the disposition of the letters or of the lines, nor for the uniformity of the letters. Some letters are lost in the fracture, others by the wearing of the stone, and the entire inscription is mutilated in the lower part.
“The reading, with the filling up, is as follows:—
τᾶς [Ἀ]θάνας
τᾶς (Ρ)[έ](ας)
χα[ὶ τ](ᾶ)ς Ἡρ
ας τα (ἔ) [ν]τεα
τῶ[ἱ]ερῶ οἱ
ἱε[ρ]εε[ς] (Κες-
π
“Translation: ‘Of Athena—of Rhea—and of Hera—the sacred utensils of the temple—the priests, Kes—placed.’
“Probably the names of the three priests followed, the first commencing with the letters Kes,—perhaps Kesiphron,—and there ought to follow τάδ’ ἒνεθεν or τάδε χάτεθεν, or similar expression. The inscription, then, has nothing to do with a sarcophagus, or with the dead. It treats, on the contrary, of a hidden treasure, that is to say, of the sacred utensils of a temple in which were worshiped the three divinities, Athena, Rhea, and Hera, each one having her peculiar priest. It is well known that there is nothing new in this case of three divinities worshiped in the same temple. We know that Athena was especially reverenced in Ithaca, and are not surprised to find her first in the list. Then to explain this inscription, it may be supposed that in some perilous time of war, revolution, or other danger, these priests decided to put in security the treasures of the temple and hid them in a safe and secret place, leaving there this inscription, so that in any case the nature and origin of the objects might be known. Probably they cut the inscription themselves that no one else might be in the secret, and this would explain the signs of haste and inexperience in the cutting, while on the other hand the language, like the orthography, is correct.”
The attribution to a sarcophagus by Schliemann is difficult to explain as a mistake. If it had been, as he says, on a sarcophagus that he found the right half of the inscription, he must have found the whole; but the fact is that there was in the whole pile of stones no fragment of anything like a sarcophagus, an object unknown in Greece till centuries later. The inscription had evidently been a mural tablet and was about eighteen inches deep and of a shape and size which made it impossible to take it for a fragment of a sarcophagus; and underneath the mass of debris from which it was extracted the workmen found a pit, which was excavated, they told me, without finding anything; nor, they said, was any object of antiquity found with the stones, while Schliemann engraves a lance head and a coin of about 300 B. C. which he says were found in the sarcophagus. This proves nothing, for when anything is found the absurd rigor of the Greek laws makes the concealment of it the first object of the finder. If this pit, when discovered, had still contained the sacred objects, what a find if archæology could have profited by it! But as the Greek law in case of concealment would have punished the excavator by confiscation, or in the best case by taking the half of the objects found, the first precaution taken by the finder would have been to remove, if possible, to a foreign shore, and if not, to melt down, if of precious metal, the objects found. Until Greek legislation on archæological research is more intelligent, it will be gravely handicapped. The greater part of the value of an object is often to know where it came from, and this we never know of objects found in Greece by chance or private excavation. There was some years ago a report, which had certainly considerable confirmation, of the discovery of a great treasure in this very part of Ithaca; possibly it may have been this. If we could have found the vessels of the temple, they would have given us the art of the descendants of the Dorians in Ithaca at least six hundred years B. C.; for this inscription is Doric, and dates from about that time.
In any case, we may be confident that our inscription marks the site as having been in the vicinity of a city of, or little later than, the Homeric epoch, as, supposing the Odyssey to have been composed in 850 B. C., only about two hundred and fifty years could have intervened between its composition and the placing of this inscription; and we know of no ethnic revolution which would have destroyed the Homeric city between the Dorian invasion and the wars of Corinth.
THE SCHOOL OF HOMER.
