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

ITHACA AND ADJOINING ISLANDS.

But as Homer’s humanity mixes by fine degrees with his divinity, so his terra cognita melts away into fairy-land, and we must look for a trace written on water before landing on identifiable shores. The story opens finding Ulysses the prisoner of Love and Calypso, in Ogygia, a fairy island of which the Greek of Homeric days had heard, perhaps, from some storm-driven mariner, or which may be a bit of brain-land. The details of the story make it very difficult even to conjecture where Ogygia was, if it was.[1] How Ulysses leaves the island alone on a raft is told by the poet in the fifth canto; how he got there the hero recounts in the narration to Alcinoüs in Phæacia. Leaving Troy, he stops at Ismarus, a town on the coast of Thrace, which he surprises and sacks; but, repulsed by the inhabitants of the lands near by, rallying to the defense, and visited by the wrath of the gods for his impiety, he is punished by a three days’ gale, and reaches Cape Malea, where, unable to stem the north wind which still persecutes him, he runs past Cerigo down to the African coast, which he reaches in nine days. Here we enter into semi-fable.[2] The Lotophagi seduce his men with their magic fruit which brings oblivion, and he is obliged to fly again. This time he goes north, and comes to an island which lies before the port of the Cyclops, a terrible race: giants with one eye, and cannibals, over whose land the smoke hangs like whirlwinds—evidently Sicily. This little island, where the Greeks debark, is not to be identified, but is probably one of those to the west of Sicily, called later the Ægades. Thence, after the famous adventure of the Cyclops’ cave, one of the poet’s most marvelous inventions (since every detail shows that there was no positive knowledge of the land or its people—only a fantastic tradition), they fly and arrive at the floating island of Æolus, still a creation of mythology, and thence to the shores of the Læstrygonians, another fabulous, man-eating race, in whose land the days are separated only by a brief pretense of night; escaping thence with his single ship and crew, Ulysses arrives at Æa, the island of Circe, from earliest classical times identified with Cape Circeo, between Naples and Cività Vecchia. Circe sends the hero to the land of the Cimmerians,[3] where time touches eternity, and the shades of the dead come to visit the unterrified living; and here Tiresias, the dead soothsayer, tells the future wanderings of the Ithacan chief. Again, returning to Æa, he is redirected toward home through the strait where Scylla and Charybdis menace his existence. This we recognize by later tradition as the Straits of Messina, but the fabulous so dominates the slight element of geography in it, that it is clear that Homer never passed that way, and gained his knowledge only from far remote report; while his second passage—after the sacrilege committed in the Island of the Sun—through the straits, is puzzling, and the recital makes it clear that till Phæacia was reached the poet was not in terra cognita.

The indications are hardly reconcilable with the map. Leaving Circe to go home, he passes the straits, and stopping at the Island of the Sun, his comrades commit a sacrilege which leads to their destruction and his being driven back to Ogygia through the straits, a solitary survivor. But on his departure for Phæacia direct, he does not pass again through the straits, evidently returning to the south of Sicily.

Released by Calypso, he goes on a raft with the sailing direction to keep the Great Bear, “which is also called the Wain,” on his left,—that is, he sails eastward, and for seventeen days splits the waves, and sees on the eighteenth the wooded mountain of the island of the Phæacians, the Scheria of the ancients. The continuity of tradition and the consistency of the narrative leave me no doubt that this was our Corfu, the uttermost of the lands positively known to the geography of that day. The actuality of Scheria has been disputed by certain German critics, who will have it that all the local allusions of the Odyssey are imaginary. But in the Æneid, when Æneas is going to Butrintum, which is now Butrinto, opposite Corfu on the Albanian coast, he says that no land was in sight except Scheria. This makes it certain that in Virgil’s time there was no question on the point.

