“Ulysses and his companions withdrew from the city and soon arrived at the magnificent garden of Laertes, which the hero had formerly purchased with his wealth after the many ills he had suffered. There stands his dwelling, surrounded on all sides by a portico where the slaves who cultivate his estate sleep and eat. In the porter’s lodge is an old Sicilian,[6] who in this solitary place, far from the city, takes care of the noble old man.... At these words he gives his arms to the herdsmen who enter into the house of their master, while Ulysses, to find Laertes, enters into the garden. The hero goes down into the great vineyard and finds neither Dolias nor his sons, nor the other slaves. Dolias has led them far away to gather thorns to make hedges round the inclosure. Ulysses finds his father digging round the root of a tree in the garden. Laertes is dressed in a dirty patched tunic; around his legs he has bound, to preserve them, greaves of sewn leather; gloves protect his hands, and his head is covered by a cap of goat-skin, which completes his mournful appearance....
“‘Ah,’ replied Laertes, ‘if you are Ulysses, if you are my son returned to this island, describe to me a sure sign that I cannot mistake.’
“‘See first,’ replies Ulysses, ‘this wound, which long ago on Parnassus a wild boar gave me with his tusk, when I went to Autolycus to bring the presents which he here had promised me. Then listen, I will describe to you the trees of your beautiful garden which you gave me, and I asked of you in my childhood as I ran behind you. We passed through your inclosure; you told me the name of every tree, and you gave me thirteen pear-trees, ten apple-trees, forty fig-trees, and then you promised to give me fifty rows of vines in full bearing.’”
The legends of the modern population of Ithaca must not be confounded with real local tradition, transmitted from ancient times. They are unquestionably the reflection of literary statement, the reiterated conclusions of students more or less well informed as to the true archæological bases of opinion. The attribution of the particular spot we visited as the garden of Laertes is doubtless due to reading of the Odyssey, and, like the location of the “Castle of Ulysses” on Aëtos, arose from a popular rendering of the story as handed down by literature and converted into legend, which is located wherever the crude antiquarianism of the people judges best. An instance of the real tradition which has a distinct value in archæological research is that of the preservation of the name Polis for the abandoned site where unquestionably the Homeric city stood; and this simple indication is sufficient to prove that Ithaca was never entirely depopulated and repeopled by Slavs, because in this case the continuity of tradition would have been lost, and there is no ruin to restore it in modern times, even if it were capable of surviving the interruption. If it had simply been handed down by a Slavonic colony, it would have been “Arad” instead of “Polis,” while, if the depopulation had once been complete, names which are not now understood by the present inhabitants could not have originated with them. If the name had sprung from the presence of ruins, the site on Aëtos would have received it instead of its present legendary appellation, so that in no way can we explain the survival of the name Polis for the site, or the names Anoï and Exoï, except by supposing them to have clung to the places from Homeric times through a continuous population of Hellenic stock, however thinned. Another curious incident illustrates the tenacity of this kind of survival. As we were passing through one of the villages, I heard one child calling to others to run to see the barbarians, οἱ βάρβαροι (várvari), just as the Greek children of ancient times would have called us,—i. e., foreigners, people who spoke a strange language, a babble, unintelligible sounds like those of children. I heard it twice and could not be mistaken, though a Greek friend to whom I related it would have it that they said βαυάροι (Bavarians), since in continental Greece, Bavarian (German) has been a term of contempt from the days of King Otho. But I am certain of the word; and besides, the children of Ithaca never had anything to do with the Bavarians, as they were under the Ionian Government till after the fall of Otho and the departure of the Bavarians.
On the whole, I think that there is the strongest ground of probability for these conclusions: that, whatever may be the relation of the real Ulysses to Ithaca, the hero as conceived and represented in the Odyssey, the Ulysses of the Homeric poems, if he was an actuality, lived at the site known as Polis; and that this site, and all the others mentioned in the poem, were known by the author of it from personal inspection. The inscription found at Polis is in Doric Greek, which gives us a right to conclude that the city continued to be inhabited by the mixed population, result of the Dorian immigration; while the entire oversight of the Pelasgic site on Aëtos indicates the total interruption of race connection and the immense interval which must have come between its construction and the transfer of the seat of power to Polis, as, if still habitable when the new race took possession, it would, like Nericus, Samé, and Crané, which we shall examine in Cephalonia, have been made the basis of the newer city. That it was then utterly abandoned, we conclude, not only from the neglect of it by Ulysses in the passages we have noticed, but from the fact that while Samé, on the other island, sends suitors, and Ithaca itself (the city) adds its quota, no allusion is made to any from any other place in the island. In short, the total silence through the whole poem in regard to any place which can be by possibility connected with Aëtos, justifies my concluding that it was as much an abandoned ruin in the time of Homer as now.
The episode of the voyage of Telemachus to Pylos and Sparta, which brings into the Odyssey the western shore of the Peloponnesus, is, with the exception of some unimportant allusions, the only interjection of continental Greece into the poem.
We went over to look for some trace of the sage Nestor, but as usual found that while the people had enough of the after-growth of legend out of the Odyssey, they knew absolutely nothing of the antique site. I had no guide then to lead me to the Pylos where the ship of Telemachus found “the Pyleans scattered along the shore offering a sacrifice to Neptune, black bulls without a spot.”
The bay of Navarino is a vast marine lake, known to us mainly by its being the locality of the decisive combat between the fleets of the great European powers and the Turkish and Egyptian, which decided the destiny of modern Greece. We ran in from the open Adriatic, whose waters were uncomfortably agitated by the south-west wind, glad of the safe and convenient anchorage. But a sleepier place than the modern substitute for the “sandy Pylos” I have never found in Greece. Nobody could give me a word of direction, and all our searching round the extended sheet of water for the antique site, only perhaps to be recognized by some half-hidden remnant of Pelasgian walls, was fruitless; we neither saw nor heard of any ruin. We paid a visit to the splendidly picturesque old Venetian fortress commanding the entrance of the bay, which perhaps has used up the stones of Nestor’s Pylos, and which has looked down on one of the most murderous combats of modern naval history. It is garrisoned by a little guard of Greek soldiers, and its keep is the prison of the district. The gate is a good sample of the fortifications by which the Venetian Republic held her Eastern possessions.
THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY.
The mythical world which had for its centre Ithaca, and for its chief people Penelope and Ulysses, was out of all proportion larger than the Europe of to-day; for it comprised the whole known world, from the shadows of Cimmeria to the clouds that gave birth to the Nile. Its geography, however, has a value to archæology and prehistory which has not been fully recognized. The date and place of origin of the Odyssey will never be determined with any high degree of certainty, but in dealing with epochs that comprise unmeasured centuries we need not fear a variation of two or three. And the collation of traditions from the same mythical world will help us to this approximation to the probable date of Homer’s life, if not that of Ulysses.