All these arguments converge towards the same conclusions, and all of them are mainly founded, not on Homer’s outer-world representations, but upon indications drawn from his knowledge of nature, or else from his experimental or otherwise familiar acquaintance with the Inner world: that is, they are built not on the figures of his fancy, but on the facts of his own and his countrymen’s every-day experience.
And now let us consider the adverse construction put upon the text of the Odyssey; particularly with regard to the island of Ææa.
Why Ææa cannot lie North-westward.
It is quite plain, from the accounts given of the route both ways, that the Ocean-mouth is meant by Homer to be near the island of Ææa; that is, within a day’s sail[620] of that island. How is this reconcilable with the doctrine, which places the island in the far north-west? In the north-east we have an Ocean-mouth, the situation of which the Poet, guided up to a certain point by his inner-world knowledge, has not very inaccurately conceived. In the north-west there is no Ocean-mouth. The Straits of Gibraltar, though they lie rather to the south of west from Ithaca, must be carried far into the north for the purpose; in what form, or with what accompaniments, it is hard to conceive. To attempt such a transposition would involve the complete abandonment of all actual geography, and would after all leave us involved in hopeless confusion in the effort to construct any tolerable scheme from the text of Homer.
Construction of Od. xii. 3, 4.
At the mere transportation, indeed, we need not scruple overmuch, if we could justify the proceeding by other clear indications of Homer’s intention. But there is no such justification. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the violence done to the text of Od. xii. 3, 4, by the interpretation which Nitzsch (following, as I admit, Eustathius), puts upon it. The ship, leaving the stream of Ocean, reaches the sea and the island[621]:
νῆσόν τ’ Αἰαίην, ὅθι τ’ Ἠοῦς ἠριγενείης
οἰκία καὶ χοροί εἰσι, καὶ ἀντολαὶ Ἠελίοιο.
The ἀντολαὶ, the rising, or rising-point of the sun, does not, he says, mean the east, but only the first appearance of the sun on their return from darkness, which is a kind of dawning on them. And the dwelling of the early-born Dawn, and the place (such appears to be the meaning of χόροι) of the Dances of her kindred or attendant Nymphs—who in later mythology became the virgin train of Hours, that now delight us in the frescoes of Guido and Guercino—not only do not mean anything eastern, but apparently in this place are conceived to have no meaning whatever, and to be an idle, indeed a most inconvenient and bewildering, pleonasm. And thus the magic poetry of this passage and all the curious traditions it involves, are destroyed, in order to make room—for what? For the hypothesis that Homer places the dwelling of Morning and the chamber of the rising Sun far to the westward of the country that he himself inhabited[622]!
There is, I confess, something almost of naïveté in the confession of Nitzsch, that ‘it sounds rather strange to interpret ἀνατολαὶ without any reference to sunrise, since it is the customary counterpart to δύσις, the sunset.’ But fortunately there is no Homeric evidence against it: as indeed there cannot well be, since the word occurs in no other passage. With respect to Ἠὼς, Nitzsch contends that it means not dawn, but light: and he quotes the passages which say, ‘your glory shall reach as far as Ἠὼς,’ and ‘horses, the best to be found beneath the Sun and Ἠώς.’ Certainly it is most allowable, (though I by no means think the sense of dawn inadmissible in these two passages,) especially as day goes nowhere except preceded by dawn, to generalize the word Ἠὼς so as to make it equivalent to light. But the fatal flaw in the interpretation is this, that when Ἠὼς is thus used, it is invariably apart from any circumstances which can give a local colour to its meaning. But wherever there is any thing local implied, as is admitted to be in the case before us, the ἠὼς uniformly means the east, though with a certain indefiniteness perhaps as to northward and southward inclination. For instance, when Homer speaks of omen-birds flying eastwards, he describes them as flying πρὸς ἠώ τ’ ἠέλιόν τε, and the opposite movement as ποτὶ ζόφον, which here evidently means north-west, although it too may signify darkness in general. The whole aim of the passage (Od. xii. 1-5) is, to fix locality; and it is in the teeth of all Homeric usage to deprive ἠὼς in such a passage of local force, while it confessedly can have no local meaning but an eastern one.