Gladstone, in the “Juventus Mundi,” has made use of an argument which, even if not sound as to the Trojan war, I believe to be good for the Odyssey. The earliest authentic records in Greek history reveal Greece as under the control of two races, the Ionians and the Dorians, elements whose antagonisms have been the chief cause of the disasters and ruin of Greece.
But neither Dorians nor Ionians were the dominant race when the Odyssey was written, as neither Ionians nor Dorians appear in the record. The Greeks of the Trojan war are always called Achaioi, and the Dorians were evidently, as a dominant race, unknown to the author of the Homeric poems. Now, as they came into Greece about 1000 B. C., and as our researches show the island of Ithaca, with which Homer was well acquainted, to have become Dorian with the rest of Greece, the substance of the Odyssey must have been earlier than we have supposed, and could hardly have been as late as 850 B. C., unless the Dorian so-called invasion was an immigration spreading very slowly from the main line of its movement, and its stock still a recognizably new people. Nor does any possible modification of the Homeric poems in the recitals, continued over centuries, affect this argument in the least, as, being common property of all the bards and all the tribes, they were liable to be modified in the various versions according to the localities and local knowledge of the singers; and, one “rhapsody” being preserved by one tribe and another by another, of this hardly homogeneous people, the traces of the modifications received in their migrations could not be by the philology of the date of their collation so effaced as to leave no marks of their incomplete restoration.
It is impossible that any idea of archæological consistency had led to the exclusion of the Dorians from the Odyssey. If the Dorians had been ruling in Greece when it was composed, it seems to the last degree improbable that they could have been so completely ignored, if it were but for the deference to be paid the rulers of half the Greek world; and whether we look at the invariable practice of all early poets to adapt their work to their own times and surroundings, or to the entire consistency of the work in this respect,—too complete to be due to the study of utterly unscientific or illiterate later times,—I think it is to be admitted as probable that the Odyssey was composed before the great ethnical revolution in Greece was complete.
The purely local evidence supports this hypothesis to a certain extent, and in this topography and geography I propose to wander as far as it is possible to do so with advantage to our knowledge of the Odyssean world. Corfu was inhabited by a race alien to the Greek, and which recognized its descent from the Siculi displaced by the Pelasgi from Sicily. Opposite Ithaca lies the more important island of Cephalonia, to which Ithaca is now completely subordinate, but which then was less important apparently than Ithaca, in all probability only because it was only partly Hellenic. Now, the earliest classical name of this Island, Kephallenia, was derived from Cephalus, a mythical hero who appears to have been contemporary with Minos. But this name is never applied to it in the Odyssey. Of the island nothing is said, but of the chief city, Samos (a colony from which gave its name to the Asiatic island now known under that appellation), Homer has much to say. It lies clearly in sight from Ithaca, from which it is separated only by a narrow strait, and is one of the prominent objects in the view from Ithaca. It was originally one of that line of prehistoric cities whose only record is in the stones of their walls, and from these we learn that it was a very ancient coast settlement, which, unlike the city on Aëtos, survived through successive civilizations until history got hold of it. In Ulysses’ day it must have been a rich place, for it furnished twenty-four pretendants to the hand of Penelope. “There are first fifty-two young men, the chosen of Dulichios—six servants accompany them; twenty-four have come from Samos; twenty from Zakynthos [Zante]; and from Ithaca were twelve, the bravest.” But the author of the Odyssey seems to have had no personal knowledge of the topography of Cephalonia, and mentions no other locality in the island. Tradition tells us that the island was peopled by Telebœans, a people driven from the continent by Achilles,—before the siege of Troy, therefore, but subsequent to Cephalus; but this is one of the confusions of mythology, as Cephalus found the Telebœans in the island. The usual condensation of history into myth leaves very little clear in these early traditions. Races become personified in individuals, and the work of centuries is attributed to a life-time and an individual. Whether Cephalus was in reality a race or a man it is impossible to do more than conjecture, but though the poems mention the Kephallenes, the entire ignoring of its topography and traditions, even of the visit of the Argonauts to it, makes it difficult to believe that it was chiefly inhabited by a race kindred to that of Ithaca when Homer knew it, because Homer was too much disposed to make use of the antique traditions when apposite, to have left unnoticed that of Jason at Palé.
