Why Eva cannot lie North-westward. 311 any point between the limit of Eurus on the East of South, and 45 or even 90 degrees beyond South to the westward. Exa, then, is in the East; with somewhat of an inclination, as measured from Greece, towards the north. Ulysses has much westing to make, in order to get to Scheria. Part of this is made on his passages between Exa and Ogygia in the farther north. The rest in the course of his long seventeen days' voyage from the north, which is propelled, as it would appear, by Boreas, and therefore includes also a slight westerly inclination. All these arguments converge towards the same conclusions, and all of them are mainly founded, not on Homer's outer-world representations, but upon indications drawn from his knowledge of nature, or else from his experimental or otherwise familiar acquaintance with the Inner world: that is, they are built not on the figures of his fancy, but on the facts of his own and his countrymen's every-day experience. And now let us consider the adverse construction put upon the text of the Odyssey; particularly with regard to the island of Ææa. It is quite plain, from the accounts given of the route both ways, that the Ocean-mouth is meant by Homer to be near the island of Exa; that is, within a day's saily of that island. How is this reconcilable with the doctrine, which places the island in the far north-west? In the north-east we have an Oceanmouth, the situation of which the Poet, guided up to a certain point by his inner-world knowledge, has not very inaccurately conceived. In the north-west there is no Ocean-mouth. The Straits of Gibraltar, though they lie rather to the south of west from Ithaca, must y Od. xi. II. be carried far into the north for the purpose; in what form, or with what accompaniments, it is hard to conceive. To attempt such a transposition would involve the complete abandonment of all actual geography, and would after all leave us involved in hopeless confusion in the effort to construct any tolerable scheme from the text of Homer. At the mere transportation, indeed, we need not scruple overmuch, if we could justify the proceeding by other clear indications of Homer's intention. But there is no such justification. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the violence done to the text of Od.xii. 3,4, by the interpretation which Nitzsch (following, as I admit, Eustathius), puts upon it. The ship, leaving the stream of Ocean, reaches the sea and the island 2: νῆσόν τ' Αἰαίην, ὅθι τ' Ηοῦς ήριγενείης οἰκία καὶ χοροί εἰσι, καὶ ἀντολαί Ηελίοιο. The arrolai, the rising, or rising-point of the sun, does not, he says, mean the east, but only the first appearance of the sun on their return from darkness, which is a kind of dawning on them. And the dwelling of the early-born Dawn, and the place (such appears to be the meaning of xópo) of the Dances of her kindred or attendant Nymphs-who in later mythology became the virgin train of Hours, that now delight us in the frescoes of Guido and Guercino-not only do not mean anything eastern, but apparently in this place are conceived to have no meaning whatever, and to be an idle, indeed a most inconvenient and bewildering, pleonasm. And thus the magic poetry of this passage and all the curious traditions it involves, are destroyed, in order to make room-for what? For the hypothesis z Od. xii. 3. Construction of Od. xii. 3, 4. 313 that Homer places the dwelling of Morning and the chamber of the rising Sun far to the westward of the country that he himself inhabited a! ' There is, I confess, something almost of naïveté in the confession of Nitzsch, that it sounds rather strange to interpret avaToλal without any reference to sunrise, since it is the customary counterpart to duris, the sunset.' But fortunately there is no Homeric evidence against it as indeed there cannot well be, since the word occurs in no other passage. With respect to 'Has, Nitzsch contends that it means not dawn, but light: and he quotes the passages which say, 'your glory shall reach as far as 'Hes,' and horses, the best to be found beneath the Sun and 'Hús. Certainly it is most allowable, (though I by no means think the sense of dawn inadmissible in these two passages,) especially as day goes nowhere except preceded by dawn, to generalize the word 'Has so as to make it equivalent to light. But the fatal flaw in the interpretation is this, that when 'Hos is thus used, it is invariably apart from any circumstances which can give a local colour to its meaning. But wherever there is any thing local implied, as is admitted to be in the case before us, the s uniformly means the east, though with a certain indefiniteness perhaps as to northward and southward inclination. For instance, when Homer speaks of omen-birds flying eastwards, he describes them as fying πρὸς ἠώ τ' ἠέλιόν τε, and the opposite movement as ποτὶ ζόφον, which here evidently means north-west, although it too may a In the well known case of a noble description in the Antiquary, Walter Scott has made the sun set on the east coast of Great Britain but this was un awares and not on purpose. Had he recited instead of writing, the error could not have escaped correction. signify darkness in general. The whole aim of the passage (Od. xii. 1-5) is, to fix locality; and it is in the teeth of all Homeric usage to deprive nos in such a passage of local force, while it confessedly can have no local meaning but an eastern one. To me, I confess, it appears that Homer has nowhere done more, and rarely so much, in a single passage, as in this, with a view of declaring his intention. The island æa, irrespective of all geographical argument, is, as we have seen, directly bound and fastened to an eastern site by four separate cords. First, as the rising point of the Sun. Secondly, as the residence of Dawn. Thirdly, because Circe, its mistress, has the Sun, the most eastern of all mythological conceptions except the Dawn, for her father. Fourthly, because she has also Perse, whose name indicates a trans-Phoenician origin, for her mother. And further, I am convinced we cannot alter the place of Eæa without uprooting the whole Phoenician scheme of the Outer Geography. The scope and range thus given to the adventures of Ulysses confines them without doubt to the northern semi-circle, but allows them to reach, within that semicircle, to its eastern and to its western extremities, as they are imagined by the Poet. Æolus and the Læstrygonians are evidently placed by him in the north-west. The hypothesis, which has here been maintained for Eæa and Calypso, supplies an effectual counterpart, and properly fills up the eastern corner. But, independently of all other objections, the north-western hypothesis for these islands jumbles them, if I may so speak, in one heap with the others, and leaves the eastern quarter towards the North wholly unoccupied. And yet that East was, for a Greek, the source and the scene of the richest legendary and mythological repre Construction of Od. v. 276, 7. 315 sentations. Such an incongruous view of the question would not, I think, be at all in keeping with Homer's ordinary modes of conceiving, handling, and presenting his materials. But I am aware that, up to this time, we have left out of view a passage, of which I freely admit that the prevailing, and in so far the most obvious, interpretation is against me. Ulysses sails over the sea from Ogygia, governing the rudder of his raft with art, and watching the stars, especially the Great Bear; which at that period, I believe, was nearer the Pole, and was a more conspicuous and splendid astronomical object, than it now is. It was with respect to this constellation that he had received a particular order from Calypsob: τὴν γὰρ δή μιν ἄνωγε Καλυψώ, δια θεάων, ποντοπορευέμεναι ἐπ' ἀριστερὰ χειρὸς ἔχοντα. Or, according to the common construction of the words, he was to keep that constellation on the left during his voyage. But if his course lay in the direction of a right line drawn from St. Petersburgh to Corfu, it appears that Arctus, when visible to him, would be visible on the right, and not on the left. I could not, however, accommodate myself to this passage at such a cost as that of oversetting an interpretation of the general scheme, which is so deeply rooted both in the letter and spirit of the poem, as is the eastern, and likewise somewhat north-eastern, hypothesis for Ææa, together with a northern site for Ogygia. These two, it may be observed, stand together. It is plain, from the times occupied by the several stages between Exa and Ogygia, and from the language used where no precise time is stated, that the Poet conceived the distance between them to be limited, b Od. v. 276. |