CORFU. MOUTH OF THE OLD HARBOR WITH "SHIP OF ULYSSES"
One need not linger too long over Kerkyra. It is a state which we cannot love. We cannot forget that before Salamis it held its fleet off the southern point of the Peloponnesus, waiting to see which way the great struggle was going to incline. When Athens concluded the alliance with her at the opening of the Peloponnesian war, many at Athens felt it to be an unholy alliance, and that the burden of hatred thus shouldered was almost a counterbalance to the winning of the second navy in Greece. Thucydides draws an awful picture of the decimating feuds, which seemed tinged with barbaric fury, between aristocracy and commons. In his pages the island vanishes from view bathed in blood.
Long before the time of Thucydides the natives of this island stoutly maintained their descent from the oar-loving Phæacians of Homer. Their land was Scheria, the home of Alkinoos. This belief, in which they took so much pride, really made them great as a naval power; and he who would to-day take away the charm of Homeric tradition from this land, which has been made by it into holy ground, would work it a greater injury than one who should despoil it of its olive-trees. Of course, our enjoyment of Homer does not depend on localizing his story:
“Was sich nie und nirgends hat begeben
Das allein veraltet nie.”
And yet the story of the Odyssey, localized here from gray antiquity, one likes, while here, to believe; to read as if there had been nobody to bring up any objections to its geography, or to reason about its geography at all—to read it, in short, with Corfiote eyes and Corfiote fancy.
Does not the very ship which Poseidon turned into stone, because it conveyed Ulysses home, still stand at the mouth of the old inner harbor? Yesterday I passed the bridge over the Potamo, where, according to Gregorovius, Ulysses was cast ashore, and tumbled out of the stream that had received him to sink exhausted in his long sleep under the double tree. I can almost go farther here than I am asked to go. Methinks that under yonder tree, which looks as if it might count almost any number of centuries, the sturdy swimmer fell asleep and awoke so sweetly. It does not matter that another place near the entrance of the old harbor has come to honor in the mouths of the natives as the spot of the meeting between Ulysses and Nausikaa. Our mood adapts itself kindly to either locality. Somewhere hereabouts we will let the sweet story have a local habitation. Let fancy for the hour hold sway. Thus we are perchance brought nearer to the clever voyager, the beautiful maid, the garrulous old king guided by his wife in the midst of his sailor people. Ah! the fiction of Homer holds the mind in more abiding thrall than the facts of Thucydides.
A DAY IN ITHACA
Ithaca was the first of the great Homeric places of renown to “swim into my ken,” if it can be said to have swum into my ken when I saw it by the light of the full moon in sailing from Corfu to Patras. But I became acquainted with Troy and Mycenæ long before I really appropriated Ithaca. This I got by the method of gradual approach, a method which has a certain charm only granted to one who is privileged to reside a series of years near his goal.