The readers of Dante will recollect with what complex precision, as a poetical Architect, he has actually, for the purposes of his work, built an Universe of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Every line of his poem has a determinate relation to a certain point in space, fixed in his own mind; but whether every such point be fixed or not in nature is no more material, than if it were simply one to be determined by axes of coordinates. Intricate as the fabric is, this great brother of Homer in his art never for a moment lets drop the thread of his labyrinth, but holds it steadily from the beginning of the first canto to the end of the hundredth. Homer, composing for a younger world, had to deal with all ideas whatsoever in simpler forms; but, I think, it is discernible that in his way he, too, made a systematic distribution of the Outer Earth, as he had rather vaguely conceived it in his teeming imagination.
We are apt to forget, from the comparatively summary manner in which the subject is dismissed by the Poet, that the voyages and travels of Menelaus occupy a time almost as long as those of Ulysses. He has but recently returned, says Nestor to Telemachus, in the last year of his father’s wanderings[628]: and Menelaus himself states, that he came home only in the eighth year after the capture of Troy[629]. And as in point of time, so likewise they are geographically in correspondence. To Menelaus Homer has given, in outline, the southern world from east to west, and to Ulysses, in detail, the northern world from west to east. It is true that he made Ulysses begin his Wanderings, properly so called, with the Lotophagi in Africa: but this is because it was necessary to throw him at Malea, by some wide and irrecoverable deviation, off his route to Ithaca. So Menelaus loses his course at the very same critical point, the Malean Promontory[630]. Then the two strike off to the opposite ends of the diameter: Menelaus to Crete, for Cyprus, Phœnicia, and Egypt, in the south-east; Ulysses to Africa, for the Cyclopes, Æolia, and Læstrygonia, in the north-west. Again, Menelaus visits Libya to the westward, where, it will be remembered, he is to find his home after death in the Elysian fields. The counterpart of this is in the eastward movement of Ulysses along a northern zone to the isle of Circe, and in his visit to the Shades. Again, it is Phœnicia, which in the south-east forms a kind of boundary line between the known and the unknown world. Accordingly Homer has given us an idealized Phœnicia on the north-western line. Perhaps only partial, but still perfectly real, resemblances of character establish a poetical relation between the Φοίνικες and the Φαίηκες. Other parts of the Phæacian character might seem to have been borrowed from the Egyptians. No one, I think, can doubt that Homer had the Phœnicians to some extent in his mind, when he invented the Phæacians. But he has given us another etymological sign of the connection. The Φοίνικες stand in evident connection with Συρίη[631]. Who but they could give that name to the island where Eumæus was born? an island with which we see them to have been in relations by a double token; the first, a Phœnician slave carried thither by the Taphians; and the second, Eumæus as a boy carried off thence by the Phœnicians, who had paid it a visit with a cargo of fine goods. The island of Ψυρίη, lying north-west from Chios, probably owed its title to the same source: if not also Σκῦρος, corrupted from Συρός. Surely then, like Φαίηκες from Φοίνικες, so Homer made Σχερίη from Συρίη. It being always remembered that Scheria is for Homer, like Phœnicia, a maritime land. It is nowhere called an island; from which we know, that Homer either believed it to be attached to the continent, or to form, like Crete[632], a continent of itself.
The Erembi of Menelaus are generally understood to be the Arabians. The Æthiopes, whom he also visits, extend from the extreme east to the furthest west of the surface of the earth; and they possibly may have a counterpart in the Cimmerians of the north. In the same zone with the Æthiopes, on the borders of Ocean to the south, a passage of the Iliad places the ἄνδρες Πυγμαῖοι[633]. Herodotus supports Homer in this, as in most other particulars. And the researches of the most recent travellers sustain the assertion of these two old ethnologists of Greece, that there are dwarfed races in the interior of Africa, accessible from Egypt.
Thus, then, it would appear in general that the voyage and travels of Menelaus, together with those of Ulysses, including in the former his final passage to Elysium, cover the entire surface of the earth, such as Homer had conceived it. This, however, can only be taken generally, and tells us little of what Homer thought concerning the actual form of the earth’s surface, while it leaves untouched various questions regarding its distribution in detail. With some of these let us now endeavour to deal.
And first, what was Homer’s belief concerning the form of the earth?
Earth of Homer probably oval.
The passage of the poems which bears most directly upon the solution of this question is that which describes the Shield of Achilles. We here learn that, in finishing his work, Vulcan gave it the great River Ocean for a border[634]. From this it follows conclusively, that the form of the Shield was that which Homer also conceived to be nearest to the form of the surface of the Earth.
The question then arises, what was the form of the Shields treated of by Homer? And it is one not easy to answer. Homer compares the light of this very Shield of Achilles in a subsequent passage to that of the moon[635]: but he does not say the full moon, and the moon in certain stages might suggest the oval, although when full it would require the circular shape. The epithets which he uses do not solve the question: for some of them appear to agree better with the one supposition, and some with the other. The ἄσπις ἀμφιβρότη, for instance, in Il. xi. 32, suggests a shape adapted in a great degree to that of the human form. The ποδηνεκὴς of Il. xv. 646 appears absolutely to require it. No circular shield, which reached down to the feet, could have been carried on the arm. But, on the other hand, Homer calls the shield εὔκυκλος[636] and παντόσε ἴση, which certainly at first sight favour the idea of a circular form. Shall we then suppose that both forms prevailed? And if so, which of the two shall we assign to the Shield of Achilles?
It appears that in the military system of historic Greece the round shield chiefly prevailed; but for the time of Homer I cannot help leaning to the supposition that the Shield was oval. For I do not know any explicit testimony, with respect to its primitive form, that can weigh against the lines of Tyrtæus[637];
μήρους τε, κνήμας τε κάτω, καὶ στέρνα, καὶ ὤμους