THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY.
The mythical world which had for its centre Ithaca, and for its chief people Penelope and Ulysses, was out of all proportion larger than the Europe of to-day; for it comprised the whole known world, from the shadows of Cimmeria to the clouds that gave birth to the Nile. Its geography, however, has a value to archæology and prehistory which has not been fully recognized. The date and place of origin of the Odyssey will never be determined with any high degree of certainty, but in dealing with epochs that comprise unmeasured centuries we need not fear a variation of two or three. And the collation of traditions from the same mythical world will help us to this approximation to the probable date of Homer’s life, if not that of Ulysses.
Gladstone, in the “Juventus Mundi,” has made use of an argument which, even if not sound as to the Trojan war, I believe to be good for the Odyssey. The earliest authentic records in Greek history reveal Greece as under the control of two races, the Ionians and the Dorians, elements whose antagonisms have been the chief cause of the disasters and ruin of Greece.
But neither Dorians nor Ionians were the dominant race when the Odyssey was written, as neither Ionians nor Dorians appear in the record. The Greeks of the Trojan war are always called Achaioi, and the Dorians were evidently, as a dominant race, unknown to the author of the Homeric poems. Now, as they came into Greece about 1000 B. C., and as our researches show the island of Ithaca, with which Homer was well acquainted, to have become Dorian with the rest of Greece, the substance of the Odyssey must have been earlier than we have supposed, and could hardly have been as late as 850 B. C., unless the Dorian so-called invasion was an immigration spreading very slowly from the main line of its movement, and its stock still a recognizably new people. Nor does any possible modification of the Homeric poems in the recitals, continued over centuries, affect this argument in the least, as, being common property of all the bards and all the tribes, they were liable to be modified in the various versions according to the localities and local knowledge of the singers; and, one “rhapsody” being preserved by one tribe and another by another, of this hardly homogeneous people, the traces of the modifications received in their migrations could not be by the philology of the date of their collation so effaced as to leave no marks of their incomplete restoration.
It is impossible that any idea of archæological consistency had led to the exclusion of the Dorians from the Odyssey. If the Dorians had been ruling in Greece when it was composed, it seems to the last degree improbable that they could have been so completely ignored, if it were but for the deference to be paid the rulers of half the Greek world; and whether we look at the invariable practice of all early poets to adapt their work to their own times and surroundings, or to the entire consistency of the work in this respect,—too complete to be due to the study of utterly unscientific or illiterate later times,—I think it is to be admitted as probable that the Odyssey was composed before the great ethnical revolution in Greece was complete.
The purely local evidence supports this hypothesis to a certain extent, and in this topography and geography I propose to wander as far as it is possible to do so with advantage to our knowledge of the Odyssean world. Corfu was inhabited by a race alien to the Greek, and which recognized its descent from the Siculi displaced by the Pelasgi from Sicily. Opposite Ithaca lies the more important island of Cephalonia, to which Ithaca is now completely subordinate, but which then was less important apparently than Ithaca, in all probability only because it was only partly Hellenic. Now, the earliest classical name of this Island, Kephallenia, was derived from Cephalus, a mythical hero who appears to have been contemporary with Minos. But this name is never applied to it in the Odyssey. Of the island nothing is said, but of the chief city, Samos (a colony from which gave its name to the Asiatic island now known under that appellation), Homer has much to say. It lies clearly in sight from Ithaca, from which it is separated only by a narrow strait, and is one of the prominent objects in the view from Ithaca. It was originally one of that line of prehistoric cities whose only record is in the stones of their walls, and from these we learn that it was a very ancient coast settlement, which, unlike the city on Aëtos, survived through successive civilizations until history got hold of it. In Ulysses’ day it must have been a rich place, for it furnished twenty-four pretendants to the hand of Penelope. “There are first fifty-two young men, the chosen of Dulichios—six servants accompany them; twenty-four have come from Samos; twenty from Zakynthos [Zante]; and from Ithaca were twelve, the bravest.” But the author of the Odyssey seems to have had no personal knowledge of the topography of Cephalonia, and mentions no other locality in the island. Tradition tells us that the island was peopled by Telebœans, a people driven from the continent by Achilles,—before the siege of Troy, therefore, but subsequent to Cephalus; but this is one of the confusions of mythology, as Cephalus found the Telebœans in the island. The usual condensation of history into myth leaves very little clear in these early traditions. Races become personified in individuals, and the work of centuries is attributed to a life-time and an individual. Whether Cephalus was in reality a race or a man it is impossible to do more than conjecture, but though the poems mention the Kephallenes, the entire ignoring of its topography and traditions, even of the visit of the Argonauts to it, makes it difficult to believe that it was chiefly inhabited by a race kindred to that of Ithaca when Homer knew it, because Homer was too much disposed to make use of the antique traditions when apposite, to have left unnoticed that of Jason at Palé.
