We find indeed that a continuance of winds, which ranged between E. and S. W. detained Ulysses in Thrinacie or Trinacria. It has from this been, as I think by much too hastily, inferred that Thrinacie lay to the north-west of Ithaca[601]. Even if it did so, we should still miss the true bearing of Sicily, which is west, with all inclination to the south, and not north-west, from Ithaca. But the assumption is in fact unwarranted. The wind, which principally held Ulysses fast in Thrinacie, was, as is evident from the passage, Notus, a southerly wind. Eurus plays a secondary part there[602]. Besides this, the wind, which Ulysses needed, may have been needed to bring him not to Ithaca, but to some point on his way to Ithaca, from whence his bearings would be known; to some point at which, from the Outer, it would have been practicable for him to re-enter the Inner or Greek world. The needful conditions would be satisfied if, for instance, Thrinacie lay either north-west or north-east from the Dardanelles; and then Ulysses would want either Zephyr or else Boreas to get there. And the opposite theory proceeds upon the entirely arbitrary, nay, untrue, assumption, that the way back through the Narrows was, like the way by which Ulysses had come to Ææa, an open-sea route, and not one in which the course would have to be governed by fixed points of land lying along the course.
There is then no middle term between Thrinacie and any fixed point of the Inner Homeric world, from which we can by direct inference argue as to its site. And the winds, which detain Ulysses in Thrinacie, go far of themselves to show that this island is not on the site of Sicily.
The case is far otherwise in regard to the Bosphorus, or Πλαγκταὶ, of the Odyssey. For here we know,
1. That Homer was familiar with the Dardanelles, a stage on the way to it, and not very far from it:
2. That he makes Jason pass the Bosphorus:
3. That he also makes Jason settle at Lemnos, and become sovereign of the island, evidently in connection with his route from Thessaly to the East.
But Thessaly, and Lemnos too, are places of the inner world: with Lemnos the Poet appears to have been accurately acquainted; and the line between that island and the home of Jason determines absolutely so much as this; that the general direction of his voyage was known by Homer, at least up to this point, to have lain to the north-eastward through the Straits of Gallipoli.
I hold therefore that the passage of the Πλαγκταὶ is fixed immovably, by known-world evidence, as to its general direction: that to transplant it to the west, is to break up the foundations of Homer’s experimental knowledge, which is always to be trusted: whereas to move his Thrinacie eastward is merely to suppose that he gave the site which was poetically most convenient to a tradition which, as it came to him, had no site at all, no positive local or geographical determination.
Character and site of Thrinacie.
Again, I take the island Thrinacie by itself; and I contend that, although the report on which this delineation was founded may probably have had its origin in Sicily, yet the Thrinacie of Homer is associated rather with the East than with the West.