Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. 3 of 3

6. From the point of Lectum to the southward, Homer shows a knowledge of the coast-line as far as Lycia in the south-western quarter of Asia Minor. But here we must close his inner sphere. The Solyman mountains supply the only local notice in the poems which can be said to belong to the interior country, and of these his conceptions are evidently as far as possible from geographical. In the Sixth Iliad533 he appears to conceive of the Solyman people as bordering upon Lycia. Although the name has suggested to some a connection with Jerusalem, we ought to consider it as representing that for which it stands in geography, a part of the grand inland mass of Asiatic mountains. But from the proximity of the Solymi to Lycia, Homer would appear to have moved them greatly westward. Again, when Neptune in the Fifth Odyssey sees Ulysses from the Solyman mountains on his way from Ogygia, we must suppose that Homer conceived them to command some point of a neighbouring and continuous line of sea, which would allow of such a prospect. He would hardly have made Neptune see Ulysses from Lycia, or from a point across the mountains of Thrace, or from one on the other side of the actual Mount Taurus.

We have now, I think, made the circuit of the whole zone, and it is a small one, of the real or experimental geography of Homer.

The intermediate or doubtful Zone.

Let us take next the intermediate zone, which marks the extreme and infrequent points of Greek resort.

Beginning in the west and north-west, we have found Sicania (now Upper Calabria), Epirus, and the country of the Thesprotians534, marking the points of this intermediate region. To the northward, we may fix it at Emathia. In the north-east, it seems to be bounded by the northern shore of the Sea of Marmora. The Thracians of Homer inhabit a country which he calls ἐριβώλαξ, Il. xx. 485, and which the Hellespont enclosed (ἐέργει), that is to say, washes on two sides at least. The Hellespont, as in this place it is termed ἀγάῤῥοος, signifies to the Eastern part of its waters in particular; and the name probably includes the Propontis (which he might well suppose to have a strong current throughout, like the Straits of Gallipoli), together with the northern Ægean between Chalcidice and the Thracian Chersonese. He has described these Thracians in very vague terms535, and without any local circumstance, in the Catalogue: but the form of the coast-line apparently implied in the word ἐέργει, and the epithet of fertility, appear to indicate the plain of Adrianople and the Maritz. But this inclosure on two sides terminates when the northern shore begins to trend directly to the eastward: and the Πλαγκταὶ, or Bosphorus, which no man but Jason ever succeeded in passing, are to be considered as in the zone of a semifabulous or exterior chorography.

When we pass into the south-east, we find that Cyprus, Phœnicia, and Egypt may perhaps most properly be placed in the doubtful zone. We have seen that Cyprus was known as a stage on the passage to the East, and as within the possible military reach of Agamemnon. But its lord did not join in the war: and Homer has no details about the island, beyond the specification of Paphos as the seat of the residence, and of the principal worship, of Venus.

We have no instance of any visit paid by Greeks to Phœnicia under ordinary circumstances. The tour of Menelaus is, like that of Ulysses, outside the sphere of ordinary life. He describes himself in it to Telemachus as πολλὰ παθὼν καὶ πόλλ’ ἐπαληθεὶς536, which may be compared with Od. i. 4. respecting Ulysses. We hear of the Taphians there; for it was at Sidon that they kidnapped the nurse of Eumæus. Piracy in those times probably reached somewhat further than trade. These same Taphians appear to be of doubtful Hellenism. On the one hand, Mentes their leader was a ξεῖνος to Ulysses537. But (1) we thus find them in Phœnicia538, which is not a place of usual Greek resort. (2) They sail to Temese in foreign parts, ἐπ’ ἀλλοθρόους ἀνθρώπους (Od. i. 183), which we do not find elsewhere said of Greeks. The case of the pseudo-Ulysses cannot stand as a precedent for the rest of Greece, nor even for the rest of Crete539. (3) The father of Mentes had given Ulysses poison for his arrows, which Ilus, the Hellene, had from motives of religion refused him. This at once supplies a particular reason for the xenial bond between them, and suggests that this Taphian prince may have been, though a ξεῖνος, yet of a different religion and race. (4) The absence of the Taphians from the war, especially as a tribe so much given to navigation, further strengthens the presumption that they were not properly Greeks.

