Thucydides says nothing about any invasion of Sicily by a people called Elymi. He does not see the Elymi as anything more than the combined Asiatic and Sican peoples, who came to be called Elymi. If he had believed in the Elymi as a distinct batch of immigrants he would have given us a line or two more about them.
It is just possible that the known connection between Phocians and Phocæans may explain why Ulysses' maternal grandfather should have been made to live on Mt. Parnassus,[11] which is in Phocis. Ulysses, to the writer of the Odyssey, was a naturalised Phæacian, for her native town had become in her eyes both Scheria and Ithaca. It would not be unnatural, therefore, that she should wish to connect his ancestry with Phocis, the ancestral seat of the Phocæans.
Returning to Thucydides, the only point in which he varies the Odyssean version is that he makes other Trojans migrate to Eryx as well as the Phocæans, whereas the writer of the Odyssey mentions only the Phæacians without saying anything about their having been of Phocæan descent. She has, however, betrayed herself very sufficiently. Thucydides again does not tell us that the Phocæans re-settled themselves at Drepanum, but a man who is giving a mere outline of events which happened some seven hundred years before he was writing, can hardly be expected to give so small a detail as this. The wonder is that the Odyssey should bear him out and confirm his accuracy in so striking a way as it does. We now, therefore, see that instead of there being any cause for surprise at finding an Ionic-Æolian poem written near Mt. Eryx, this is the very neighbourhood in which we might expect to find one.
Finally, let us turn to Virgil. His authority as a historian is worthless, but we cannot suppose that he would make Æneas apparently found Drepanum, if he held the presence of a Greek-speaking people at Drepanum even before the age of Homer to be so absurd as it appears to our eminent Homeric scholars. I say "apparently found Drepanum," for it is not quite easy to fix the site of the city founded by Æneas (Æn v. 755-761), for at the close of Æn. III. Anchises dies at Drepanum, as though this city was already in existence. But whether the city founded by Æneas was actually Drepanum, or another city hard by it, it is clear that Virgil places Greek-speaking people at Drepanum, or close to it, immediately after the fall of Troy. He would hardly do this unless Drepanum was believed in his time to be a city of very great antiquity, and founded by Greek-speaking people. That the Trojan language was Greek will not be disputed.
[1] Introduction to Homer, Ed. 1888, pp. 172, 173.
[2] On its earlier coins Syracuse not unfrequently appears as Syra.
[3] The fact that Σικανίης (xxiv. 397) should not have got corrupted into Σικελίης—which would scan just as well—during the many centuries that the island was called Σικελία, suggests a written original, though I need hardly say that I should not rely on so small a matter if it rested by itself.
[4] See Prof. Jebb's Introduction to Homer, ed. 1888, Note I on p. 43.
[5] Murray, 1830.