Cephalus having, according to the legend, killed his wife Procris, mistaking her for a wild animal as she, excited to jealousy by his devotion to the chase, which she attributed to another love, hid herself in the thickets to watch him, was banished from Athens, and, wandering in exile, came to Thebes, just then under excitement owing to the Telebœans of Cephalonia having killed the brothers of Alcmena, wife of the Theban Amphytrion, and he was requested to take charge of the expedition to avenge the murder. He succeeded in conquering the island and gave it his name. His descendants reigned there two generations, after which, the latest rulers of his blood being recalled to Attica by the oracle, a federative republic succeeded, formed by the four principal cities, or perhaps by the four which had survived the changes of race, for there are more than four antique sites. Those which history has preserved as having submitted to the Romans in the year of Rome 563 were Samé, Nesia, Crané, and Palé.
The city of Samé alone presents, in the annals of historical times, any interest, and this is sad and glorious. Livy says that at the end of the Ætolian war the Romans sent to Cephalonia to know whether they would submit or try the fortune of war, as they seem to have joined in the war with the Ætolians, though he gives no record of the part they took. He gives the account, brief and tragic, of the fate of the city, which I will neither dilute nor abbreviate:—
“An unhoped-for peace had now shone on Cephalonia when one state, the Saméans, suddenly revolted, from some motive not yet ascertained. They said that as their city was commodiously situated they were afraid the Romans would compel them to remove from it. But whether they conceived this in their own minds and under the impulse of a groundless fear disturbed the general quiet, or whether such a project had been mentioned in conversation among the Romans and reported to them, nothing is ascertained except that, having given hostages, they suddenly shut their gates, and would not relinquish their design even for the prayers of their friends whom the consul sent to the walls to try how far they might be influenced by compassion for their parents and countrymen. When no pacific answer was given, the city began to be besieged.
“The consul had all the apparatus, engines, and machines which had been brought from Ambracia, and the soldiers executed with great diligence the works necessary to be made. The rams were therefore brought forward in two places, and began to batter the walls.
“The townsmen omitted nothing by which the works or the motions of the besiegers could be obstructed. But they resisted in two ways in particular, one of which was to raise constantly opposite the part of the wall attacked a new wall of equal strength on the inside; and the other was to make sudden sallies at one time against the enemy’s works, at another against his advanced guard, and in those attacks they generally got the better. The only plan that was invented to confine them within the walls, though ineffectual, deserves to be recorded. One hundred slingers were brought from Ægium, Patræ, and Dymæ [Peloponnesus]. These men, according to the customary practice of that nation, were exercised from their childhood in throwing with a sling, into the open sea, the round pebbles with which, mixed with sand, the shores were generally strewn; therefore they cast weapons of that sort to a greater distance, with surer aim and more powerful effect, than even the Balearian slingers. Besides, their sling does not consist merely of a single strap like the Balearic and that of other nations, but the thong of the sling is threefold and made firm by several seams, that the missile may not, by the yielding of the strap in the act of throwing, be let fly at random; but, after sticking fast while whirled about, it may be discharged as if sent from the string of a bow. Being accustomed to drive their missiles through circular marks of small circumference placed at a great distance, they not only hit the enemy’s heads, but any part of their faces that they aimed at. These slings checked the Saméans from sallying either so frequently or so boldly; insomuch that they would sometimes from the walls beseech the Achæans to retire for a while and be quiet spectators of their fight with the Roman guards. Samé supported a siege of four months. When some of their small number were daily killed or wounded, and the survivors were, through continual fatigues, greatly reduced both in strength and spirits, the Romans, one night, scaling the wall of the citadel which they call Cyatides (for the city, sloping toward the sea, verges toward the west), made their way into the forum. The Saméans, on discovering that a part of the city was taken, fled with their wives and children into the greater citadel; but, submitting next day, they were all sold as slaves, their city being plundered.” (Bohn’s translation.)
