[290] Mr. Gladstone (Homer and the Homeric age, vol. iii.) transposes these Homeric localities to the east, and a few German writers agree with him. President Warren (True key to ancient cosmologies, etc., Boston, 1882) will have it that Ogygia is neither more nor less than the north pole. Neither of these views is likely to displace the one now orthodox. Mr. Gladstone is so much troubled by Odysseus’s course on leaving Ogygia that he cannot hide a suspicion of corruption in the text. President Warren should remember that Ogygia apparently enjoyed the common succession of day and night. In Homeric thought the western sea extended northward and eastward until it joined the Euxine. Ogygia, located northwest of Greece, would be the centre, omphalos, of the sea, as Delphi was later called the centre of the land-masses of the world.
[291] Odyssey, iv. 561, etc.
[292] It is well known that whereas Odysseus meets the spirits of the dead across Oceanus, upon the surface of the earth, there is in the Iliad mention of a subterranean Hades. The Assyrio-Babylonians had also the idea of an earth-encircling ocean stream,—the word Ὠκεανὸς the Greeks said was of foreign origin,—and on the south of it they placed the sea of the dead, which held the island homes of the departed. As in the Odyssey, it was a place given over to dust and darkness, and the doors of it were strongly barred; no living being save a god or a chosen hero might come there. Schrader, Namen d. Meere in d. Assyrischen Inschriften (Abhandl. d. k. Akad. d. Wiss. zu Berlin, 1877, p. 169). Jeremias, Die Babylonisch-Assyrischen Vorstellungen vom Leben nach dem Tode (Leipzig, 1887). The Israelites, on the other hand, imagined the home of the dead as underground. Numbers, xvi. 30, 32, 33.
Buchholtz, Die Homerische Realien, i. 55, places Hades on the European shores of Ocean, but the text of the Odyssey seems plainly in favor of the site across the stream, as Völcker and others have understood.
[293] Hesiod, Works and Days, 166-173; Elton’s translation, London, 1815, p. 22. Paley marks the line Τηλοῦ ἀπ̓ ἀθανάτων τόισιν Κρόνος ἐμβασιλζύει as probably spurious. Cronos appears to have been originally a Phœnician deity, and his westward wandering played an important part in their mythology. We shall find further traces of this divinity in the west.
[294] Pindar, Olymp., ii. 66-85, Paley’s translation, London, 1868, p. 12. See also Euripides, Helena, 1677.
[295] Æschylus, in the Prometheus bound, introduced the Gorgon islands in his epitome of the wanderings of Io, and certainly seems to speak of them as in the east; the passage is, however, imperfect, and its interpretation has overtasked the ablest commentators.
[296] Euripides, Hippolytus, 742-751; Potter’s translation, i. p. 356. See also Hesiod, Theog., 215, 517-519.
[297] Mela, iii. 100, 102, etc. The chief passage is Pliny, Hist. Nat., vi. 36, 37, who took his information from King Juba and a writer named Statius Sebosus. Pliny, who, beside the groups named in the text, mentions the Gorgades, which he identifies with the place where Hanno met the gorillas, has probably misunderstood and garbled his authorities; his account is contradictory and illusive.
[298] Tzetzes (Scholia in Lycophron, 1204, ed. Mueller, ii. 954), a grammarian of the twelfth century, says that the Isles of the Blessed were located in the ocean by Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, Plutarch, Dion, Procopius, Philostratus and others, but that to many it seems that Britain must be the true Isle of the Blessed; and in support of this view he relates a most curious tale of the ferriage of the dead to Britain by Breton fishermen.