Phœnicia, then, hangs doubtfully on the outer verge of the Greek world, and belongs to the intermediate zone. Yet more decidedly is this the case with Egypt. For Ulysses means something unusual, when he describes the voyage as one lasting for five days across the open sea, even with the very best wind all the way, from Crete; and it is elsewhere described as at a distance formidably great. Such is the idea apparently intended by the statement, that the very birds do but make the journey once a year over so vast a sea540. No ordinary Greek ever goes to Egypt: and when the pseudo-Ulysses planned his voyage thither, it was under a sinister impulse from Jupiter, who meant him ill541:

αὐτὰρ ἐμοὶ δειλῷ κακὰ μήδετο μητίετα Ζεύς.

Again, the Poet appears to have entirely misconceived the distance of Pharos from the coast. He places it at a day’s sail from Αἴγυπτος, meaning probably by that name the Nile. Vain attempts have been made to get rid by explanation of this geographical error. Nitzsch542 says truly, that for the geography of this passage Homer was dependent on the gossip of sailors, and compares it with that of Ogygia, Scheria, and the rest. When Menelaus went to Egypt, it was involuntarily, as we are assured by Nestor543;

ἀτὰρ τὰς πέντε νέας κυανοπρῳρείουςΑἰγύπτῳ ἐπέλασσε φέρων ἄνεμός τε καὶ ὕδωρ.

Beyond the circumscriptions which have thus been drawn, lie the countries of the Outer Geography. Outwards their limit in the mind of Homer was either the great River Ocean, or else the land immediately bordering upon it. Their inner line, that is, the line nearest to the known Greek or Homeric world, may be defined by a number of points specified in the poems. We have, for example, the Lotophagi and Libya in the south; the land of the Cyclops on the west; (I pass by Sicily, because it can, I think, be shown, that Homer transplanted it into another quarter;) Scheria to the north-west, the Abii, Glactophagi, and Hippemolgi, to the north. Then come the Strait of the Πλαγκταὶ, or Bosphorus, pretty accurately conceived as to its site; next towards the east, the Amazons and the Solymi with their mountains; in the south-east the Ἐρεμβοὶ, and then the widely spread Αἰθίοπες. All the places and people visited by Ulysses after the Lotophagi, that have not been named, must be conceived to lie yet further outwards.

I have now explained the grounds on which I assume the existence of two great zones, the one of a real, the other of an imaginative, fluctuating, and semi-fabulous Geography in Homer; and of a third zone, drawn as a somewhat indeterminate border-ground between them.

Sphere of the Outer Geography.

I come now to consider what are the keys or leading ideas of local arrangement which we can first obtain from the particulars of the Outer Geography of Homer, and which we may then apply to the solution of such questions of detail as it presents.

It is plain that we have real need of some such keys. To ascertain the general direction of the movements of the Wanderings of Ulysses, and the general idea entertained by the Poet of the distribution of land and sea, is an essential preliminary to the solution of such questions as, Where were the Sirens? or, Where were the Læstrygones? According to the statement I have recently given, many of the points, that Ulysses in the Wanderings visited by sea, would appear to have been so fixed by Homer, as to imply his belief that the chieftain sailed over what we know to be the European continent.

The two propositions, which I have already ventured to state as being the keys to the Outer Geography of the Odyssey, are in the following terms544:

1. That Homer placed to the northward of Thrace, Epirus, and the Italian peninsula, an expanse, not of land, but of sea, communicating with the Euxine; or, to express myself in other words, that he greatly extended the Euxine westwards, perhaps also shortening it towards the East; and that he made it communicate, by the gulfs of Genoa and Venice, with the southern Mediterranean.

2. That he compounded into one two sets of Phœnician traditions respecting the Ocean-mouth, and fixed the site of it in the North-East.

