Complete works of samuel.., p.410
Complete Works of Samuel Butler, page 410
I will, however, date the Iliadic wall as 1400 B.C. The Trojan war will then be supposed to have taken place from 1360-1350 B.C.; the writing of the “Iliad” will be about 1150; and that of the “Odyssey” about 1050 B.C. This is a tight fit, and I should be glad to throw the Iliadic wall back to the earlier of the two dates between which Dr. Dörpfeld has placed it, but precision is out of the question; 1400 B.C. will be as near the truth as anything that we are likely to get, and will bring the archæological evidence as derivable from the wall of Troy, the internal evidence of the “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” the statement of Thucydides that the last and greatest inroad of the Sicels occurred about 1030 B.C., and our conclusion that the “Odyssey” was written before that date, into line with one another.
The date 1050 B.C. will explain the absence of all allusion in the “Odyssey” to Utica, the land near which, on certain rare days, can be seen from Mt. Eryx. The Phœnicians are known in the “Odyssey,” disliked and distrusted, but they do not seem to be feared as they would surely be if so powerful a maritime nation were already established so near the writer’s own abode. She does not seem to know much about the Phœnicians after all, for in iv. 83 she makes Menelaus say that he had gone to Cyprus, Phoenicia, and the Egyptians, and in the next line she adds that he had also been to the Ethiopians and the Sidonians, as though she was not aware that Sidon was a Phœnician city.
The absence of all allusion to Olympia when Telemachus was on his return from Pylos is most naturally explained by supposing that Olympia was not yet famous. The principal hero at Athens appears to be the earliest known object of the national cult, I mean Erechtheus (vii. 81); the later, though still very early, cult of Theseus is not alluded to. There is no allusion, however vague, to any event known as having happened in Greek history later than 1100 B.C., and though the absence of reference to any particular event may be explained by indifference or forgetfulness, the absence of all reference to any event whatever suggests, I should say strongly, that none of the events to one or other of which reference might be expected had as yet happened.
While, however, placing 1050 B.C. as the latest limit for the “Odyssey” I do not see how we can place it earlier than 1150 without throwing the date of the Iliadic wall farther back than we can venture to do, for we can hardly date it earlier than 1500 B.C., and 350 years is as short an interval as we can well allow between the building of that wall and the writing of the “Odyssey.”
Let us now compare the history of the N.W. corner of Sicily as revealed to us in the “Odyssey” — always assuming that the pedigree of Alcinous and Arēte in Book vii. is in its main facts historic — with the account given by Thucydides concerning the earliest history of the same district.
In the “Odyssey” we have seen the Sicans (whom I think that I have sufficiently identified) as originally in possession of Mt. Eryx under a king whose Odyssean name is Eurymedon. He, it seems, was overthrown, and the power of his people was broken, by enemies whose name is not given, about a hundred years before the writing of the “Odyssey,” as nearly as we can gather from the fact of his having been Nausicaa’s great great grandfather.
The writer of the “Odyssey” wrote in a language mainly Ionian, but containing a considerable Æolian element. It must be inferred, therefore, that her family and audience — that is to say the Phæacians — spoke a dialect in which these characteristics are to be found. The place of all others where such a dialect might be looked for is Phocæa, a little South of the Troad; for Phocæa was an Ionian city entirely surrounded on its land sides by Æolian territory. I see from Professor Jebb’s Introduction to Homer * that Aristarchus when editing the “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” and settling the text to all intents and purposes as we now have it, by comparison of the best copies known, made most frequent use of the civic edition of Marseilles which contained both “Iliad” and “Odyssey.” It will be remembered that Marseilles was a Phocæan colony.
The name Phæacians is not unsuggestive of a thin disguise for Phocæans; lines iv. 441-443, moreover, will gain greatly in point, if we imagine that the seals, or Phocæ, with their disgusting smell, are meant for the writer’s countrymen whom she evidently dislikes, and that the words, “who, indeed, would go to bed with a sea monster if he could help it?” are her rejoinder to the alleged complaint of the young Phæacians that she would marry none of them (vi. 276 &c.). Apart, therefore, from any external evidence, I should suspect the Phæacians to have been Phocæans, who had settled on this part of the island. * From the fact that the Phæacians in the time of the “Odyssey” were evidently dominant on Mt. Eryx as well as at Trapani, I conclude that they must have had, to say the least of it, a considerable share in the overthrow of Eurymedon and of the Sican power in that part of the island. If they had allies with them, these allies seem to have gone on to other sites on which Elymite cities are known to have existed, for we find no reference in the “Odyssey” to any other people as sharing Hypereia and Scheria with the Phæacians.
