[4] iv. 73, xv. 460, xviii. 296.
[CHAPTER XVI.]
CONCLUSION.
Before I quit my subject, I should perhaps answer a question which the reader has probably long since asked himself. I mean, how it is conceivable that considerations so obvious as those urged in the foregoing Chapters should have been overlooked by so many capable students for so many hundreds of years, if there were any truth in them. For they lie all of them upon the surface; they are a mere washing in the Jordan and being clean; they require nothing but that a person should read the Odyssey as he would any other book, noting the physical characters described in the Scherian and Ithacan scenes, and looking for them on some West coast of the Mediterranean to the West of Greece.
The answer is that the considerations which I have urged have been overlooked because, for very obvious reasons, it never occurred to any one to look for them. "Do you suppose, then," more than one eminent scholar has said to me directly or indirectly, "that no one has ever read the Odyssey except yourself?" I suppose nothing of the kind, and know that it was only possible for the truth when once lost (as it soon would be on the establishment of the Phœnicians at Drepanum) to be rediscovered, when people had become convinced that the Odyssey was not written by the writer of the Iliad. This idea has not yet been generally accepted for more than a hundred years,[1] if so long, but until it was seized and held firmly, no one was likely to suspect that the Odyssey could have come from Sicily, much less that it could have been written by a woman, for there is not one line in the Iliad which even hints at the existence of Sicily, or makes the reader suspect the author to have been a woman, while there are any number of passages which seem absolutely prohibitive of any other opinion than that the writer was a man, and a very strong one. Stolberg in the last century, and Colonel Mure in this, had the key in the lock when they visited Trapani, each of them with the full conviction that the Cyclops incident, and the hunting the goats, should be placed on Mt. Eryx and the island of Favognana—but they did not turn it. Professor Freeman, Schliemann, and Sir H. Layard, all of them visited Trapani and its immediate neighbourhood either as students or excavators, and failed to see that there was as splendid a prize to be unburied there without pick and shovel, outlay, or trouble of any kind, as those of Nineveh, Mycene, and Hissarlik—and why? Because they were still hampered by the long association of the Iliad and Odyssey as the work of the same person. Knowing that the Iliad could hardly have been written elsewhere than in the Northern half of the West coast of Asia Minor, it would never occur to them to look for the Odyssey in a spot so remote as Trapani. They probably held it to be the work of some prehistoric Herodotus, who would go on from scene to scene without staying longer than he could help in any one place, instead of feeling sure, as I believe they should have done, that it was the work of one who was little likely to have travelled more than a very few miles from her own home. Moreover, Admiralty charts are things of comparatively recent date, and I do not think any one would have been likely to have run the Odyssey to ground without their help.
But however this may be, I do not doubt that the habit of ascribing the Odyssey to Homer has been the main reason of the failure to see the obvious in connection with it. Surely it is time our eminent Iliadic and Odyssean scholars left off misleading themselves and other people by including the Odyssey in their "Introductions" to the work of "Homer." It was permissible to do this till within recent years; anything else, indeed, would have been pedantic, but what would have been pedantic a hundred years ago, is slovenly and unscholarly now.