In the first place, I assume that it would be a waste of time to enter upon an elaborate confutation of the traditional identifications, which the pardonable ambition of after-times has devised for the various points of the wanderings. According to those expository figments, we must believe that the land of the Cyclops is an island, that it is the same island which reappears at a later date as Thrinacie, that Æolia is Stromboli in sight of that island of the Cyclops, (though it took Ulysses nine days of fair wind to sail from it to within sight of Ithaca,) and that Ulysses could sail straight across the sea from Æolia to Ithaca. We must look for the Læstrygones and their perpetual day in the latitudes of the Mediterranean. We must either place the ocean northward, (but wholly without any prototype in nature,) and the under-world on the west coast of Italy, where there is no stream whatever, and seek, too, for fogs and darkness in the choicest atmospheres of the world; or else we must remove the Ocean-mouth to a distance about four times as far from the island of Circe, as that island is from Greece, whereas the poem evidently presumes their comparative proximity. But in truth, it is useless to go on accumulating single objections, for it is not upon these that the confutation principally depends. The confutation of these pardonable but idle traditions rests on broader grounds. The grounds are such as really these, that in no one particular do these Italian fables – for such I must call them, notwithstanding the partial countenance they receive from the chaotic and seemingly adulterated parts of the Theogony of Hesiod545– satisfy the letter of the text of Homer; that in the attempt to give it a geographical character, they misconceive its spirit; and that they oblige us to override and nullify not only the facts of actual geography, for that we might do without violating any law of reason and likelihood under the conditions of the case, but also the positive indications which Homer has given us from phenomena that lay within his knowledge and experience. In fact, they would oblige us to condemn Homer as geographically unworthy of trust, within the sphere of the every day life and resort of the Greeks, as well as in regions, which he and his countrymen never visited.

And the result of all the violence thus done to Homer would be, that we should have sacrificed at once his language and his imagination, in the attempt to struggle with contradictions to the actual geography which defy every attempt at reconciliation.

At the outset, according to my view, both admissions must be made, and principles must be laid down, as cardinal and essential to the conduct of the inquiry we have now in hand.

Dislocation of actual nature.

It must, I think, be admitted,

1. That Homer has dislocated or transplanted the traditions he had received. For example, he has either carried the Bosphorus westwards546, or else the Straits of Messina eastwards.

2. That therefore as we are on this occasion inquiring not into the geographical information Homer can give us, but into the errors he had embraced, we must not be surprised if we fail to arrive at any conclusions, either wholly self-consistent or demonstratively clear. We must exact from his text, with something less than geographical rigour, even the conditions of inward harmony.

It may then reasonably be asked, if this be so, how are we to find any clue to his meaning.

My answer is, by laying down rules which will enable us to discriminate between his primary and his secondary statements; between the results of his knowledge, and the fruits of his fancy.

By his knowledge I mean, what he had seen, what he had travelled over, what was familiarly and habitually known to his countrymen, so as to give him ample opportunities of refreshing recollection, of enlarging knowledge, and of correcting error.

By the fruits of his fancy I mean, the forms he has thought fit to give to statements of geography lying outside the world of his own experience, and that of the Greeks in general. These statements, gathered here and there as time and opportunity might serve, he could hardly have moulded into a correct and consistent scheme. Emancipating himself wholly from obligations which it was impossible for him to fulfil, he has treated them simply as the creatures of his poetic purpose, and has analysed, shifted, and recombined them into a world of his own, in the creation and adjustment of which, the principal factor has of necessity been his own will.

Postulates for the inquiry.

I therefore lay down the following postulates:

1. That, Homer having an Inner or known and an Outer or imagined world, between which a line may be drawn with tolerable certainty, the voyage of Ulysses, from the Lotophagi to Scheria inclusive, lies in the Outer world.

2. That we may not only implicitly accept the geographical statements of Homer, when they lie within his own horizon or the Inner world, but may fearlessly argue from them.

3. That arguments so drawn are available and paramount, as far as they go, for governing the construction of passages relating to the geography of the Outer world.

4. That we have no title to argue, when we find a point in the Outer world described in such a manner as to correspond with some spot now known, that Homer gave to that tract or region in his own mind, the site which we may now know it to occupy, but that he is quite as likely to have placed it elsewhere.

5. That arguments grounded on the physical knowledge of the Poet are to be trusted. I would name by way of example, (subject only to a certain latitude for inexactness,) such arguments as are drawn from the directions of winds, and from other patent and cardinal facts of common experience, for example, the distances which may be traversed within given times.

6. So likewise are the indications, which harmonize with known or reasonably presumed historical and ethnological views, to be trusted as good evidence on questions relating to his geographical meaning.