It is only by conjecture we can distinguish between the two hills, both being covered with ruins; and the walls are so broken in their circuit, and so complex as well as various in their epoch of construction, that no plan of the siege could be made, but the above indicates the westernmost as first captured.
The city must have been very wealthy, if we may judge from that generally excellent indication, the tombs, which line the roads and the sea-shore beyond the city (looking from the point where the general view is taken), and by the enumeration of the booty taken by the Romans, which is given as follows: Two hundred golden crowns of ten Roman pounds each, eighty-three thousand pounds of silver, two hundred and forty-three pounds of gold, one hundred and eighteen pieces of Athenian money, two thousand four hundred and twenty-two of Macedonian, two hundred and eighty-three statues of bronze, two hundred and thirty of marble, besides the money distributed to the army.
I know of no place where the ruins of all epochs are so well indicated as at Samé. The large fragment of wall of the best Hellenic time which runs down the slope of the eastern hill is one of the finest, if not the finest, I have ever seen. Its stones are perfectly hewn, and some of them are twelve to fourteen feet long, and the highest portion still standing is not less than twenty feet high. At other points are various examples of the Pelasgic, similar to that of “Ulysses’ Castle,” but of better work. There are magnificent subterranean passages, one of which leads to the citadel on the easternmost hill, the more remote in the distant view, but the higher and probably the site of the greater citadel, being marked by the most imposing ruins and remains of works, and without doubt the locality of the original settlement. On the lower hill stand some interesting remains—a tower and remains of city wall of mixed Hellenic and Pelasgic, the tower being of the very latest Hellenic, showing the beginning of “rustication.” It was built upon in the middle ages, and the whole mass of buildings transformed into a fortress and afterward into a convent. Samé must very early have been a large and important city, as the whole of the space, including the two hills and the land between them, shows traces of Pelasgic construction, and one fragment on the brow of the hill near the tower is one of the most perfect examples of the best Pelasgic work one can find away from Mykenæ and Argos. The stones in the illustration range about five feet in length, and are faced with exquisite exactness. A wild fig-tree has taken root in the interstices of the stones, and the roots have pushed the masses of rock apart, but in several places it is difficult to see the junction when the light is flat against them. Of Roman work there is little; but some thermæ walls on the plains by the sea and some tombs show a considerable Roman occupation. Livy says that Marcus Tullius, the conqueror of Samé, went over to the Peloponnesus “after having placed a garrison in Samé.” This negatives the notion that the walls were razed to the foundations, as is asserted by La Croix; and it is also rendered improbable by the existing ruins, though it is not impossible that so much of the wall was destroyed as made the defense of it temporarily impracticable. There are, however, some slight traces of rubble-wall on the old ruins, which show a Roman (or possibly middle-age, though I incline to the former) construction, which negative any supposition that the enceinte was rendered useless for defense; for no one would repair a wall which was not tolerably complete in its circuit. The remains of the Roman time, however, are insignificant compared with those of the Pelasgic, either as to preservation or quality.
VIEW OF SAMÉ FROM THE WEST,—WITH PARTS OF PELASGIC AND HELLENIC WALLS.
At present Samé is an insignificant village, consisting of twenty or thirty small houses stretched along the beach, with a tiny port formed by a breakwater constructed from the stones of the city wall, the fairest and best cut that could be found. The people are a thievish clan, who set on any chance comer, like mosquitoes on a solitary and bewildered fisherman in a swampy land. They have coins and antiquities to sell, for which, as everywhere else in Greece, they demand the most absurd prices; and they beset one with offers of service as guides, etc., etc., etc., till they weary all human patience. This may be said of the Ionians in general, but less of the people of Cerigo, perhaps, than the others. We found, however, a grateful exception. We had wandered along the beach to the furthermost houses of the line, and on passing a very respectable-looking house, the owner, sitting in the coolness of the twilight at his gates, seeing two strangers, rose to salute us and invited us to enter; an invitation so amiable and earnest that we accepted, and were ushered into the guest-chamber, clean and furnished with divans in eastern fashion, where we were entertained with the usual sweetmeats and coffee, while the daughter of the house went into the garden and collected for each of us a bouquet of roses, the most fragrant I ever remember to have seen. Our host narrated many incidents of the English rule in Cephalonia, and when we rose to go urged us to take up our quarters in his house; and finally, as we stood before the gates, as a last favor, offered me two beautiful Greek stelæ, memorials of the ancient dead, possibly of the period of the heroic defense of Samé. He had found them in digging his house cellar, and they were the ornaments of his court-yard; but learning that we were in search of antiquities, he offered them freely as his contribution. I shall not soon forget him or his fragrant roses and the dark-eyed Saméan girl who offered them to us.
