For I rest my case on the harmonious concurrence of four lines of argument, each requiring the fulfilment of many and very rigorous conditions, and each by itself sufficient to raise a strong presumption that Trapani was the place which was most prominent in the mind of the writer of the Odyssey. They are:—
1. That Scheria is drawn from Trapani. This I will substantiate by bringing forward a much stronger combination of correspondences than exists between Grammerton and Shrewsbury.
2. That Ithaca also is drawn from Trapani and its immediate neighbourhood. My case for this will be found even stronger if possible than that by which I established that Scheria was Trapani.
3. That the Ionian islands as described in the Odyssey cannot have been drawn from the actual Ionian islands, nor from any others but those off Trapani; and that the writer sinned against her own knowledge in order to force these islands into her narrative.
4. That the voyages of Ulysses practically resolve themselves into a voyage from Troy to the neighbourhood of Sicily, and thenceforward into a sail round Sicily, beginning with Trapani and ending with the same place.
It will be necessary that no argument adduced in support of any of these propositions should clash with those in support of any other, but all the four lines of argument must corroborate each other, so that they fit into one another as the pieces of a child's puzzle. It is inconceivable that anything but a true theory should comply with conditions so exacting. I will now proceed to show that Scheria is Trapani, and will return to the steps by which I arrived at this conclusion.
Armed with the list of points I had to find in combination, as given at the beginning of this chapter, I went down to the map room of the British Museum intending to search the Mediterranean from the Troad to Gibraltar if necessary; but remembering that I ought to look (for reasons already given) some distance West of Greece, and also that the writer of the Odyssey appeared to have lived on a coast that looked West not East, I resolved to search the West coasts first. I knew that Colonel Mure and a respectable weight of ancient testimony had placed the Cyclopes on Mt. Eryx, and it seemed to me that the island where Ulysses hunted the goats, and the whole Cyclopes incident suggested drawing from life more vividly than any other part of the voyages. I knew, moreover, that the writer was a young woman who was little likely to have travelled, and hence felt sure that if one place could be found, none of the others would be long in finding; I asked, therefore, for the map of the Lilybæan promontory, as the West coast West of Greece that offered the greatest prospect of success, and hardly had I got it in my hand before I found the combination I wanted for Scheria lying right under Mt. Eryx. The land's end jutting into the sea—the two harbours one on either side of it—the narrow entrance between two marshes—the high mountain hard by—the rock at the entrance of one of the harbours—the absence of any river—will be found in the map here given, which Messrs. Walker & Boutall have made for me from the Italian Government survey, and from our own Admiralty chart.