Cephalus having, according to the legend, killed his wife Procris, mistaking her for a wild animal as she, excited to jealousy by his devotion to the chase, which she attributed to another love, hid herself in the thickets to watch him, was banished from Athens, and, wandering in exile, came to Thebes, just then under excitement owing to the Telebœans of Cephalonia having killed the brothers of Alcmena, wife of the Theban Amphytrion, and he was requested to take charge of the expedition to avenge the murder. He succeeded in conquering the island and gave it his name. His descendants reigned there two generations, after which, the latest rulers of his blood being recalled to Attica by the oracle, a federative republic succeeded, formed by the four principal cities, or perhaps by the four which had survived the changes of race, for there are more than four antique sites. Those which history has preserved as having submitted to the Romans in the year of Rome 563 were Samé, Nesia, Crané, and Palé.
The city of Samé alone presents, in the annals of historical times, any interest, and this is sad and glorious. Livy says that at the end of the Ætolian war the Romans sent to Cephalonia to know whether they would submit or try the fortune of war, as they seem to have joined in the war with the Ætolians, though he gives no record of the part they took. He gives the account, brief and tragic, of the fate of the city, which I will neither dilute nor abbreviate:—
“An unhoped-for peace had now shone on Cephalonia when one state, the Saméans, suddenly revolted, from some motive not yet ascertained. They said that as their city was commodiously situated they were afraid the Romans would compel them to remove from it. But whether they conceived this in their own minds and under the impulse of a groundless fear disturbed the general quiet, or whether such a project had been mentioned in conversation among the Romans and reported to them, nothing is ascertained except that, having given hostages, they suddenly shut their gates, and would not relinquish their design even for the prayers of their friends whom the consul sent to the walls to try how far they might be influenced by compassion for their parents and countrymen. When no pacific answer was given, the city began to be besieged.
“The consul had all the apparatus, engines, and machines which had been brought from Ambracia, and the soldiers executed with great diligence the works necessary to be made. The rams were therefore brought forward in two places, and began to batter the walls.
“The townsmen omitted nothing by which the works or the motions of the besiegers could be obstructed. But they resisted in two ways in particular, one of which was to raise constantly opposite the part of the wall attacked a new wall of equal strength on the inside; and the other was to make sudden sallies at one time against the enemy’s works, at another against his advanced guard, and in those attacks they generally got the better. The only plan that was invented to confine them within the walls, though ineffectual, deserves to be recorded. One hundred slingers were brought from Ægium, Patræ, and Dymæ [Peloponnesus]. These men, according to the customary practice of that nation, were exercised from their childhood in throwing with a sling, into the open sea, the round pebbles with which, mixed with sand, the shores were generally strewn; therefore they cast weapons of that sort to a greater distance, with surer aim and more powerful effect, than even the Balearian slingers. Besides, their sling does not consist merely of a single strap like the Balearic and that of other nations, but the thong of the sling is threefold and made firm by several seams, that the missile may not, by the yielding of the strap in the act of throwing, be let fly at random; but, after sticking fast while whirled about, it may be discharged as if sent from the string of a bow. Being accustomed to drive their missiles through circular marks of small circumference placed at a great distance, they not only hit the enemy’s heads, but any part of their faces that they aimed at. These slings checked the Saméans from sallying either so frequently or so boldly; insomuch that they would sometimes from the walls beseech the Achæans to retire for a while and be quiet spectators of their fight with the Roman guards. Samé supported a siege of four months. When some of their small number were daily killed or wounded, and the survivors were, through continual fatigues, greatly reduced both in strength and spirits, the Romans, one night, scaling the wall of the citadel which they call Cyatides (for the city, sloping toward the sea, verges toward the west), made their way into the forum. The Saméans, on discovering that a part of the city was taken, fled with their wives and children into the greater citadel; but, submitting next day, they were all sold as slaves, their city being plundered.” (Bohn’s translation.)
It is only by conjecture we can distinguish between the two hills, both being covered with ruins; and the walls are so broken in their circuit, and so complex as well as various in their epoch of construction, that no plan of the siege could be made, but the above indicates the westernmost as first captured.