Of Crané scarcely a trace remains, even of the Pelasgic walls. It stood originally on the Lake of Argostoli (to which place we drove from Samé across the island), but at a point now far from the water’s edge. The lake is a singular geological phenomenon, formed by a number of springs bursting out from under the hills on which Crané lay, with a force sufficing to drive mills and form a strong current over the whole extent of the lake, which is a mile or more in diameter, though the surface of land to be drained by these subterranean outpours is, one would say, utterly inadequate to the quantity of water delivered.
I took a guide at Argostoli, a man of the usual type of Greek guide, who assured me that he knew the ancient city, and had often guided strangers there. On arriving at the head of the lake I found him taking useless détours to bring me to the mills, which were driven by the springs; and on asking him what he went there for, he replied that he supposed I wanted to see the mills—since that was what other people had come for. I gave him an energetic sample of modern Greek, and ordered him to show me the way to the ancient city—Palaiokastron. “Palaiokastron!” he ejaculated with surprise and bewilderment in his eyes, and turned to ask some shepherd boys or other vagabonds, who were sauntering near by and watching us, where the Palaiokastron was. They declined to give any information, probably regarding him as a poacher on their preserves. I had, therefore, to depend on my antiquarian instincts, and, taking the lead, climbed over the heights above until, guided by the nature of the ground, I found the traces of the old wall.
CRANÉ FROM THE SEA SHORE.
The position of the city was entirely characteristic of the sites of the Pelasgic epoch: a bold, double peak, almost inaccessible on the sea-side, and on the two flanks still very precipitous, but connected with higher land on the side opposite the water. On the side from which the view is taken none of the ancient walls remain. The movement of earthquakes, the gradual fall of the rock at the precipitous edge, or the leveling labor of man has carried away all the blocks that made this side of the enceinte; but many of the stones may be recognized at the foot of the slope, some worked into modern walls, and some in the débris of the hill. On the opposite side the traces are more distinct, and the wall may be traced a long way, and the site of the citadel determined, with a gate and the angles of some of the towers. From near the citadel a view is obtained which shows a long line of the débris with a distant view of the town of Argostoli and the lake, and far beyond the lines that form the western shore of the superb harbor of Argostoli, almost without a rival in the Adriatic. The mass of wall is hardly to be distinguished from mere decomposed rock; so much have time and frost, the great demolishers, split and crumbled the flinty, massive limestone, the preferred material of the Pelasgi. On the further shore shown in the view may be seen, when the air is clear, the houses which form a modern village on the site of the ancient Palé. Here were Jason and his fellow adventurers entertained on their search after the golden fleece,—an expedition which perhaps we may translate from myth into probability, as an expedition to obtain an improved breed of sheep, a finer-wooled stock, from one of the northern and inland countries.
At Argostoli I inquired about the ruins of Palé, but was told that they are mainly built over, and what is visible is only of the Roman period. I attempted, however, on our return to Samé, to run around in the Kestrel, as the voyage across the bay from Argostoli is neither pleasant nor sure in the small boats that make the service. We got up anchor as the land breeze began to blow at midnight, and I went to bed, having given orders to anchor in a little bay about half-way to the southern extremity of the island near which some ruins are indicated on the map. Awaking in the morning and finding a most suspicious tranquillity prevailing, I took a look at the outside surroundings, and found the yacht quietly moored on the same spot she had occupied the day before. A furious sirocco had sprung up and met us half-way to our destined anchorage, and after beating for an hour in vain, our little boat nearly buried in the seas, we were compelled to retreat and run back to our former place of refuge. There is no getting ahead in such small craft against the sharp, violent seas of the Mediterranean.
