We have no instance of any visit paid by Greeks to Phœnicia under ordinary circumstances. The tour of Menelaus is, like that of Ulysses, outside the sphere of ordinary life. He describes himself in it to Telemachus as πολλὰ παθὼν καὶ πόλλ’ ἐπαληθεὶς[536], which may be compared with Od. i. 4. respecting Ulysses. We hear of the Taphians there; for it was at Sidon that they kidnapped the nurse of Eumæus. Piracy in those times probably reached somewhat further than trade. These same Taphians appear to be of doubtful Hellenism. On the one hand, Mentes their leader was a ξεῖνος to Ulysses[537]. But (1) we thus find them in Phœnicia[538], which is not a place of usual Greek resort. (2) They sail to Temese in foreign parts, ἐπ’ ἀλλοθρόους ἀνθρώπους (Od. i. 183), which we do not find elsewhere said of Greeks. The case of the pseudo-Ulysses cannot stand as a precedent for the rest of Greece, nor even for the rest of Crete[539]. (3) The father of Mentes had given Ulysses poison for his arrows, which Ilus, the Hellene, had from motives of religion refused him. This at once supplies a particular reason for the xenial bond between them, and suggests that this Taphian prince may have been, though a ξεῖνος, yet of a different religion and race. (4) The absence of the Taphians from the war, especially as a tribe so much given to navigation, further strengthens the presumption that they were not properly Greeks.
Phœnicia, then, hangs doubtfully on the outer verge of the Greek world, and belongs to the intermediate zone. Yet more decidedly is this the case with Egypt. For Ulysses means something unusual, when he describes the voyage as one lasting for five days across the open sea, even with the very best wind all the way, from Crete; and it is elsewhere described as at a distance formidably great. Such is the idea apparently intended by the statement, that the very birds do but make the journey once a year over so vast a sea[540]. No ordinary Greek ever goes to Egypt: and when the pseudo-Ulysses planned his voyage thither, it was under a sinister impulse from Jupiter, who meant him ill[541]:
αὐτὰρ ἐμοὶ δειλῷ κακὰ μήδετο μητίετα Ζεύς.
Again, the Poet appears to have entirely misconceived the distance of Pharos from the coast. He places it at a day’s sail from Αἴγυπτος, meaning probably by that name the Nile. Vain attempts have been made to get rid by explanation of this geographical error. Nitzsch[542] says truly, that for the geography of this passage Homer was dependent on the gossip of sailors, and compares it with that of Ogygia, Scheria, and the rest. When Menelaus went to Egypt, it was involuntarily, as we are assured by Nestor[543];
ἀτὰρ τὰς πέντε νέας κυανοπρῳρείους
Αἰγύπτῳ ἐπέλασσε φέρων ἄνεμός τε καὶ ὕδωρ.
Beyond the circumscriptions which have thus been drawn, lie the countries of the Outer Geography. Outwards their limit in the mind of Homer was either the great River Ocean, or else the land immediately bordering upon it. Their inner line, that is, the line nearest to the known Greek or Homeric world, may be defined by a number of points specified in the poems. We have, for example, the Lotophagi and Libya in the south; the land of the Cyclops on the west; (I pass by Sicily, because it can, I think, be shown, that Homer transplanted it into another quarter;) Scheria to the north-west, the Abii, Glactophagi, and Hippemolgi, to the north. Then come the Strait of the Πλαγκταὶ, or Bosphorus, pretty accurately conceived as to its site; next towards the east, the Amazons and the Solymi with their mountains; in the south-east the Ἐρεμβοὶ, and then the widely spread Αἰθίοπες. All the places and people visited by Ulysses after the Lotophagi, that have not been named, must be conceived to lie yet further outwards.
I have now explained the grounds on which I assume the existence of two great zones, the one of a real, the other of an imaginative, fluctuating, and semi-fabulous Geography in Homer; and of a third zone, drawn as a somewhat indeterminate border-ground between them.
Sphere of the Outer Geography.