They have neither places of assembly nor laws, but they live in caves on the tops of high mountains; each one of them rules over his own wife and children, and they take no account of any one else (ix. 112-115).
I saw several families of cave-dwellers at a place called le grotte degli Scurati on Cofàno about fifteen miles North of Trapani. There was, however, nothing of the Cyclops about them. Their caves were most beautifully clean and as comfortable as the best class of English cottages. The people, who were most kind and hospitable, were more fair than dark, and might very well have passed for English. They provided us with snow white table cloths and napkins for the lunch which we had brought from Trapani, and they gave us any quantity of almonds fried in a little salt and butter; most unexpected of all, the salt they brought us was mixed with chervil seed. There was an atrocious case of brigandage on Cofàno about a fortnight later than our pic-nic. A Palermo merchant was kept a whole month on the mountain till he was ransomed, but I am sure that our cave-dwellers had nothing to do with it. The caves bore traces of prehistoric man by way of ancient meals now petrified.
It is noticeable that forms of the word σπέος or ἄντρον (cave) appear forty-five times in the Odyssey as against only six in the Iliad, which, allowing for the greater length of the last named poem, is about in the proportion of 10:1. We may surmise, therefore, that the Odyssey hails from a district in which caves abounded.
As regards "the wall of bronze" which the writer of the Odyssey tells us ran round the island of Æolus, it is hard to say whether it was purely fiction or no. We may be sure that it was no more made of bronze than Æolus was king of the winds, but all round the island of Marettimo, wherever the cliffs do not protect it naturally, there existed a wall of long pre-Odyssean construction, traces of which were shown me by Sigr. Tedesco and Professor Spadaro, without whose assistance I should not have observed them. I have sometimes wondered whether the writer may not have transferred this wall to Ustica, as we shall see later that she transferred the hump on Thersites' back to that of Eurybates; but no traces of any such wall exist so far as I know on Ustica, nor yet on the islands of Favognana or Levanzo. The ancient name of Marettimo was Hiera, and about 1,900 feet above the sea I was shown ruins (not striking) of exceedingly ancient walls on a small plateau which the inhabitants dare not cross by night, and which is believed to have been the site of the cult that gave its name to the island.
What I have to say about Circe's island is so speculative that I write it in fear and trembling. I see that Circe's house is, like Eumæus's pig farm, "in a place that can be seen from far" (x. 211), and I see also that Ulysses approaches it "over the top of the mountain" (x. 281), as he does Eumæus's hut (xiv. 2). I remember the pigs, and I cannot refrain from thinking that though the writer tells us in the first instance that the island was a low one (x. 196), her inability to get away from her own surroundings is too much for her, and she is drifting on to the top of Mt. Eryx and Eumæus's pig farm. She does not mean to have pigs at first—the men whom Circe bewitched on previous occasions were turned into wolves and lions—but the force of association is too strong for her, and Ulysses' men are turned into pigs after all.
The fall of Elpenor from the top of Circe's house is a very singular way of killing him. If he had been at Eumæus's hut she could not have killed him more naturally than by letting him tumble off the precipice that overhangs it, and on the top of which the temple of Venus stood in later ages. I suspect, not without shame, that the wall of Circe's house is made to do duty for this precipice.
On the island of Panaria, anciently Enonymus, among the Lipari group, there is a small bay called La Caletta dei Zummari, which suggests a corruption of Cimmerii, but I have already explained that no attempt should be made to localise the journey to Hades.
The two Sirens can be placed with, I should say, confidence, on the island of Salina anciently called Didyme from the two high mountains, each about 3000 feet high, of which it consists. Sudden cat's paws of very violent wind descend at times from all high points near the sea in this part of the Mediterranean, as from Cofàno near Trapani, where there is a saying among the fishermen "ware Cofàno." My friend, Signor E. Biaggini, whose loss I have to deplore within the last twelve months, and who has furnished me over and over again with local details, told me that he once was all but capsized by a gust from Cofàno, that came down on his boat in perfectly calm weather, and lasted hardly more than a few seconds. I take it that the two Sirens—who are always winged in the earlier Greek representations of them—were, as indeed their name suggests, the whistling gusts or avalanches of air that descended without the slightest warning from the two mountains of Didyme. The story turned from poetry into prose means, "Woe to him who draws near the two treacherous mountains of Didyme; the coast is strewn with wreckage, and if he hears the wind from off them shriek in his rigging his bones will whiten the shore." The reader will remember that the Sirens' island is very near Circe's.
Speaking of the Æolian islands Admiral Smyth says:—