Though the power of the Sicans at Eryx was broken, and the Phæacians were established at Hypereia, also on the top of Mt. Eryx and less than a mile from the Sican city, the Sicans were still troublesome neighbours; there seems, however, to have been a marriage between some chief man among the Phæacians and Peribœa, youngest daughter of the old king Eurymedon, and this no doubt would lead to some approach to fusion between the two peoples. The offspring of this marriage, Nausithous, is said in the poem to have been by Neptune, from which I infer that the marriage may have been of a more or less irregular kind, but there can be no doubt that Nausithous came of a Phæacian father and would speak the Phæacian dialect, which the Sicans, though in all probability a Greek-speaking race, cannot be supposed to have done. Nausithous seems to have been a capable man; finding the continued raids of semi-outlawed Sicans still harassing, perhaps, also, induced by the fact that the promontory on which Trapani stands was better suited to a race of mariners than the lofty and inhospitable top of Mt. Eryx, he moved his people down to the seaside and founded the city that now bears the name of Trapani — retaining, however, the site of Hypereia as his own property on which his pigs and goats would feed, and to which also his family would resort, as the people of Trapani still do, during the excessive heat of summer.
The reader will have noted that Eumæus, who we must never forget is drawn not from Ithaca but from Mt. Eryx, when watching over his pigs by night thought it necessary to be fully armed (xiv. 526). He seems also from xvi. 9, to have had neighbours, from which we may infer that the old Sican city of Eryx was not yet entirely abandoned; nevertheless, Eumæus would not be there at all unless the fusion between the Sicans and the Phocæans had been fairly complete. The Sicans appear in the “Odyssey” under the names of Cyclopes and Læstrygonians, and the Sicels are not yet come. This is all that we can collect from the “Odyssey.”
We will now see what support the sketch given above will derive from Thucydides (vi. 2). According to him the Læstrygonians and the Cyclopes, mentioned as the earliest inhabitants of Sicily, are mere poetical fictions. This, however, does not preclude their having had their prototype in some real Sicilian people who bore another name; and at any rate, however fictitious they may be, he locates them in Sicily.
He continues that the oldest historic inhabitants of the island were the Sicans, who by their own account had been there from time immemorial. This he denies, for he says they were Iberians, and he says it as though he had satisfied himself after due inquiry, but since he gives no hint as to the date of their arrival, he does not impugn their statement that their settlement in the island dated from a remote time. It is most likely that he is right about the Sicans having come from Spain; and indeed at Tarragona, some fifty or sixty miles North of the mouth of the river Iberus, there are megalithic walls that bear, so far as I can judge from photographs, a very considerable analogy with those of Eryx. In Thucydides’ own times there were still Sicans in the Western part of Sicily.
He then goes on to say that after the fall of Troy, but he does not say how much after, some of the Trojans who had escaped the Greeks migrated to Sicily. They settled in the neighbourhood of the Sicans and were all together called Elymi, their cities being Eryx and Segesta. There were also settled with them — but whether at the same date, or earlier or later, and if so, how much, Thucydides does not say — certain Phocians of the Trojan branch, i.e., Phocæans — Phocæa having been founded by Phocians from the gulf of Corinth under the leadership of the Athenian chiefs Philogenes and Damon (Strab. xiv. 633; Pausan. vii. 3, 10; cf. Herod. I. 146). These Phocæans had been carried first by a tempest to Libya, * and thence to Sicily.
We need not follow him to the arrival of the Sicels, for I have already, I hope, satisfied the reader that the “Odyssey” belongs to a pre-Sicelian age, and I am only dealing with the period which the “Odyssey” and Thucydides cover in common.
