If what I have said above is not enough to satisfy the reader that the writer of the Odyssey was drawing the Ionian islands from the Ægadean, nothing that I can add is likely to convince him. I will therefore now go on to my fourth point, namely, that the voyages of Ulysses are, as nearly as the writer could make them, a voyage round Sicily, from Trapani by the North coast, through the straits of Messina, to the island of Pantellaria, and so back to Trapani, beyond which we need not go, for Ithaca and Scheria are, both of them, Trapani, as I have already shown.
The main episodes of the voyage occur in the following order. 1. The Cicons. 2. The Lotus-eaters, arrived at after passing the island of Cythera. 3. The island where Ulysses and his men hunted the goats, and the adventure with Polyphemus. 4. The island of Æolus, and a ten days' sail towards the East with a fair wind all the time, till Ithaca is well in sight, followed by an immediate return to the island from which Ulysses had started. This sail to Ithaca over the toe of Italy and the island of Samos has no topographical significance except as showing that the writer conceived of the island of Æolus as lying a long way West of Ithaca. The episode is introduced merely for the purpose of bringing the cup close to Ulysses' lips and then dashing it from them. 5. The Læstrygonians. 6. The island of Circe and the journey to Hades, which last is again without topographical significance, being nothing but a peg on which to hang colloquies with the dead, and bringing us back to the island of Circe. 7. The Sirens. 8. Scylla and Charybdis. 9. The cattle of the Sun. 10. The island of Calypso. 11. Scheria and Ithaca.
There is no difference of opinion among scholars as to the sites of the Cicons, the island of Cythera, and the Lotus-eaters; the reader will, therefore, see that we are taken without waste of time to a point at no great distance from Sicily—the contrary winds off Cape Malea (ix. 81) being apparently raised on purpose to take us away from Greece. It is not quite easy to see why the Cicons were introduced unless it was that Ulysses might become possessed of the wondrous wine of Ismarus with which lie intoxicated Polyphemus. The wine of this neighbourhood was famous many centuries after the Odyssey was written, and presumably was so in the time of the Odyssey itself. A gasconading story of this wine may well have existed among the people of Trapani which might prompt the reader to introduce it, poke fun at it and make Polyphemus drunk with it.
Or again, knowing as we do from Thucydides (vi. 2) that the original Sican inhabitants of this part of Sicily received an influx of fugitives from the neighbourhood of Troy after the fall of that city, it is possible that traditions may have existed among the writer's audience to the effect that some of them were of Cicon origin, and she may have wished to flatter them by telling them that they had repulsed Ulysses. Nothing can be said with any confidence upon this head; all we may note is that the country is quite featureless, and hence does not suggest drawing from personal knowledge, any more than does the land of the Lotus-eaters.
On leaving the land of the Lotus-eaters the full consent which has accompanied us so far fails us; nevertheless a considerable weight of authority, ancient, medieval, and modern, carries us to the island of Favognana, anciently called Ægusa or Goat Island, as the one on which Ulysses and his men hunted the goats. Indeed this incident seems introduced as though purposely to suggest the Ægadean or "goat" islands to the audience, as also does the line iv. 606 in which Ithaca—that is to say, in reality, the island of Marettimo—is said to be an island fit for goats.[2]
A very considerable consent accompanies us also to Mt. Eryx as the site of the adventure with Polyphemus. Here, and with the island on which the goats were hunted, the local colour is stronger than anywhere else in Ulysses' voyages, as indeed might be reasonably expected from a writer whom I have shown to have been so intimately acquainted with the neighbourhood of Trapani.