Three days the sirocco blew, and we tried in vain to pass the time fishing. The Ionians have adopted dynamite so universally to catch their fish that they are as scarce as honest people on shore. One does find them sometimes, and we caught a shark about four feet long and a half dozen red mullet where, before dynamite was discovered, we could have caught in the same time a hundred-weight.
The third night we got under way again, and, with a heavy swell still on, ran down to our harbor, reaching it as a flaming, splendid thunder-storm was coming up, the finale of our southern blow. We moored with cables out in three directions, and when the storm had all gone by I went ashore to hunt my ruins. A vagabond Cephalonian offered his services to carry my camera and guide me; but his crafty and evasive face, coupled with the assurance with which he clung to me, so irritated me that to rid myself of him I plunged into the pathless thicket. Traveling by compass, and searching long and closely, I found at last the remains of an early Pelasgic wall on a magnificent site, with a breezy outlook to sea north and west and overlooking a fertile valley inland, not especially pictorial, for it was too regular and too thoroughly cultivated, but through it ran a bright crystal brook overhung by huge pollard sycamores and fringed with oleanders just bursting into blossom and making the valley look like a rose-garden. Beyond the hill on which the city stood is a wild ravine through which runs the brook, which in Greek would naturally be dignified by the name of a river. Only a narrow neck, as usual, gave access to the site. It is impossible to ascertain with any kind of assurance what the name of the city was. It could not have been Nesia, the only one of the four principal ones we have not visited, for no ruins are visible approaching so late an epoch as the Roman, and it was probably Heraclea. Its position was magnificent for defense and on account of the fertility of the country behind it, but the site was probably abandoned very early for one further inland, where I was assured there were ruins of an ancient city. But my time had been so invaded by the loss of three days through the storm, and I was already so behind my programme, that I was not able to give the time necessary to the search and examination, or, indeed, to follow my plan of visiting Palé.
DISTANT VIEW OF PALÉ FROM THE CITADEL OF CRANÉ.
We climbed down to the brook, and I enjoyed the pastime of wading in the gurgling water as if I were a boy—it was so long since I had had that pleasure! We followed it into a close and gloomy gorge, where the crag of the ancient site overhung us like a huge, rough wall, almost a sheer precipice, and down at the foot ran the brook, which we followed to the sea. The sun was setting as we reached the yacht, and before we waked from sleep next morning we were bounding toward Zante.
In Zante (Zakynthos) there is, so far as I could find, no ancient ruin whatever. The character of the rock explains this; for, except at the extreme southern end of the island, there is no stone which would resist even the weather-wear since the Roman epoch. The island seems to be a bed of sand raised from the sea and slightly hardened, so that, though the citadel hill is imposing enough as a mass, the material of it is being continually dissolved, and looks at a distance more like a bank of clay than like rock.
ZANTE.
Zante is rhymingly called the “fior di Levante” (flower of the Levant), but it is difficult to see wherein it surpasses Corfu in any flowery attribute. I guess that, as in many other cases, the rhyme went for more than the fact, poetical or otherwise. It is fertile, and the land extends in an immense unpicturesque plain covered with olive-orchards and vineyards for miles from the port. Its history is unimportant and its mythology not interesting. It was said to have been colonized by Zakynthos, son of Dardanus of Troy, about 1500 years before Christ; but, as I have before said, all Greek dates and traditions of migration earlier than 1000 B. C. are purely conjectural. Zante suffered with the other islands from the endless and furious feuds of the Greek states; ravaged by turns by Athenian and Lacedæmonian, it came down to the Romans an unruly subject province, conquered and reconquered, and finally lay still in the tranquillity of slavery until Geneseric, king of the Vandals, began an epoch of devastation, which only concluded with the purchase, by the Venetians from the Sultan, of its soil depopulated by the sword and slavery.