I should perhaps put it beyond doubt that Thucydides means Phocæans and not Phocians. In the first place it is difficult to understand how Phocians, who were on the Achæan side (“Il.” II. 518), should amalgamate with Trojans; and in the next Thucydides’ words cannot be made to bear the meaning that is generally put upon them, as though the Phocians in question were on their way back from Troy to Phocis. His words are Φωκέων τινὲς τῶν ἀπὸ Τροίας, and this cannot be construed as though he had said Φωκέων τινὲς τῶν ἀνερχομένων ἐν νόστῳ ἀπὸ Τροίας. If ἀπό is to imply motion from, it should have a verb or participle involving motion before it; without this it is a common way of expressing residence in a place. For example, Ὀρέστης ἤλυθεν…ἀπ᾽ Ἀθηνάων (iii. 307) means Orestes came from Athens, whereas Ὀρέστης ὁ ἀπ᾽ Ἀθηνάων would mean “Orestes the Athenian, or quasi-Athenian,” as Λακεδαιμόνιοι οἱ ἀπὸ Σπάρτης means “the Lacedæmonians who live at Sparta,” Neither of these last two passages can be made to bear the meaning “Orestes, who was on his way from Athens,” or “the Lacedæmonians, who were on their way from Sparta.” The reader who looks out ἀπὸ in Liddell & Scott will find plenty of examples. To Thucydides, Phocæans in Asia Minor and Phocians on the gulf of Corinth would be alike Phocians in virtue of common descent, but to avoid misapprehension he calls the Phocæans “Phocians of the Trojan stock,” by “Trojan” meaning not very far from Troy. It should be noted that the Phocians of the gulf of Corinth are called Φωκῆες, not Φωκέες in “Il.” II. 517, xv. 516, xvii. 307. I see that Dobree (Adversaria in Thucyd.) is suspicious of the reading in the passage of Thucydides which we are now considering. He evidently considers that Φωκέων must mean Phocians from the gulf of Corinth, and so it would, if it were not qualified by the words τῶν ἀπὸ Τροίας which negative the possibility of European Phocians being intended.
Thucydides says nothing about any invasion of Sicily by a people called Elymi. He does not see the Elymi as anything more than the combined Asiatic and Sican peoples, who came to be called Elymi. If he had believed in the Elymi as a distinct batch of immigrants he would have given us a line or two more about them.
It is just possible that the known connection between Phocians and Phocæans may explain why Ulysses’ maternal grandfather should have been made to live on Mt. Parnassus, * which is in Phocis. Ulysses, to the writer of the “Odyssey,” was a naturalised Phæacian, for her native town had become in her eyes both Scheria and Ithaca. It would not be unnatural, therefore, that she should wish to connect his ancestry with Phocis, the ancestral seat of the Phocæans.
Returning to Thucydides, the only point in which he varies the Odyssean version is that he makes other Trojans migrate to Eryx as well as the Phocæans, whereas the writer of the “Odyssey” mentions only the Phæacians without saying anything about their having been of Phocæan descent. She has, however, betrayed herself very sufficiently. Thucydides again does not tell us that the Phocæans re-settled themselves at Drepanum, but a man who is giving a mere outline of events which happened some seven hundred years before he was writing, can hardly be expected to give so small a detail as this. The wonder is that the “Odyssey” should bear him out and confirm his accuracy in so striking a way as it does. We now, therefore, see that instead of there being any cause for surprise at finding an Ionic-Æolian poem written near Mt. Eryx, this is the very neighbourhood in which we might expect to find one.
Finally, let us turn to Virgil. His authority as a historian is worthless, but we cannot suppose that he would make Æneas apparently found Drepanum, if he held the presence of a Greek-speaking people at Drepanùm even before the age of Homer to be so absurd as it appears to our eminent Homeric scholars. I say “apparently found Drepanum,” for it is not quite easy to fix the site of the city founded by Æneas (Æn. v. 755-761), for at the close of Æn. III. Anchises dies at Drepanum, as though this city was already in existence. But whether the city founded by Æneas was actually Drepanum, or another city hard by it, it is clear that Virgil places Greek-speaking people at Drepanum, or close to it, immediately after the fall of Troy. He would hardly do this unless Drepanum was believed in his time to be a city of very great antiquity, and founded by Greek-speaking people. That the Trojan language was Greek will not be disputed.
