If, on the hypothesis that Favognana and Mt. Eryx are the true sites of the island on which Ulysses and his men hunted the goats, and of the cave of Polyphemus, we are immediately led to others, in due order of sequence, which commend themselves as being those of the island of Æolus, the Land of the Læstrygonians, Circe's island, the other established sites, and lastly Calypso's island, should we not conclude, at any rate provisionally, that the hypothesis is a true one?
I will so conclude, and proceed to look for the island of Æolus in some island, apparently solitary, a good way to the West of the Lipari islands, and at no great distance from Mt. Eryx.
I should first correct a very general misapprehension. The word πλωτῇ (x. 3) has been unduly pressed into meaning that the island floated about, and thus changed its place. But if so singular a phenomenon were intended more would have been made of it. It would not have been dealt with in a single word, admitting easy explanation as mere metaphor. No one presses the "swiftly moving" islands of xv. 299 into meaning that the islands actually moved. All that is meant is that they "seemed to move" as the ship flew past them, and so with the island of Æolus—"it seemed to float on the horizon." It shows no signs of having moved during the month that Ulysses stayed on it, and when he returns to it after an absence of three weeks, we have no hint given of its having changed its place.[5] I conclude, therefore, that it was as fixed as any other island, and proceed to look for it.
This is no hard matter, for the island of Ustica offers itself at once. In clear weather it can be faintly seen from Mt. Eryx, and would naturally have impressed itself on the mind of a writer to whom Eryx and its neighbourhood was all in all. It is in the quarter from which the winds blow most fiercely on Trapani during the winter months, and may fitly have been selected by a Trapanese writer as the home of the winds. The distance, a long way West of the Lipari islands, and a greatly longer distance West of Ithaca, is all as it should be. I accept it, therefore, and go on to look for the land of the Læstrygonians, and their city Telepylus, at some point on the North coast of Sicily between Ustica and the Lipari islands.
The name of the Læstrygonians or Workers in Stone,[6] like all names of places or people inside Sicily, is fictitious. If there had ever been any people really so called in Sicily Thucydides would have been able to find out some little, at any rate, about them; whereas he declares (vi. 2) that he cannot do so, and subrisively refers his readers to the poets, or whatever other source of information they can command. Clearly he does not believe in them except as poetical fictions concerning the most ancient inhabitants of Sicily—of whom none are known to him as more ancient than the Sicans.
But why should not the writer of the Odyssey be referring under names of her own coinage to these same Sicans, for both the Cyclopes and the Læstrygonians? The name of the Læstrygonian city, Telepylus, is certainly fictitious. It means "with gates far asunder," which can only be an ex post facto name: a city receives its name long before it is known what it will prove to be in the matter of growth. All that we can gather from the name is that the writer of the Odyssey intended her audience to understand that the city was large.
Its inhabitants, like the Cyclopes, are giants and ogres. They being giants, we should look for remains of megalithic buildings, and being ogres we should suspect identity of race between them and the Cyclopes whom they so closely resemble. The writer hates them both, and looks down upon the Cyclopes much as the Normans looked down upon the Saxons for some generations after the Conquest.
The Cyclopes appear to have been subdued and outlawed; not so the Læstrygonians. These last are a flourishing and very industrious people, who work by night as well as by day (x. 84-86). There is a poor little prehistoric joke about them, to the effect that in their country a man could earn double wages if he could only do without sleep. Moreover they were so wealthy and luxurious that they used to have relays of fresh milk (x. 82, 83), instead of being contented with a morning supply, as Sicilian towns generally are even at the present day. More than this I cannot collect about them from the Odyssey.