And the new seasons ent’ring on their course)
To Lybia then, on board his bark, by wiles
He won me with him, partner of the freight
Profess’d, but destin’d secretly to sale,
That he might profit largely by my price.
Not unsuspicious, yet constrain’d to go,
With this man I embark’d.
The hero of The Odyssey was, self-confessedly, no tyro, but was himself “in artifice well framed and in imposture various”. Admittedly he “utter’d prompt not truth, but figments to truth opposite, for guile in him stood never at a pause”.[119] Obviously he was a sailor to the bone, and when he says, “I boast me sprung from ancestry renowned in spacious Crete,” with the additional statement that at one time he was an Admiral of Crete, it is possible we are in face of a fragment of genuine autobiography.
Doubtless, as our traditions state, the first adventurers on the sea who reached these shores were oft-times terrors and “the dread of Europe”. To the Tyrrhenes may probably be assigned the generic term tyrranos which, however, meant primarily not a tyrant as now understood, but an autocrat or lord. “Clad in their long dress who could equal them?” wondered a British Bard, and it may be that the long robes figured herewith are the very moulds of form which created such a powerful impression among our predecessors. The word attire points to the possibility that at one time Tyre set the fashions for the latest tire, and like modern Paris fired the contemporary world of dress. In connection with the word dress, which is radically dre, it is noticeable that the Britons were conspicuously dressy men; indeed, Sir John Rhys, discussing the term Briton, Breton, or Brython, seriously maintains that “the only Celtic words which can be of the same origin are the Welsh vocables brethyn, ‘cloth and its congeners,’ in which case the Britons may have styled themselves ‘cloth-clad,’ in contradistinction to the skin-wearing neolithic nation that preceded them”.