But if there are no traces of the Homeric city, and none of earlier construction in the immediate neighborhood of the site, there is in the interior of the island, and in the northern lobe, which we see was probably the special domain of the Ithaca of Ulysses, a most interesting antiquity which is now known as the “school of Homer.” It is in all probability a sacred place of the Pelasgic epoch, as on the rock above it is a chapel whose substructions are clearly Pelasgic and most probably the remains of a Pelasgic temple, which alone would account for its preservation, and is probably also the reason of its conversion into a Christian church. It is on a scale in keeping with all the remains we have of the heroic epoch, about twelve by twenty feet, and though much repaired in the modern adaptation, still shows its ancient dimensions and style of building in the lower courses, too solid to have been rearranged, though some of the upper stones have evidently been replaced in later times. It stands on the brow of a low bluff, below the village of Exoï and not far from the “field of Laertes,” which tradition points out at a little hamlet below. Traces of other walls extend to the brink of the precipice that overhangs the “school,” and round by the side is an antique flight of steps, mostly preserved and cut in the solid rock, that served as passage between the temple and the “school,” which may have been the place of sacrifice or possibly an area for the holding of the council. It is mainly cut in the rock at the foot of the precipice on which the temple was built, with a double flight of steps, also cut in the rock, descending to the ground below. It is not above fifteen feet across at its widest, and the decomposition of the solid rock by time and weather leaves only the general shape and character, with some of the steps above and below it, still tolerably perfect. It was a lovely place, and if the shade now thrown by the olive-trees which surround it was anciently given by plane-trees, it would have been still more striking. You look off on the sea and the distant island of Levkadi with the mountains of Acarnania, and through the interstices of the olive-trees you catch glimpses of the cultivated valley beneath, where, if anywhere in this end of the island, old Laertes must have had his field, as here only is tillage possible. North is the sea, south the huge wall of Neriton, east the rugged mountain that looks out on the inner sea, and west that on which Exoï is raised to the clouds and from which one looks down on the Cephalonian channel at its foot. Like the plain or valley between the Raven’s Cliff and Vathy for the southern lobe, this is the only valley for the northern. The “school” is poised thus midway between the valley and the mountain peak; and whether, as the islanders pretend, it was the place where Homer read his poems, the council place of the ancient heroes and kings, or the hieron of Pelasgic priests whence the smoke of sacrifice went up to the great Zeus, the choice of locality was one which suited alike its uses. The young wheat was springing into head in all the interspaces of the close-standing olive-trees, and the rocks above were overhung and draped with wild sage and gemmed with wild flowers. The boy who guided us assured us that there was a secret passage to the top of the rock, filled up now; and a peasant passing by stopped to see what we might be saying or doing, and finding that our interest was fixed on palaia pragmata, offered to guide us to an ancient rock-cut well in the valley below. We found the door which opens to the passage, which led down a stone-cut staircase to the well, far in the ground; but as the well belonged to the priest, who had the key in his pocket, and was, no one knew where, we had to be content with the door, which was modern enough, though fitting an opening cut in the rock very evidently ancient.
In this vicinity must, by the force of nature, have been the residence of all the agricultural part of the population of the ancient Ithaca. Says the poem:—
“Ulysses and his companions withdrew from the city and soon arrived at the magnificent garden of Laertes, which the hero had formerly purchased with his wealth after the many ills he had suffered. There stands his dwelling, surrounded on all sides by a portico where the slaves who cultivate his estate sleep and eat. In the porter’s lodge is an old Sicilian,[6] who in this solitary place, far from the city, takes care of the noble old man.... At these words he gives his arms to the herdsmen who enter into the house of their master, while Ulysses, to find Laertes, enters into the garden. The hero goes down into the great vineyard and finds neither Dolias nor his sons, nor the other slaves. Dolias has led them far away to gather thorns to make hedges round the inclosure. Ulysses finds his father digging round the root of a tree in the garden. Laertes is dressed in a dirty patched tunic; around his legs he has bound, to preserve them, greaves of sewn leather; gloves protect his hands, and his head is covered by a cap of goat-skin, which completes his mournful appearance....
“‘Ah,’ replied Laertes, ‘if you are Ulysses, if you are my son returned to this island, describe to me a sure sign that I cannot mistake.’
“‘See first,’ replies Ulysses, ‘this wound, which long ago on Parnassus a wild boar gave me with his tusk, when I went to Autolycus to bring the presents which he here had promised me. Then listen, I will describe to you the trees of your beautiful garden which you gave me, and I asked of you in my childhood as I ran behind you. We passed through your inclosure; you told me the name of every tree, and you gave me thirteen pear-trees, ten apple-trees, forty fig-trees, and then you promised to give me fifty rows of vines in full bearing.’”