He who goes about in the Mediterranean has great chance of seeing bad weather, for it is the reverse of a pacific sea, and in a scrap of a boat like the Kestrel the phenomena are sometimes interesting. Our course from Zante to Cerigo (ancient Cythera) leads by Cape Mátapan, opposite Cape Maleá, the two southern points of Greece, which enjoy a reputation of the kind that the American proverb gives to Hatteras and Lookout. The Kestrel was again baffled, and, after beating for hours to get past the point, we had to put up the helm and run back to Navarino, the nearest shelter, before a gathering southerly blow. We lay in our old anchorage another day, and as the wind fell at night we beat out again and ran through the little archipelago of barren and desolate islands which lie off this part of the Morea. The weather still looked ugly, and thunder-clouds were gathering on the hills of Lacedæmon, and we could see the storm creeping down toward the sea, but the wind was fair, and we hoped to make Kapsali, in Cerigo, before the squall came down. Already the heights of Cerigo loomed before us, and we had begun to look for the landmarks, when the wind struck us. All hands made what haste was possible to get in sail and get up a small storm jib to lie to under, and not too quickly, for no common canvas would have stood that blast when it struck us. The sun was setting, and soon we were out of sight of all land in the driving spray and rain. The lightning was such as only they who sail in semi-tropical seas can have known, blinding and incessant; it seemed to have gathered around the mountains of Cerigo as a centre, for it went and came and still hung there as the rain swept down the coast and up again. As the wind fell off with the down-pouring of the torrents we got off again and pointed our bowsprit for Kapsali; and as the waters above and those below seemed to have formed an alliance against us, we went below and shut the hatch. Fortunately the wind was off shore and we had little sea, and managed to creep along nearly as much as we had drifted to the leeward; so that when the storm broke and the rain held up we were able to see the rocks off the coast, and finally to grope our way into the little port of Kapsali, which is secure against everything but a southerly blow. The wind, always contrary, fell off as we drew near the light-house, and we had to get in with our sweeps in the small hours of the morning, wet, cold, hungry, and jaded from the excitement of the night; for, though it is simple and safe in the telling, a large Greek brig foundered only two miles from us in the squall, and we had experienced the worst weather we had yet felt, and since the storm began no one had been able to eat or even get a cup of coffee.
At Kapsali one begins to see the antique sailor ways and the evidence of the intense conservatism of the eastern world. The ships are drawn up on the beach at night as of old, and this necessitates a construction of the hull which cannot be far removed from that of the antique. Indeed, I have seen fishing-boats which might have served for the models of the galley on the Roman coins. The rigging, again, is of the simplest, and fitted for these seas, where the sudden squalls and the “meltem,” or gusts which come down from the mountains with no warning but a little cloud appearing on the summit, sometimes leave brief space for the taking in of sail. On the whole, wherever we look we see ample evidence that in the whole Levant, where the original population exists in a considerable proportion, the ways of life and thought are the same as those of Homer’s day. Nature has changed more than man. Where the Venetians came they brought new habits of military life and construction, and demolished all the old ruins to make fortresses; but on the domestic life and on the character of the Greek they had little or no influence.
Whether Kapsali, a mere village, the port of Cerigo, had any ancient existence, we do not know. Cerigo lies on the high rock above it, and is a Venetian fortress; and, as is generally the case with Venetian fortresses, has used up all ancient masonry, if any existed, in its construction.
CITADEL OF CERIGO.
The road from Kapsali to the town of Cerigo is of Venetian construction, kept in repair by those fitting successors of Venice, the English, who certainly left the Ionian Islands in a state of prosperity higher than that of to-day. Good roads were almost everywhere provided, and good ways of other kinds, now lost entirely, if I might believe the complaints of the people. The position of Cerigo is very strong for the days of Venetian rule, and it overhangs the port and country round on every side, except one, like a Pelasgic site, but I could find no stone of that date. It is not likely that there was any very ancient city there, as no tombs or evidences of a necropolis have been found. The formidable character of the position in the times of the Venetians is shown by the view from the road above the ravine which severs the mountain from the lesser hill over the port—a ravine whose existence is quite unsuspected from the port.
The city itself is without interest except as the first really Eastern city one will see coming from the West, and as an example of Venetian fortress-building. The view from the citadel is fine and breezy, the islands of Ovo, Cerigotto, and Crete being visible, and a great expanse of that sea which, on sunny days, is in itself so beautiful from its color. You look down on the houses, white as continual whitewashing will make them, whose flat, terraced roofs serve in the hot and rainless summer as sleeping-places for the whole family. How many nights I have dragged my mattress from the bedroom out on this delightful substitute and let the night breeze fan me to sleep!
