[10] The Isles of the Blest are the same as the Fortunate Isles of other geographers. It is clear from Strabo’s description that he alludes to the Canary Islands; but as it is certain that Homer had never heard of these, it is probable that the passages adduced by Strabo have reference to the Elysian Fields of Baïa in Campania.
[11] The Maurusia of the Greeks (the Mauritania of the Latins) is now known as Algiers and Fez in Africa.
[12] The Ethiopians, who are divided into two divisions, the most distant of men. Odyssey i. 23.
[13] For yesterday Jove went to Oceanus, to the blameless Ethiopians, to a banquet. Iliad i. 423. The ancients gave the name of Ethiopians, generally, to the inhabitants of Interior Africa, the people who occupied the sea-coast of the Atlantic, and the shores of the Arabian Gulf. It is with this view of the name that Strabo explains the passage of Homer; but the Mediterranean was the boundary of the poet’s geographical knowledge; and the people he speaks of were doubtless the inhabitants of the southern parts of Phœnicia, who at one time were called Ethiopians. We may here remark too, that Homer’s ocean frequently means the Mediterranean, sometimes probably the Nile. See also p. 48, n. 2.
[14] But it alone is free from the baths of the ocean. Iliad xviii. 489; Odyssey v. 275.
[15] We are informed by Diogenes Laertius, that Thales was the first to make known to the Greeks the constellation of the Lesser Bear. Now this philosopher flourished 600 years before the Christian era, and consequently some centuries after Homer’s death. The name of Φοινίκη which it received from the Greeks, is proof that Thales owed his knowledge of it to the Phœnicians. Conf. Humboldt’s Cosmos, vol. iii. p. 160, Bohn’s edition.
[16] Iliad xiii. 5. Gosselin says, Thrace (the present Roumelia) was indisputably the most northern nation known to Homer. He names the people Ἱππημόλγοι, or living on mares’ milk, because in his time they were a nomade race. Strabo evidently gives a forced meaning to the words of the poet, when he attempts to prove his acquaintance with the Scythians and Sarmatians.
[17] For I go to visit the limits of the fertile earth, and Oceanus, the parent of the gods. Iliad xiv. 200.
[18] The eighteenth book of the Iliad.
[19] Iliad xviii. 399; Odyss. xx. 65.