Chapter 13: Further Evidence in Support of an Early Ionian Settlement at Trapani
FURTHER EVIDENCE IN SUPPORT OF AN EARLY IONIAN SETTLEMENT AT OR CLOSE TO TRAPANI.
I am often asked how I explain the fact that we find no trace in ancient authors of any tradition to the effect that the “Odyssey” was written at Drepanum or that the writer was a woman. This difficulty is laid before me as one that is almost fatal. I confess, however, that I find it small in comparison with that of explaining how both these facts should have failed of being long since rediscovered. Neptune indeed did not overwhelm Scheria under Mt. Eryx, but he, or some not less spiteful god, seems to have buried both it and its great poetess under another mountain which I fear may be found even more irremovable — I mean a huge quasi-geological formation of academic erudition.
The objection is without sufficient foundation in its implied facts; for that the Phæacians were a real people who lived at a place bearing the name of Drepane (which is near enough to Drepanum for all practical purposes), has never been lost sight of at all — except by those who find it convenient to lose sight of it. Thucydides (i. 25) tells us that the inhabitants of Corfu were the descendants of the Phæacians, and the rock into which their ship was turned as it was entering the harbour after having escorted Ulysses to Ithaca is still shown at Corfu — as an island 58 feet high with a monastery on the top of it. But the older name of Corfu was Drepane, and when the Carthaginians had established themselves at the Sicilian Drepanum, it would be an easy matter for the inhabitants of the Corfu Drepane to claim Phæacian descent, and — as they proceeded to do — to call their island Scheria, in spite of its offering no single point of correspondence with the description given in the “Odyssey.”
I grant that no explicit tradition exists to the effect that the “Odyssey” as a whole was written at or in Corfu, but the Phæacian episode is the eye of the poem. I submit, then, that tradition both long has, and still does, by implication connect it with a place of which the earliest known name was to all intents and purposes the same as that of the town where I contend that it was written.
The Athenian writers, Thucydides included, would be biassed in favour of any site which brought Homer, as they ignorantly called the writer of the “Odyssey,” nearer their own doors. The people, moreover, of Eryx and Segesta, and hence also of Drepanum, were held to be barbarians, and are so called by Thucydides himself (vi. 2); in his eyes it would be little less than sacrilege to hesitate between the Corfu Drepane and the Sicilian Drepanum, did any tradition, however vague, support Corfu. But it is not likely that Thucydides was unaware of the Sicilian claim not only to the Phæacian episode, but to the entire poem, for as late as 430 B.C., only a little before the date of his own work, there were still people on or near Mt. Eryx who present every appearance of having claimed it, as I will almost immediately show.
As for losing sight of its having been written by a woman, the people who could lose sight of the impossibility of its having been written by Homer could lose sight of anything. A people who could not only do this, but who could effectually snuff out those who pointed out their error, were not likely to know more about the difference underlying the two poems than the average English layman does about those between the synoptic gospels and that of St. John.
I will now return to my assertion that in the time of Thucydides there seem to have been not a few who knew of, and shared in, the claim of Drepanum to the authorship of the “Odyssey.”
The British Museum possesses a unique example of a small bronze coin which is classed with full confidence among those of Eryx and Segesta. It is of the very finest period of the numismatic art, and is dated by the museum authorities as about 430 B.C.
The reader will see that the obverse bears the legend ΙΑΚΙΝ, and the reverse a representation of the brooch described by Ulysses (“Od.” xix. 225-231). A translation of this passage is given on page 80.
The cross line of the A is not visible in the original, but no doubt is felt at the Museum about its having existed.
There seems, however, to be more doubt whether the legend should be ΙΑΚΙΝ, or PIAKIN — P being the older form of Π. Possibly from a desire to be right in either case, the Museum catalogue gives it as ΙΑΚΙΝ in the illustration, and PΙΑΚΙΝ in the descriptive letterpress. The one reading will do nearly as well as the other for my argument, which only requires that the coin should belong to the Eryx and Segesta group and be dated about 430 B.C. — neither of which points are doubted. I will, however, give the reasons that convince me that ΙΑΚΙΝ is the true reading.
