The claim of the city of Corfu to be the site of the ancient Phæacia rests on nothing but the fact that it is the only city in the island; but the ever-tranquil bay on which it lies, and the fact that Ulysses, instead of searching for a place where he could land, would rather have had to search for a place where he could not, shows conclusively that no part of the eastern coast is entitled to the honor. The “one-gun battery,” where local tradition places his landing, is perhaps the least likely point, as no running stream is to be found near there. The lake, which is now suggested as the tranquil water in which Ulysses came to land, must then have been much larger than at present, and now in nowise resembles a river: it is the half-filled arm of the sea into which a wide basin of marshy land has been for centuries draining, but into which no watercourse leads, and the view seen from above the “one-gun” needs scarcely a commentary to show its entire incompatibility with the Odyssey.
The capital of Alcinoüs was, we are told by Homer, founded by his father Nausithoüs. His people were formerly inhabitants of Hyperia, “near the Cyclops,” and were by these latter so ravaged and overborne that they emigrated to Phæacia. The generally accepted location of the Cyclops in Sicily suggests that Hyperia was probably there or in Italy; and that the Phæacians may have been related to the Siculi; since the Pelasgi, who invaded Italy from the north, and, uniting with the Umbri, spread over the whole of southern Italy, expelling the aborigines, are continually confounded by the earliest traditions with the Cyclops. As, from all we know, the Tyrrhene Pelasgi were the earliest metal-workers in that part of Europe,[5] and as the Cyclops, the children of Hephaistos, the great metal-worker, are a mythological idealization of a race of smiths who had a habit of covering the eyes, for protection from sparks, with a screen in which a single hole was cut to see through, which was transmogrified into a single eye in the middle of the forehead, there is nothing unlikely in the inference that the Pelasgi and Cyclops were identical, and that the Phæacians were refugees from the conquest of southern Italy by that formidable people. That they were not Greeks we know by their absence from the catalogue of the “Iliad,” where all the Hellenic tribes were recorded in their places in the league.
The Corfiotes of to-day boast of descent from the Phœnicians, and certainly they are not to be measured by the same standard as the Greek race in general. Their reputation for dishonesty has given rise to a Greek proverb, which relegates a person of more than usual craftiness and bad faith to the “Corfiotes.” “He behaves like a Corfiote” is the greatest reproach the continental Greek can bring against a man who is too clever in business matters. In character as well as history the Corfiote has little in common with Greece. As he had no place inside the line drawn around the Hellenic world at the great critical, even if mythical, epoch assigned to the siege of Troy, so in his latest history he has always maintained a position more or less apart. Diodorus Siculus makes the Homeric name of the city, Phæacia, to have been derived from Phæacus, son of Poseidon, and places his reign contemporary with the Argonauts, as Phæacus protected Jason against the king of Iolcus when, returning from Colchis with Medea, he took refuge at Scheria. Mythology begins with it in the combat of Zeus and Poseidon in their struggle for supremacy in the government of the universe, and finishes with Ulysses’ visit. History commences with the arrival of a colony of Corinthians under Chersicrates, who built a city which he called Chrysopolis. This was probably Corfu, for, as the immigration of Nausithoüs, coming from Italian shores, first established itself on the coast looking toward their old home, so the Corinthians, coming by the islands and the Epirote shores, would find their first landing in the spacious and tranquil bay formed by the crescent-shaped island, which, at its extremes, approaches the mainland. The Hellene of Corinth brought all the seeds of the virtues and vices of his national temperament to the fertile soil of Corcyra, as it is henceforward called by the Hellenic chronicles, colonization and war with their neighbors filling all their early history. They founded, according to their tradition, Apollonia and other cities on the mainland; but, as among the ruins of those cities there are Pelasgic remains, it is not to be supposed that they were the first colonists, but that they merely colonized, as the Romans did in the later times, with a dominant population, cities in decline or too weak to maintain their independence. This is, in ancient Greek history, oftener the meaning of the word colonize than the founding of a new city. To get a clear idea of the condition of this part of the world at the beginning of historical, or even heroic record, we must take into consideration that an epoch of civilization, perhaps of empire, had long preceded the awakening of the Hellenic national life; an epoch which ought, perhaps, to be measured by centuries, if we could measure it at all, and whose record is preserved in the stupendous ruins we call Pelasgic, a name applied by the Greeks to a people who preceded them, derived possibly from the Greek name of the stork, indicating a migrating or wandering people,—wandering, probably, because their empire had been broken up by some newer and stronger race, but which the various remaining traditions accord in asserting to have once held great rule in Italy, where they were known also as Tyrrhenians, in the Peloponnesus, and in Crete. We shall see presently some indications of the correctness of the assumption that they preceded by an infinite period the great assemblage of Greeks, which the expedition to Troy perhaps marks, perhaps symbolizes; but at present I have only to do with the history and mythology of Corfu, which is in no way that we can discover connected with the Pelasgi.
