The cave is full of bees' nests in summer, as are all the caves hereabouts. They are small, solitary, of red clay, and about the size of the cup of an acorn. All the caves in the neighbourhood of Mt. Eryx abound in remains of stone-age man, some fine examples of which may be seen in the museum at Palermo. These remains would doubtless be more common and more striking three thousand years or so ago than they are at present, and I find no difficulty in thinking that the poetic imagination of the writer of the Odyssey ascribed them to the nymphs and naiads.
From hard by both the caves one can see, of course, the precipices of Mt. Eryx, which I suppose to be Neritum in the mind of the writer (xiii. 351), the straight paths on the cultivated land some couple of hundred feet below, the harbour of the old merman Phorcys, and also the harbours of Trapani, all which are requisite by lines xiii. 195, 196, and 345-351.
The reader will note that while more than one Scherian detail is given casually and perhaps unintentionally, as for example the harbour where Ulysses landed in Scheria, and the harbours, which I do not doubt are the two harbours of Trapani, there is no Ithacan detail given so far which conflicts with any feature in the description of Scheria.
The number and value of the points of correspondence between the cave in which Ulysses hid his treasure, and the grotta del toro greatly exceed those between Grammerton and Shrewsbury. Nevertheless it will be well to see whether his movements on leaving the cave confirm my view or make against it.
I suppose him to have ascended the steep, and then, doubtless, wooded slopes of Mt. Eryx and to have passed along its high and nearly level summit (δἰ ἄκριας, xiv. 2) to the other end of the mountain, where the Norman Castle stands now 2500 feet above the sea level. Here he descended some two or three hundred feet to the spot now called i runzi, where there is a spring near a precipice which is still called il ruccazzù dei corvi, i.e. "the rock of the ravens," it being on this part of the mountain that these birds breed most freely. This walk would take him about two hours, more or less.
The site is seen from far and wide, it is bitterly cold in winter, and is connected with Trapani by a rough mountain path which Ulysses may well have been afraid to travel without a stick (xvii. 195).[3] The path passes close to the round-topped _Colle di Sta Anna_ which answers perfectly to the Ἕρμαιος λόφος of xvi. 471. The time it takes to walk from the runzi to Trapani corresponds with all the indications furnished us in the Odyssey concerning the distance between Eumæus's hut and the town of Ithaca—which seems roughly to have been a winter's day walk there and back.
The reader will see, therefore, that we have the whole road taken by Ulysses from his landing in the harbour of Phorcys to the cave (with all its complex requirements) in which he hid his presents, up Mt. Neritum, along its long top to the spring and the Haven Rock, and finally the path passing the hill of Mercury down to Ithaca, as accurately presented to us by the road from the saline di S. Cusumano to the grotta del toro, Mt. Eryx, the fountain, the Raven Rock, and the road to Trapani, as though the Odyssey had been written yesterday. When the reader can find me in all literature, ancient or modern, any like chain of correspondences between an actual place and one described in a work of fiction as an effect of mere chance, I will accept the coincidences to which I have called attention as possibly accidental only; but I am convinced that no such case nor anything approaching it can be adduced.
I, therefore, claim that Ithaca, like Scheria, must be taken as drawn from Trapani. There is, however, this important point to be remembered, that though the writer, when she has to consider Ithaca ab extra, as an island and nothing more, pictures it to herself as the high and striking island of Marettimo some 22 miles off Trapani, when she wants details she takes them from her own immediate neighbourhood on the mainland.
Young people when transferring familiar stories to their own neighbourhood, as almost all young people do, never stick at inconsistencies. They are like eminent Homeric scholars, and when they mean to have things in any given way they will not let the native hue of resolution be balked by thought, and will find it equally easy to have an Ithaca in one place and also in another, and to see the voyages of Columbus to the tropics in their own sliding over a frozen pool. So Lord Selborne writes:—
As we grew, the faculty of imagination increased in power. It coloured all our childish pleasures; it accompanied us on the ice and into the woods; it mixed the dreams of the supernatural with the most ordinary things. Our resting-places when sliding over a frozen pool were the islands discovered by Columbus or Cook, in whose voyages we delighted.
(Memorials &., by Roundell Palmer, Earl of Selborne, Macmillan 1896, pt. I. p. 66.)