The legends of the modern population of Ithaca must not be confounded with real local tradition, transmitted from ancient times. They are unquestionably the reflection of literary statement, the reiterated conclusions of students more or less well informed as to the true archæological bases of opinion. The attribution of the particular spot we visited as the garden of Laertes is doubtless due to reading of the Odyssey, and, like the location of the “Castle of Ulysses” on Aëtos, arose from a popular rendering of the story as handed down by literature and converted into legend, which is located wherever the crude antiquarianism of the people judges best. An instance of the real tradition which has a distinct value in archæological research is that of the preservation of the name Polis for the abandoned site where unquestionably the Homeric city stood; and this simple indication is sufficient to prove that Ithaca was never entirely depopulated and repeopled by Slavs, because in this case the continuity of tradition would have been lost, and there is no ruin to restore it in modern times, even if it were capable of surviving the interruption. If it had simply been handed down by a Slavonic colony, it would have been “Arad” instead of “Polis,” while, if the depopulation had once been complete, names which are not now understood by the present inhabitants could not have originated with them. If the name had sprung from the presence of ruins, the site on Aëtos would have received it instead of its present legendary appellation, so that in no way can we explain the survival of the name Polis for the site, or the names Anoï and Exoï, except by supposing them to have clung to the places from Homeric times through a continuous population of Hellenic stock, however thinned. Another curious incident illustrates the tenacity of this kind of survival. As we were passing through one of the villages, I heard one child calling to others to run to see the barbarians, οἱ βάρβαροι (várvari), just as the Greek children of ancient times would have called us,—i. e., foreigners, people who spoke a strange language, a babble, unintelligible sounds like those of children. I heard it twice and could not be mistaken, though a Greek friend to whom I related it would have it that they said βαυάροι (Bavarians), since in continental Greece, Bavarian (German) has been a term of contempt from the days of King Otho. But I am certain of the word; and besides, the children of Ithaca never had anything to do with the Bavarians, as they were under the Ionian Government till after the fall of Otho and the departure of the Bavarians.
On the whole, I think that there is the strongest ground of probability for these conclusions: that, whatever may be the relation of the real Ulysses to Ithaca, the hero as conceived and represented in the Odyssey, the Ulysses of the Homeric poems, if he was an actuality, lived at the site known as Polis; and that this site, and all the others mentioned in the poem, were known by the author of it from personal inspection. The inscription found at Polis is in Doric Greek, which gives us a right to conclude that the city continued to be inhabited by the mixed population, result of the Dorian immigration; while the entire oversight of the Pelasgic site on Aëtos indicates the total interruption of race connection and the immense interval which must have come between its construction and the transfer of the seat of power to Polis, as, if still habitable when the new race took possession, it would, like Nericus, Samé, and Crané, which we shall examine in Cephalonia, have been made the basis of the newer city. That it was then utterly abandoned, we conclude, not only from the neglect of it by Ulysses in the passages we have noticed, but from the fact that while Samé, on the other island, sends suitors, and Ithaca itself (the city) adds its quota, no allusion is made to any from any other place in the island. In short, the total silence through the whole poem in regard to any place which can be by possibility connected with Aëtos, justifies my concluding that it was as much an abandoned ruin in the time of Homer as now.
The episode of the voyage of Telemachus to Pylos and Sparta, which brings into the Odyssey the western shore of the Peloponnesus, is, with the exception of some unimportant allusions, the only interjection of continental Greece into the poem.
We went over to look for some trace of the sage Nestor, but as usual found that while the people had enough of the after-growth of legend out of the Odyssey, they knew absolutely nothing of the antique site. I had no guide then to lead me to the Pylos where the ship of Telemachus found “the Pyleans scattered along the shore offering a sacrifice to Neptune, black bulls without a spot.”
The bay of Navarino is a vast marine lake, known to us mainly by its being the locality of the decisive combat between the fleets of the great European powers and the Turkish and Egyptian, which decided the destiny of modern Greece. We ran in from the open Adriatic, whose waters were uncomfortably agitated by the south-west wind, glad of the safe and convenient anchorage. But a sleepier place than the modern substitute for the “sandy Pylos” I have never found in Greece. Nobody could give me a word of direction, and all our searching round the extended sheet of water for the antique site, only perhaps to be recognized by some half-hidden remnant of Pelasgian walls, was fruitless; we neither saw nor heard of any ruin. We paid a visit to the splendidly picturesque old Venetian fortress commanding the entrance of the bay, which perhaps has used up the stones of Nestor’s Pylos, and which has looked down on one of the most murderous combats of modern naval history. It is garrisoned by a little guard of Greek soldiers, and its keep is the prison of the district. The gate is a good sample of the fortifications by which the Venetian Republic held her Eastern possessions.