In order, however, to be in a condition to make use of indications supplied by the Winds, we must consider what the Winds of Homer are.

The Winds of Homer.

The Winds of Homer are only four in number, and the manner of their physical arrangement is rude. It by no means corresponds with our own, but varies from it greatly, just as his points of the compass varied from ours. And though he names only four winds, yet I apprehend we must consider that upon the whole he uses them with such latitude, as to express under the name of some one of them every gale that blew.

As to some of these winds, Homer has provided us with an abundance of trustworthy data for their point of origin: and through them the evidence as to the rest may be enlarged.

Homer’s governing points, from which to measure arcs of the horizon were, as is evident, the sunrise and the sunset. This is clearly shown by his expressions, such as πρὸς ἠῶ τ’ ἠέλιόν τε, for the east, and then in opposition to this, ποτὶ ζόφον ἠερόεντα547 for the west. Again, when Ulysses urges upon his companions that he has lost all means of forming a judgment of their position, his mode of expression is this, that he does not know where is dusk or where is dawn; where the joy-giving sun rises, or where he sinks548. We must therefore dismiss from our minds the four cardinal points to which we are accustomed. They were not cardinal points for Homer. We must also remember not only (1) that Homer had only two549, but also (2) that his two did not correspond with any of our four, and (3) that from the variation of sunrise and sunset with the seasons of the year a certain amount of vagueness was of necessity introduced into his conceptions of the point of origin for each of the different winds.

We should not, however, exaggerate this vagueness. It had its cause in the variations of the ecliptic, and, like its cause, it was limited. I suppose, however, that the eye guesses rudely at the deviations of the ecliptic, and that we must take N.W. and S.E. for the two cardinal points of Homer.

Homer’s west then ranged to the north of west, and Homer’s east to the south of east. But although this must be borne in mind when we translate his winds into our language, yet of course the winds themselves were arranged, not technically so as each to cover a certain arc on the horizon, but with reference to the directions in which they were found by experience commonly to blow. And in associating each wind with a particular point of the horizon, we must bear in mind that such a point is to be regarded as its centre, and that the same name would be given to a wind within a number of points on either side of it.

As to the respective prevalence of the different winds, the criterion is certainly a rude one, still it is a criterion, which is provided for us by the comparative frequency of the occasions on which they are mentioned. Eurus is mentioned in the poems seven times, Notus fifteen; Boreas twenty-seven, subject to a small deduction for cases where he is simply a person; and Zephyr twenty-six. The latter pair are the leading Winds of the poem: not necessarily that they indicated the prevailing currents of air, but that they represented such currents of air as usually prevailed with force sufficient to make them good poetical agents.

We may also learn, from the epithets given to the winds, the impressions which they respectively made upon the mind of Homer.

Eurus never has a character attached to it. Notus seldom has any epithet; but still it is mentioned, by the comrade of Ulysses in Od. xii. 289, as one of the most formidable winds. This may probably have been on account of its direction relatively to the place of the speaker; because from that point it blew right upon Scylla550. Again, as Zephyr and Notus are nowhere else associated by the Poet, the presumption arises on that ground also that here Notus is put in for a special and local reason. It is called ἀργέστης, and is so essentially allied with the idea of moisture, that νότιος stands simply for wet (νότιος ἱδρὼς, Il. xi. 810).

The characteristic epithets of Boreas are μέγας, ὀπώρινος, and αἰθρηγένης. The first of these indicates that he blew hard: and we know the same thing from the facts, that Achilles desired him to contribute towards rapidly consuming the pyre of Patroclus, and that he is often used for a storm551.

But, of all the winds, the Zephyr evidently was the most prominent in the view of Homer. It is μέγας (Od. xiv. 458), λαβρὸς ἐπαιγίζων (Il. ii. 148), κελαδεινὸς (Il. xxiii. 208), δυσαὴς (Il. xxiii. 200, and Od. xii. 289), κεκληγὼς (Od. xii. 408); and it alone of the winds roars, ζεφύροιο ἰώη (Il. iv. 276). In Od. xii. 289, it is mentioned with Notus: they are the winds most apt to destroy ships even despite or without the gods. For Notus, as I have said, this character seems to be local: but the Zephyr is here called δυσαὴς, and the sense of the passage is in accordance with his general reputation. He, with Boreas, is invoked for the pyre of Patroclus: and these two are the only winds which are ever employed singly to make foul weather. Homer’s other modes of creating a tempest by the agency of the winds are (1) to make a combination of all or several of them, (2) to cover the matter in a generality by speaking of the ὀλοοὶ ἄνεμοι without distinction.

