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

The position of the grotto makes the only difficulty in tracing all his movements; for it is not, as one would expect from the text, at the head of the port, strictly speaking, but at the head of the little ravine which ends in the port, a good quarter of an hour’s walk from the shore, even making allowance for all the recession of the water-line, which has evidently been considerable. The grotto itself corresponds exactly with the description, and can be entered by mortals only in the usual way, by the small opening which looks toward the port. “It has two entrances: one, turned toward the breath of Boreas, is for human use; the other, toward that of Notos, is more divine. Never man enters by that; it is the way of the immortals.” The human entrance is a low, almost invisible opening, or at least, easily passed without notice, at a short distance. Even now, when all vegetation has disappeared from around it, and the olive-trees come only half-way up the hill, it would easily be hidden by a large stone, as Minerva hides it. The entrance, low and precipitous, widens rapidly within, and we descend by what might once have been artificially prepared steps to a vault-like cave, sixteen to twenty feet in diameter, with a curious recess at the farther end, and at the top of the vault another opening, like the top window of the Pantheon of Rome, or any of the circular temples whose form was derived from the vaulted tomb or treasury of Pelasgic architecture. At first sight I thought this opening might have been artificial, but on close examination I saw that the formation of the rock led to it naturally, and that, hardly large enough to admit a human body readily, it could only, if enlarged, be entered by a person’s being let down with a cord. This is the “immortals’ entrance.” Under this opening lies a huge heap of stones, the accumulation of centuries, for the lower portions are cemented together by the stalagmitic deposit from the rock above; and the walls of the grotto, despite the breaking off of every attackable stalactite, are also formed of carbonate of lime so deposited. The difference between the actual distance from the water’s edge to the grotto and that which is indicated by the narrative of the Odyssey is not more than a fair poetic license would permit; or the memory of the narrator, having known the localities, might well in a few years of absence leave out this short distance.

The Odyssean topography is greatly confused to the modern traveler by the fact that the Homeric city undoubtedly stood at the northern end of the island, and far remote from the modern city as well as from the landing-place of Ulysses and the pig-pens of Eumæus. The view from the grotto gives us, at the left, a bay of which Vathy and Phorcys are tributaries. This cuts the island nearly in two, a narrow ridge of rock only connecting its two great masses. On the north is the site of the Homeric city, as I shall presently show; but on the south are the Raven’s Cliff and the fountain of Arethusa, together with an ancient ruin known by the people as the “Castle of Ulysses.” These ruins are of the earliest form of Pelasgic, commonly named Cyclopean, though there is no justification for any distinction between the “Pelasgic” and the “Cyclopean,” or any proper distinction of styles, as they run into each other, from the form shown at “Ulysses’ Castle” to the most elaborate and carefully fitted polygonal which we shall find at Samé on the opposite shore of Cephalonia. The walls of Ulysses’ Castle are of great extent, and portions still remaining near the summit are well preserved, some fragments being nearly twenty feet high. It must have been the work of a powerful tribe and a great stronghold. Seen from the sea, it shows on a sharp conical rock precipitously trending down to the shore. The Odyssey in no manner makes allusion to this, either as city or as ruin. Ulysses passes very near it going south, leaving it on the right, apparently ignoring its existence. This makes it tolerably clear that it had been so long in ruin that it was in no way to be connected with the Odyssean dynasty or colonization even, or that it was constructed after the Homeric epoch. The latter hypothesis is untenable, because we find in many parts, especially in the Argolid, ruins clearly contemporary with this, which are in the Hellenic traditions regarded as the work of a vanished and semi-divine race of giants, the Cyclopes or the “divine Pelasgi;” while, of the Homeric epoch, as distinguished from the Pelasgic, which preceded it, and the Hellenic, which followed it, we have no recognizable remains, and the cities known to have existed, such as the Ithaca of Ulysses, have left no ruin durable enough to show in our time. This indicates a state of civilization in which the great necessity of strong walls as a defense had passed, or that, by the use of cement, walls were made so light in structure that they were efficient for the day, but perished utterly in the intervening time, which again is an untenable hypothesis, because we find cement used nowhere in Greece in work known to be earlier than the third century B. C. I leave the question of the identity of the Odyssean epoch with that of the composition of the poem at present untouched. I am dealing only with the poem which philologists suppose to have been composed about 850 B. C. That the author knew Ithaca perfectly, I think we shall see, and that consequently the ruins of the Pelasgic epoch, when not continuously inhabited (as were Nericus and Samé, the former of which Laertes conquered, and the latter of which sent the largest deputation of “kings” as suitors for Penelope, the foundations of both being Pelasgic), were already so lost in the twilight of prehistory as to be without any meaning to the author of the Odyssey. The city whose ruins are now called the Castle of Ulysses was as unknown to the epoch of Homer as to ours. No one in the whole action of the Odyssey goes in or out of its gates, or turns aside from his path to speak of or visit it. “Kings” were as common as rascals in those days, but that two important cities should exist contemporaneously in the small island of Ithaca, and that the people of Ulysses should live in one, pasture their hogs on the territory of the other, and ignore its existence, is impossible. This does not prevent Schliemann from identifying the house walls, which remain to a small height, with the pig-pens of Eumæus, or a huge stump near the citadel, with the tree from which Ulysses had made his bed (Ithaca, Peloponnesus and Troy).