Already in sight of Scheria, Ulysses is overtaken again by the wrath of Poseidon, who unchains on him all his tempests; and, his raft wrecked in open sea, himself swept away from it into the mountainous waves, he regrets not having found a glorious death before Troy, seeing an inevitable and unhonored end before him, with no funeral rites to give his soul peace. Leucothea, the white goddess, throws into the black warp a silver thread, and brings the story into new light and color. She gives him an amulet which, by its magic, carries him through the last of his grave perils, and preserves him when, with a great and wrathful burst of wind, Poseidon disperses the timbers of his raft and leaves him floating in the yeasty sea. He seizes on one of the timbers and hopefully strikes out for the land. Athene comes once more to his aid. She chains all the winds except Boreas, which, wafting him for two days and nights to the southeast, gives place to a perfect calm. Ulysses, raised on the summit of a huge wave, looks out and sees the land. But it is a terrible, rock-bound coast. “He hears the roar of the waves that break on the rocks, because the shock of the great waves against the bare cliffs sounds fearfully, and the sea, far and wide, is covered with foam. But there is no peaceable roadstead, no port, safe refuge of ships; everywhere high, mountainous rocks and cliffs.” He appeals to the gods for pity, and just then, “while he turns these thoughts in his spirit and heart, an immense wave throws him on the bare shore. Then his flesh would have been torn and his bones broken if Athene had not inspired him. With both hands he clutches the rock and embraces it with groans until the wave had withdrawn. He in this way escapes death, but the return of the wave falls on him, strikes him, and withdraws him into the open sea. He, emerging from the depths, more prudently coasts along, swimming until he can find an opening in the rocks where he may enter, and finally perceives the mouth of a river. He offers a prayer to the river god, and is heard and peacefully received by the peaceable wave, which lands him on the sandy shore.” The whole of the finale of the fifth book is grand and imaginative, especially in the description of the stormy sea and the condition of Ulysses as he sinks on the hospitable sands exhausted, half dead from his long struggle and his two days’ and nights’ swim, sustained only by one of the logs of his raft;[4] but what to my present purpose is of most significance is the striking description of the west coast of Corfu and the unmistakable evidence of the mythologist giving way to the traveler. Here we strike the veritable track of Ulysses, and here begin our researches. To reach this point all the commerce of the Levant aids us—steamers from Trieste, Brindisi, Naples, Patras, Malta, etc.

Here I found fit to my purpose a little yacht of twelve tons, cutter-rigged and Malta-built, the Kestrel, with whose master and owner I made my bargain, namely: he was to obey all my reasonable orders for any voyage within the two archipelagos, find his ship and crew of two sailors in all they needed for service and safety, do my cooking, and insure himself, for the sum of fifteen pounds sterling a month for three months; and while he was putting in stores, fitting new cables to his anchors, and burnishing up a bit, we began to inspect Scheria.

WEST COAST OF SCHERIA.

The popular tradition of to-day fixes the landing of Ulysses near the actual city of Corfu, and an island is pointed out as the ship turned to a rock; while the spot where he landed, and the scene of that most charming of all the episodes of his wanderings, the meeting with Nausicáa, is put at the “one-gun battery,” just south of the harbor of Corfu. Nothing could comport less with the description of the Odyssey. The Channel of Corfu, dividing the island from Epirus, is a land-locked basin in which no such storm could arise as Ulysses encountered, and along which no such rocks exist as are described in the poem. The seventeen days’ drift from the westward before the tempest, and the next two days after it, wafted by Boreas, show that he was in the open Adriatic, and coasting along the rock-bound western coast of Scheria to find an inlet where he might enter. The illustration shows the character of this coast in entire concordance with the Odyssey; and there is near the spot from which my view of the west coast of Scheria is taken, a convent (which is visited by all the tourists who, having some days in Corfu, care for the most picturesque part of the island), and which by its name, Palæcastrizza, shows that it stands near the site of some ancient city or fortress, as the term “Palæcastron” is never applied by local tradition to any construction not belonging to the classical or archaic epochs. Even Byzantine ruins never receive the epithet “palæos.” No trace is now to be found of any prior structure near the convent, which, while it probably has some relation to an antique site, certainly is not on that of the city of Alcinoüs, which must have been farther south where the shore breaks down to a plain. There used to be in the island an old antiquity-hunter who brought from time to time to sell clandestinely in the city, objects of gold and terra-cotta, vases, etc., dug up at a site which only he seems to have known, and of which he would never disclose the location. On inquiring for him on this my last visit to Corfu for these researches, he was not to be heard of. All that we had learned from him was that the ruins of which he knew and where he excavated in secret were somewhere on the western coast, which corresponds to my hypothesis that the capital of Alcinoüs was there.

There is something so unpractical in the Greek laws on the subject of excavation and exportation of antique objects, that it is to be hoped that the shrewd common sense of the people will ere long see their impolicy. Excavation without permission from the Government, even on one’s own land, is forbidden, which is not unreasonable considering all things; but even when permission is accorded or when objects are found by chance, the Government practically confiscates the find when the finders are feeble, and levies a tax of half the value when they are not. Everything, therefore, is done in secret, and exportation by contraband is the only possible manner of profiting by one’s good fortune. The peasant who finds an antique site carefully conceals it; and the objects he finds, instead of enabling the archæologist to classify the antiquities by reference to their provenance, are sold to some one who removes them from the country, and so all clue is lost to their true archæological position. As I shall have to show in the course of these articles, grave loss to the science of archæology sometimes occurs in this way. In this particular instance the loss to me is the being unable to identify, with any probability, the place where or near to which Ulysses landed, and where the classic meeting with Nausicáa took place. When we get to Ithaca we shall find that the author of the Odyssey knew well every foot of land he describes; and the scene of Ulysses’ disaster, already translated, accords so well with the actual topography that it is difficult to suppose that a mere inspiration dictated it, and that the author was not well acquainted with the island of Scheria, whose capital was Phæacia.