There is, however, in Homer a faint trace of the milder character, which was afterwards more fully recognised in Zephyr, when he had moved down from the north, and become a simple west wind. In the description of the Elysian plain, we find that it is never vexed with tempest or with rain, but that the happy spirits dwelling there are incessantly refreshed with the Zephyrs which spring from Ocean552. But even here the breezes are λιγυπνείοντες: and this word means what is called blowing fresh. And the conception of the wind here is rather as a sea-wind, and therefore not a cold one, than as being soft and gentle.

Of these four Winds, Homer has made, on various occasions, two couples. He repeatedly associates Boreas and Zephyr in the same work553:

ὡς δ’ ἄνεμοι δύο πόντον ὀρίνετον ἰχθυόεντα,Βορέης καὶ Ζέφυρος, τώτε Θρῄκηθεν ἄητον.

And again, for the purposes of Achilles, the two come together over the sea, and quickly fall to, that the pyre may be consumed; even as the prayer of the hero had been addressed to them in common554.

In the same way, Eurus and Notus are associated together as exciting the Icarian Sea. This passage is curiously illustrative of Homer’s distinctions between the winds. He has two successive similes, both describing the agitation of the same Assembly555. In the first it is compared to the Icarian Sea lashed by Eurus, and by Notus charging from the clouds. In the second, to a corn-field, on which Zephyr powerfully sweeps down556.

From a just consideration of these passages, it becomes clear that the four winds of Homer were not at equidistant points of the compass, but that each two of them were capable of association, while neither member of one pair is ever described, except in a single passage, which I will presently notice, as cooperating with one of the other. Of course I do not refer to those cases, where the Poet raises all the four winds at once, simply to create a hurricane; no bad conjecture, I will add, for those times, in anticipation of the modern discovery that hurricanes are eddies, and that it is their circular motion which makes them seem to blow almost simultaneously in all directions557.

Let us now inquire what can be done towards ascertaining more particularly the leading points of these winds, of which we have surveyed the general descriptions.

Points of origin for Zephyr and Boreas.

I begin with the more prevailing pair, Zephyr and Boreas.

There can, I think, be no hesitation in deriving Ζέφυρος from ζόφος. It may be well to remind the reader that ζόφος is the same word in substance with κνέφας and νέφος558.

Thus the north-west is his cradle. But he is so closely associated with Thrace and with Boreas, the former being his residence, and the latter559 his companion, that though he may mean any wind from west up to north, we must consider him as usually leaning from the north-west towards the north, while he properly belongs to the north-west rather than any other given point of the compass.

The position of Boreas is the best defined of all the winds of Homer. He cannot come from any point to the west of due north: for all that space is appropriated to Zephyr. He is equally well defined on the other side. For he blows from Thrace, both generally, as in Il. ix. 5, and particularly on the Plain of Troy560. I hold to be of no authority, as fixing the direction of this wind, the Boreas which carries the pseudo-Ulysses from Crete to Egypt561: for there Homer is already beyond the Inner World, and he only knows the position of Egypt from Phœnician report. But we have other trustworthy indications from within the sphere of Greek nautical knowledge, in his carrying Hercules from Ilium to Cos562, in his preventing a voyage from Crete to Ilium563, and in the fate of Ulysses, who, in rounding Malea, is carried off by Boreas to the westward of Cythera564. All these operations can be performed only by a wind blowing from the quarter between east and north-east.

Putting together these indications, I think we must conclude that the Boreas of Homer is a wind to the east of north. But it seems plain that he does not embrace nearly the whole quadrant from north to east. For, like and even more than Zephyr on the other side of the pole, he has a leaning towards the polar side, and, in the absence of more particular marks, Homer should be taken to mean by him a N.N.E. wind, that is, a wind ranging principally or wholly from N. to N.E.