GREEK BOATS AND ROSTRUM OF ROMAN GALLEY.
The first wars of Corcyra were, as was to be expected of an enterprising people, with the mother country; but as in those days piracy was the chief business of every maritime people, war was perhaps only a normal condition. The Persian invasion brought Corcyra into the Hellenic league, but, with the duplicity of which the race furnished so many instances in ancient times, the Corcyriote fleet only sailed, and took good care not to be in time for the battle, fearing the vengeance of the Persians. Their prudence brought on them, after the defeat of Xerxes at Salamis, a combined attack of the Peloponnesian States. As the union of these was always a challenge to Athens, she sided with the Corcyriotes, and the resulting war plunged Corcyra into intestine and social strife, in which the most horrible cruelties were perpetrated by the islanders; and the animosities and renewals of revolt and war, which the divisions of the classes of the population gave opportunity for, reduced the island to anarchy and helplessness. Their subsequent history is one of repeated subjugation and revolt. After losing even the relative independence of alliance with Athens, they were conquered by Agathocles of Syracuse, Pyrrhus, and finally by Rome.
CORFU, FROM THE KING’S GARDEN.
From this time Corcyra was the base of the Roman military movements against the Levantine enemies of the republic. The commanding position of the island has, from that day to this, made it an object of the covetousness of all the maritime powers of the Mediterranean by turns. In the civil wars of Rome, the island espoused the part of Pompey, later of Brutus and Cassius, and then, always unfortunate, of Antony. After the battle of Actium, fought almost within sight of its shores, Corcyra was besieged, taken, and rigorously punished by Augustus, and then relegated to an obscurity out of which only the great Ottoman invasion of Europe brought it. It was involved more or less in the Saracenic, Bulgarian, Norman, and Neapolitan wars and invasions, and finally threw itself into the arms of Venice to save itself from conquest by Genoa. From this time (1386) the history of Corcyra, become Corfu, until the overthrow of the republic by Napoleon, is identified with that of Venice, and all the remains or structures in the island date from the Venetian occupation.
In 1537 the troops of the Sultan, under the orders of the renegade Barbarossa, made a descent on the island and laid siege to the city, which, taken by surprise, was ill-provisioned and with a small garrison. The Turkish fleet blockaded the port, and the troops beleaguered the city by land. The garrison was under the terrible alternative of being starved into surrender speedily or dismissing all the useless mouths. The latter was, on the whole, safer, for the surrender would have been disastrous even to the non-combatants, who were to Turkish barbarity no less obnoxious than the soldiers. The old men, women, and children were sent out of the city, perhaps the most horrible necessity which ever befell brave men. A successful defense of the city justified, in a military point of view, the terrible sacrifice; and, after a long and obstinate siege, Barbarossa, his army nearly destroyed by battle and pestilence, withdrew, defeated. The island was almost depopulated, ravaged, and so utterly impoverished that Venice was obliged to send the people seed-corn and beasts to till their fields. Nearly the whole of the nobility of the island had been killed in the defense.