On the track of Ulysses; Together with an excursion in quest of the so-called Venus of Melos / Two studies in archaeology, made during a cruise among the Greek islands

by William James Stillman

FROM AN OLD GREEK VASE.
THE SITE OF ITHACA—PORT POLIS.

To return to the city of Ithaca, Ulysses must retrace his steps past the port of Phorcys, and follow the ridge of rock which connects the divisions of the island past the mass of Neriton. His landing-place was on the east side of the island, the port of the ancient city Ithaca on the west; and there are now on the road between, several villages, the representatives, perhaps, of the ancient towns from which Ulysses drew his quota of men for the Trojan campaign, “Crocyles and the rocky Ægilipos.” It was in one of these villages that Schliemann, visiting the island for the first time, in his Homeric enthusiasm, as the villagers, in their habitual curiosity to see the stranger, came out to gaze and question, taking the assemblage as a demonstration in his honor, and determined to show them how well he estimated the dignity of an heir of the Odyssean glory, mounted on a table and translated from Homer the passages which record Laertes’ emotions on the return of his long-lost son. “They wept with emotion,” says the naïf Doctor; and he rewarded them by some hundred lines more. Remembering this incident, I inquired about the matter, and found that it had excited much merriment in the cultivated circles of Vathy, and, as I expected, the other side in the rencontre preserved a very different recollection of the Doctor’s achievement, and that the tears were of merriment rather than of pathos. No one in the assemblage could understand a word of the Greek in the Doctor’s pronunciation of it.

In the nomenclature of the two principal higher villages of the northern section, I found a curious survival of archaic language, which, so far as I could learn, is as incomprehensible as Homer, in the original, to the inhabitants. The villages are Anoï and Exoï, which are clearly from the archaic and (except in the Cretan mountains) obsolete words ano and exo, used as haw and gee are by us in driving oxen, and of course meaning originally right and left, and these indicate site survivals of early towns or villages. But of Ithaca the city, the home of Ulysses, not a trace remains except the name Polis (city, the city par excellence), which is applied to a locality where not even an ancient wall shows a claim to the appellation. The fragments of substructure shown on the hill above and near the village of Stavros are undoubtedly mediæval, and belong to the piratical city which was established here, and which was destroyed in the latter part of the sixteenth century. I searched in vain for anything to indicate the date of the ancient city, but here, doubtless, was the home of Ulysses. Its little port is of the nature demanded by ancient mariners,—a smooth beach in a cove, with the island of Cephalonia opposite and near enough to shut off any great violence of sea or wind. Homer relates that the suitors, when Telemachus had gone to Pylos to get news of his father, sent out a ship with some of their number to intercept and kill him on his return, and that this ship lay in watch at an island off the port where the return of Telemachus’s ship could be seen from afar and prevented. Opposite Port Polis is a rock, probably the remnant of that island; for, as the material of it is a conglomerate easily subdued by the elements and decomposing rapidly, it must have been once a considerable island, and it is now the only remnant of rock or island which occupies any such relative position.

In searching around the neighborhood for traces of antiquity I was accosted by a peasant, who told me that there had been found a stone with some letters on it, and I made haste to hunt it out. They (for there were two fragments) were at the bottom of a heap of stone which had been exhumed from under a land-fall, and which were evidently part of a very ancient building. I hired the men who gathered round to remove the heap, and photographed the stones, which had been originally one. The inscription is in the early style of Greek epigraphy, boustrophedon, i. e., going alternately from left to right and right to left, as oxen go when ploughing. It is the oldest known inscription in the Ithacan alphabet.

I placed a copy of the photograph in the hands of Professor Comparetti of Florence, amongst others, and received from him the following, read at a meeting of the Academy of the Lincei:—

INSCRIPTION FOUND AT POLIS.

“Since I have hitherto spoken of inscriptions very old or archaic, as we say, it will be permitted me to close this communication by presenting to the Academy a curious inscription of this kind recently discovered in Ithaca and communicated to me by a diligent and cultivated visitor to the Greek lands, the American, Mr. Stillman, who made in Ithaca a photograph of the inscription, and, having unsuccessfully asked an interpretation of several scholars, applied to me. He has permitted me to make communication to this Academy, putting at my disposition also the negative of his photograph, from which are printed the copies I present. The inscription is tolerably roughly cut in a friable stone, broken in two, worn by time and water. The photograph, which is never the best means of representing monuments of this kind even in experienced hands, presents some confusion and obscurity in parts; but this is the only difficulty in the epigraph.... I saw at once that this was an inscription of which there was already some notice in a book published by the Phœnix of discoverers of antiquities, Schliemann, in 1868, ‘Ithaca, Peloponnesos, and Troy.’ Rich as he is in fancy, Schliemann is ready to believe any story, and at once convinced himself that he had discovered the inscription of a very old sarcophagus, and found an honest workman who helped him to complete the idea, showing him the bones found in it by him. And in his book, together with this and other news, he communicated the inscription such as he read it. Of the two fragments, however, he only saw that at the right, and this he read very badly, seeing letters where none are, and imagining incredible forms of letters. Kirchhoff in his ‘Studien zur Geschichte des Griechischen Alphabets’ sought to apply this monument to his purposes, but could make nothing of it, and it would have been impossible to get anything from it. Now, thanks to the intelligent care of Mr. Stillman, we have before us the monument as it is; he knew nothing of Schliemann; when he saw the inscription, he saw that it was incomplete, and seeking amongst the stones, found the other piece, and, divining justly its relation, united them and took the photograph which now permits us to utilize what we may call his discovery.

“The epigraph is certainly very old, besides being boustrophedon. This is shown particularly by the forms of the sigma and iota. It was cut roughly and by hands little used to such work, without any care for symmetry in the disposition of the letters or of the lines, nor for the uniformity of the letters. Some letters are lost in the fracture, others by the wearing of the stone, and the entire inscription is mutilated in the lower part.