That this part of the island was nearly or quite unpopulated is made more than probable by the facts that no mention is made of any city or people here; that the only features mentioned are the wildness, and forests abandoned to feeding of pigs; and that Ulysses selects this part for his concealment. The path Ulysses probably followed from the port of Phorcys to the Raven’s Cliff is by far too hard for dilettante following; it is not only impassable to beasts of burden, but, I should say, difficult for a pedestrian. There is a road carriageable for a few miles from Vathy along the ridge southward, and then a fair bridle-path to the cliff, which, had we known it, would have led us somewhere near the location of Eumæus’s sties; but the guide my friends had recommended me, on his personal assurance, did not know the road, and we went wandering across fields and over hills, abandoning our quadrupeds at the moment when they would have been our best guides; and, finally, the fellow had to go to a ploughman scratching the earth with a crooked stick behind a yoke of year-old heifers, and inquire his way. I exhausted my modern Greek in exasperated vituperation of his pretentious ignorance, and took the lead, as I generally have had to do on similar occasions.

There was a pretty little valley on our way, the only arable or fruitful land in this part of the island; all else was bare and bleak. A few tough-lived shrubs, broom and gorse, arbutus, and some others I did not know, wring a scanty subsistence from the clefts between the rocks, and in a mass of almost unmitigated limestone was cloven a ravine. The roughness of Ithaca was proverbial even in Homeric days, since Athena, while disguised as a shepherd, replies to Ulysses, “If it [Ithaca] is rocky, if it breeds not horses in its moderate space, it is not quite barren,” etc. One might well select this scene as one of tranquil beauty, with the faint glimpses of the dreamy inner sea above its valley distance, and the golden grain-fields as I saw them, interspersed with vineyards and olive-orchards.

RAVEN’S CLIFF AND THE FOUNTAIN OF ARETHUSA.

The glen of the Raven’s Cliff becomes a wild gorge below the fountain of Arethusa, and descends abruptly to the sea. Above, a stripe of bare, pale-gray rock down the cliff shows that in winter it is the location of a cataract, though, when I visited the locality, dry as summer dust. The fountain of Arethusa is situated about half-way from the cliff to the sea, and bears the evidences of an immense antiquity. Remains of an architectural surrounding are still to be seen, which, with some foundations of walls of the Roman period, evidently of a temple to the nymph or local goddess, and “Ulysses’ Castle,” are the only traces of ruin discoverable in this lobe of the island. The recess of the fountain has once been much larger, but the slow process of depositing the calcareous incrustation which forms its walls has gone on so long that only a small deep basin remains, from which the people draw the water with a cord and bucket. Its niche is cushioned with moss and maidenhair ferns, and the soft porous rock is always moist with the filtering through of the water. A wooden trough is placed for the watering of the sheep and goats which take the place of the hogs of Eumæus, for this is the only perennial source of water in the region.

An old woman, wrinkled and bowed, looking like one of the Fates, sat near the fountain, combing the wool she had washed at it; and on the opposite side the nymph of the fountain, in the shape of a young matron of some neighboring hamlet, was washing her clothes. The wash was boiling when we came up, over a fire of brambles and weeds; but the utensil which took the place of the bronze caldron of the antique house-mother was an American petroleum-can, with a wire bale fitted in rudely, and the stamp of the New York Refining Company was still visible on the tin. We talk of the omnipresence of gold, of the omnipotence of cotton; but in my wanderings on the earth I have found places where the people did not know the value of a piece of gold, and wore nothing but the homespun and woven wool of their flocks and flax of their fields, while I have never found one that did not know petroleum; and I have learned that the petroleum-can is a more universal concomitant of civilization than English cutlery or American drillings.

The pens of Ulysses’ pig-herd were at the top of the cliff, where a plain of small extent and soil of scanty depth still maintains an olive-grove, sole representative of the forest of oaks whose acorns fattened the swine for the revels of the suitors of Penelope.

Here Ulysses finds Eumæus, and here, in his anxiety to convince him of the truth of his prediction of the return of the wanderer, he says: “If he return not as I declare, let your servants seize me and throw me over the high rock, that vagabonds may learn in future to abstain from useless falsehoods.”