Of history the island has next to none. Mythology puts the landing of Aphrodite here, as she came, foam-born and sea-borne, to found her religion in the Greek worlds.[7] The first who are traditionally reported to have colonized the island are the Phœnicians; but it is impossible to ignore the previous coming of the Pelasgi, who have left a well-marked ruin of the earliest type. To see the traces of the antique settlements, one had better go to Port San Nicolo if provided as we were; but secure an intelligent guide previously from Cerigo, as the country people, as in other islands, while pretending to know all about the antiquities, really know absolutely nothing. They know the tombs because they serve as sheep-folds, and they have sometimes a curious knowledge of the relative antiquity of the ruins; but they have heard modern myths, and apply them with the least possible regard to archæological facts, and invariably assure you that they know everything.
So it happened that I was again, for want of choice, out on a search with an ignorant guide. There had been some excavations commenced on the site of what is now known as Palaiopolis (the old city), which evidently was Phœnician, and was occupied down to Roman times. There were some columns of Roman or Byzantine work unearthed, and from mere curiosity to know his notions, I asked a shepherd boy watching his sheep near by what they were. “This,” he said, “was the palace of the king.” “Of what king?” I asked. “Don’t you know?” he said, opening his eyes at me as if this were the very a b c of history. “Why, the palace of Menelaus.” There is an old tradition that it was the place of residence of Menelaus and Helen, and all the objects to be seen are attributed to them. The Phœnician city is close to the sea; the Pelasgic site is several miles back, and looms up on the highest mountains in the vicinity. In a previous visit I had seen but had not explored it; but now I determined to see the whole extent of it. My guide, who brought a donkey for my occasional changes of mode of locomotion, pretended to lead me to the ancient citadel; but when we reached the hill on which I knew it to be better than he, he began to inquire about it of the women at work in the fields; thereupon I, as usual, took the lead. Guided by the nature of the ground, I found all that remained of the ancient citadel wall—a fragment kept up by the chance of its being the limit of a field, and so kept in repair, but in such a state of dilapidation that but for the evidences of the continuity I would not have been sure that it was a wall. I followed the main wall a mile or more along the edge of the precipitous slope, and saw that it bore testimony to the importance of the ancient city, for it was wide in its compass and massive, with towers, gates, and flanking towers of the true Pelasgic style, but in most places only two or three stones high. I got an imposing view of the hill from below the lowest trace of wall, showing its position with reference to the valley below, through which ran once a river of some volume, if we may judge by the alluvial plains at its mouth, but which at the time of my visit in midsummer, was dry as desert dust. A strip of white pebbles shows where it still runs in winter-time. On the hills close to the sea-side, and on both sides of the mouth of this ancient river, used to lie the old Phœnician, Greek, and Roman city, whatever it was originally called,—probably Cythera, like the island. As I have said, it is now called Palaiopolis. The temple of Aphrodite, the people pretend, was on the hill near the citadel where now is an insignificant chapel, but with no evidence of antiquity except that there are in the construction of the chapel some large stones which are evidently of Hellenic cutting; but as the Greeks had the habit in all ages of keeping up the temples of their gods, there is nothing to show that it was a temple of Aphrodite rather than a Pelasgic god, which Aphrodite-Astarte was not, and her temple must have been near the sea.
The site of Palaiopolis is marked by a quantity of tombs, most, if not all, of Hellenic date. There are now no temple remains there; but Spon, who visited the spot two hundred years ago, says that he saw the statue of Aphrodite, which was very ugly and of coarse brown stone, which reminds us of the statues of Cyprus. The rock is a soft conglomerate which the sea cuts away very rapidly, and apparently there has been a subsidence of the soil, since they say that when the sea is tranquil there may be seen beneath the water, some distance out from the actual shore, the ruins of a city. This may have been the port of Cythera—scarcely a fortified city, as the site must have been too low. Right and left of the rivulet which now represents the ancient river are bluffs of conglomerate, that on the left honeycombed by tombs, some of which have fallen with the rock, but of which others are still visible, opened to the elements but showing within the rock-cut graves. Many valuable articles of gold work have been found in past times, but the treasure seems to have been exhausted. These two bluffs are the lineal representatives and successors by right of position of what Aphrodite must have seen as she came ashore on the foam, otherwise they have no interest.
