It seems to follow almost mathematically, that he believed in an open sea route, which must have lain to the north, and which established a communication, independent of the Bosphorus, between the Mediterranean and the Euxine.
He blends two sets of reports into one.
It also hereby appears that he had received from the Phœnicians two sets of reports, one relating to western, and the other to north-eastern navigation, but both involving a description of a great inward flowing stream as an ultimate point, agreeably to his idea of the River Ocean. These two ulterior points, obtained respectively from each set of reports, Homer, led by the similarity of features, has blended into one. We can even now take his untrue representation to pieces, and can see where and how it separates into two, each of them geographically true. In his one mouth of Ocean he has combined the conditions, that in nature belong to two separate geographical points. Both the north-eastern report and the western report he has amalgamated, by carrying the remote point of the former round, so to speak, in order to meet the latter: and having thus made his Ocean-mouth northern, as well as eastern, he consistently calls in Boreas to take the ship of Ulysses to the mouth of the Shades below, so as to fix that point in the east, because it was the counterpart to his Elysian fields which lay in the west. The two sets of Phœnician reports are in this way oddly brought to integrate one another. The Ocean mouth in the Euxine gets the benefit of the open sea route; and the Ocean mouth at Gibraltar has credit for being placed in a northern latitude and eastern longitude; each report thus throwing its own separate attributes into the common stock.
The effect of thus forcing Yenikalè and Gibraltar to meet, naturally enough brings the Faro of Messina and the Bosphorus near to one another: and hence Circe, in the Twelfth Book, names them to Ulysses as alternative routes, both apparently lying in the same region.
But again I say, that in order to comprehend the Outer or imaginary geography of the Odyssey, we must entirely dismiss from our minds the map of Europe as it is. We must treat as having been a real map to Homer only the little sphere which was embraced within the resort of ordinary Greek navigation. Beyond that narrow range, we must consider him as distributing land and sea in the manner he best could, by the aid of reports, necessarily in that age most indistinct, and in all likelihood exaggerated, and even wilfully darkened to boot, by trading craft. Sometimes therefore he puts a people upon poetical terra firma at points, where it fortunately but accidentally turns out that nature has provided an antitype for the imagery of the Poem. Sometimes he lodges them where there is none; ubi nîl nisi pontus et aer. But though details are to be thus disposed of, still the one master variation from actual nature is this; the sea extended from the Mediterranean to the Euxine, behind, i. e. to the north of, the Bosphorus and of Thrace. This gives us that open passage into the Euxine, by which Homer supposed Ulysses to have reached the maritime region, that Jason had sought and found through the Bosphorus.
In sum; it is too plain to require much of the detailed proof which I have tried to give, that Homer believed in a great expanse of waters lying somewhere to the north. The probability is, that from some Phœnician source he had heard rumours of the great German Ocean. It need not to us appear strange that his mind did not readily conceive an extent of land like that of the continent of Europe, when we notice that his experience made him conversant partly with islands, partly with countries in minute subdivisions, and of small breadth from sea to sea. This great imaginary mass of waters he included within the θάλασσα, to which everything belonged as far as the point where the great River Oceanus was reached.
I think then that we have now found the two keys to the Outer Geography,
1. In the sea-route north of Thrace;
2. In the amalgamation of the western with the north-eastern report of the Ocean-mouth.
From the site of the Ocean-mouth of Homer, we may most naturally proceed to examine the site of Ææa; which, as being within one day’s sail, is a kind of porter’s lodge to it[598], and is a point of the utmost importance in the system. Hitherto I have proceeded only by assertion, so far as the site of the Homeric Ææa is conceived. But to defend the second main proposition or key to the system, in the face of counter-theories, it will be necessary to examine, with as much care as may be, all the Homeric evidence that bears either upon this question, or upon the kindred one of the site of Ogygia.