(1) That Homer placed to the northward of Thrace, Epirus, and the Italian peninsula, an expanse, not of land, but of sea, communicating with the Euxine. Or, to express myself in other words, that he greatly extended the Euxine westwards, perhaps also shortening it towards the east; and that he made it communicate, by the Gulfs of Genoa and Venice, with the southern Mediterranean.
(2) That he compounded into one two sets of Phœnician traditions respecting the Ocean-mouth, and fixed the site of them in the North East.
It would carry us too far from the line of ethnological inquiry, were I now to examine the extensive question with which these propositions are connected. I will only observe in this place, that all the features of this outer geography, when viewed at large, are of such a nature as to favour, or perhaps rather to compel, the supposition, that it was founded on foreign, that is to say, on Phœnician information. Its extended range, its reach, by the routes of Menelaus on the one side, and of Ulysses on the other, over all the points of the compass, its vague, indeterminate, and ungeographical character as to distances and directions, and yet its frequent, though inconsistent and confused, resemblances at almost every point to some actual prototype, of which the poet may have had possibly or probably a vision in his eye;—all this agrees with the belief, that it represents a highly manufactured work, made up from Phœnician materials, and can scarcely agree with any thing else.
Reserving this much agitated subject for a fuller separate discussion, I will here only proceed to consider that limited portion of it which bears upon ethnology; I mean the evidence afforded us by Homer in the Odyssey, and particularly in connection with the Wanderings, as to the site and character (1) of the Siceli and of Sicania: (2) of the Thesprotians and Epirus: and (3) with respect to the family of Cadmus, which general tradition connects immediately with Phœnicia in the person of its founder, and which Homer, by indirect testimony, I think, justifies us in considering as derived from that source.
The Siceli and Sicania.
The Siceli and Sicania.
Notwithstanding his use of the name Thrinacie, the poet appears to have had no geographical knowledge of Sicily, at least beyond its shape; for I think it may be shown that he places the site of the island in the immediate neighbourhood of the Bosphorus. But he might still have heard of the eastern coast of Italy immediately adjoining, afterwards the country of the Bruttii, which forms the sole of the foot rudely described by the configuration of southern Italy. For this coast is much nearer to Greece; it probably would be taken by mariners on their way from Greece to Sicily, and might be visited by them before they had pushed their explorations to the more distant point. The Athenian fleet in the Peloponnesian war touched first at the Iapygian promontory, and then coasted all the way[451]. This possibility grows nearly into a certainty, when we find that Homer speaks of a race, evidently as transmarine, which from history would appear probably to have inhabited that region at some early period.
I venture to argue that this Bruttian coast, the sole of the Italian foot, reaching from the gulf of Tarentum down to Rhegium, is the country which appears to us in the Odyssey under the name of Sicania.
In the fabulous account which Ulysses gives of himself to his father Laertes before the Recognition, he speaks as follows: