[513] Herodot. i, 2; Ephorus, Fragm. 40, ed. Marx; Strabo, xvi, pp. 766-784; Justin, xviii, 3. In the animated discussion carried on among the Homeric critics and the great geographers of antiquity, to ascertain where it was that Menelaus actually went during his eight years’ wandering (Odyss. iv, 85)—
... ἢ γὰρ πολλὰ παθὼν καὶ πόλλ᾽ ἐπαληθεὶς
Ἠγαγόμην ἐν νηυσὶ, καὶ ὀγδοάτῳ ἔτει ἦλθον,
Κύπρον, Φοινίκην τε, καὶ Αἰγυπτίους ἐπαληθεὶς,
Αἰθίοπάς θ᾽ ἱκόμην, καὶ Σιδονίους, καὶ Ἐρεμβοὺς,
καὶ Λιβύην, etc.
one idea started was, that he had visited these Sidonians in the Persian gulf, or in the Erythræan sea (Strabo, i, p. 42). The various opinions which Strabo quotes, including those of Eratosthenês and Kratês, as well as his own comments, are very curious. Kratês supposed that Menelaus had passed the straits of Gibraltar and circumnavigated Libya to Æthiopia and India, which voyage would suffice, he thought, to fill up the eight years. Others supposed that Menelaus had sailed first up the Nile, and then into the Red sea, by means of the canal (διωρὺξ) which existed in the time of the Alexandrine critics between the Nile and that sea; to which Strabo replies that this canal was not made until after the Trojan war. Eratosthenês started a still more remarkable idea: he thought that in the time of Homer the strait of Gibraltar had not yet been burst open, so that the Mediterranean was on that side a closed sea; but, on the other hand, its level was then so much higher that it covered the isthmus of Suez, and joined the Red sea. It was, he thought, the disruption of the strait of Gibraltar which first lowered the level of the water, and left the isthmus of Suez dry; though Menelaus, in his time, had sailed from the Mediterranean into the Red sea without difficulty. This opinion Eratosthenês had imbibed from Stratôn of Lampsakus, the successor of Theophrastus: Hipparchus controverted it, together with many other of the opinions of Eratosthenês (see Strabo, i, pp. 38, 49, 56; Seidel, Fragmenta Eratosthenis, p. 39).
In reference to the view of Kratês,—that Menelaus had sailed round Africa,—it is to be remarked that all the geographers of that day formed to themselves a very insufficient idea of the extent of that continent, believing that it did not even reach so far southward as the equator.
Strabo himself adopts neither of these three opinions, but construes the Homeric words describing the wanderings of Menelaus as applying only to the coasts of Egypt, Libya, Phenicia, etc; he suggests various reasons, more curious than convincing, to prove that Menelaus may easily have spent eight years in these visits of mixed friendship and piracy.
[514] See Ritter, Erdkunde von Asien, West-Asien, Buch iii, Abtheilung iii, Abschnitt i, s. 29, p. 50.