The two low hills which were included in the city of Cythera are covered with fragments of building and traces of tombs, but, so far as I could find, no wall. This is all that is left of Aphrodite, Helen, and Menelaus in their land of fabled existence. The coming ashore of Aphrodite undoubtedly indicates, like that of Europa at Gortyna in Crete, the landing of a colony from Phœnicia, bearing the worship of Astarte, who became later assimilated to Aphrodite. Of the presence here of Helen and Menelaus there is no evidence in any trustworthy tradition. The subjection of Cythera to Sparta is of historic date. My conclusion as to the island is that in Homeric times it was Phœnician in its relations as Melos was at one time, as well as Santorin and other eastern islands, and that, like Corfu, it did not come into the Greek system.
Opposite Cerigo, and with its snowy peaks glistening under the noonday sun, lies Crete. The strangest omission of the Odyssey would have been that of the island of Minos from its reminiscences, if the author had known of it; but, as we have seen in his interviews with Athene, Ulysses did not fail to include it in his geography though he had apparently never visited it, and like Egypt and Lotophagitis it was known by report. Of Egypt we had heard mention through the visit of Helen and Menelaus. Of the country where subsequently was established the Great Greek-African colony, Cyrene, we have no hint, yet the inhabitants of the Peloponnesus knew of Libya earlier than the Dorian invasion—as early, in fact, as 1500 B. C., as we know by the Karnac inscriptions. The story of Eumæus shows knowledge of the ways of that race of merchants and pirates, the Phœnicians, but nothing of their country.
The questions of the personality and date of Homer and of the reality of the Trojan war are utterly diverse, and not, in fact, interdependent. As to the latter we have thus far no direct evidence whatever, beyond poetic traditions in which the supernatural is so strongly and inextricably involved with the pretense or actuality of history that no inferences can be drawn from any part of the narrative, though from its ensemble we are assured that in its ancient form it was accepted as history by the entire Greek world as early as we know anything of that world with historical certainty. But that is no criterion. Even at this day myths grow and crystallize in the Oriental mind with a rapidity which leaves the ancients without any advantage. The universal belief from the first to the eighth century B. C. that the Iliad was history need not weigh with us. Scientific investigators differ so widely that we have no general inference to draw from their arguments. The most recent excavations leave a grave doubt whether any of the ruins excavated in the Troad can by any reasoning be admitted to be as old as the Iliad, and the remains on Hissarlik hill which Schliemann more suo has identified with Homer’s Troy are clearly the remains of the city of Crœsus, being of brick, which does not appear in the classic traditions or structures until his time, and we know by authentic history that he did build a city on this hill. Professor Jebb, one of the most acute of the literary investigators of the question, is convinced that the topography of the Iliad is eclectic, some of its indications suiting only Hissarlik and others only Bunarbashi; Max Müller maintains that the whole story is a solar myth; while Nicolaïdes, a patient and thorough Greek student of the Iliad, believes that he can follow the whole strategy of the poem on the plain of Troy. But the main questions involved in the Odyssey are of a different character and determined by different criteria. I offer my suggestions as to some of them with the deference due my masters in archæology.
LANDING-PLACE OF THE CYPRIAN APHRODITE OR ASTARTE.
The general knowledge shown in the Odyssey divides itself into kinds: that which was part of the general geography of the day, and this included the coasts shown on our route map; and that of which the poet had personal cognizance, which is limited to Corfu, Ithaca, Nericus, and possibly Pylos; and this exclusiveness suggests to us that Homer, a stranger in the West, had come, as I did, simply to follow and study the traces of Ulysses’ wanderings, and that he did so in obedience to a clearly preserved tradition as to his great exemplar, which was almost impossible without the still remembered personal presence. What he describes is admirably told, even to the “sandy shore” of Pylos, in a world whose sandy shores are rare; but Homer does not seem to have any mental vision of the lands and islands of which Ulysses only speaks in his story—the lands of the Cimmerians, of the Læstrygonians, the Cyclops, the Lotophagi, the homes of Circe and Calypso, are only heard of. Cythera, close by, is not named, and Crete and Egypt are only named. This kind of fulfillment, as well as this kind of omission, gives a tone of personality to the poem, as the composition of one person, and that one familiar with the scene of its major events, and it strengthens my belief in the hypothesis of the presence of Homer in Ithaca, and of the early date of the Odyssey, and by a certain implication argues for a logical relation between the hero and the Trojan war, implying the actuality of both.