Boston University - HUB Yearbook (Boston, MA)

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I HOMEIPS ABODE OF' THE LIVING. 21 large number of interpreters, however widely these latter may dissent among themselves with respect to other ques- tions. The partisans of the eastern location are accus- tomed to appeal to the explicit declaration of the poet that at Aiaie are the abodes and dance-grounds of Aurora, there the risings of the Sun C Odyssey, xii. 3, 45: the other company declare that every indication given as to the direction of the voyagers on their way thither ne- cessitates the supposition that the general course was west, or north-west or south-west from Greece! Both classes are rightg but instead of searching out in what way they can both be right, a great number of interpreters have taken the easier method of accusing the poet of arbi- trariness, or of self-contradiction. Thus one of them says, We cannot help fancying that our poet, in the plenitude of his authority, seized upon the Argonautic cycle, and tranferred Aietes and the Aiaian isle to the West from their proper place in the Eastg and he may have retained the description of that isle, which accords perfectly with its eastern position, but which requires a sleight of in- genuity like that just noticed, to make it suit the West. Mr. Bunbury observes, Kirks was the daughter of the Sung and hence her island would naturally be asso- ciated, in the mind of the poet, with bright and sunny images, which he might well introduce in a passing notice without considering how far they were geographically appropriate. 3 912 1 To break the force of the argument from Od. xii. 3, 4, Mr. Merivale, like some of his predecessors, says, The land of sunrise is the land over which the sun first appears to him who is making his backward journey from the West, the land of sunset and of death, across the Ocean-stream to the inhabited world, as the extreme west of Cornwall is the land of sunrise to the Scilly Islanders. Unfortunately for this ingenious ex- planation, its author, in interpreting the account of the land of the Laas- trygonians, Od. x. Sl, seq., is driven by his flat-earth assumption to a doctrine of sunrise, according to which the Scilly Islands become the sunrise land to the inhabitants of West Cornwall. Three Theories of the NVanmler- ings of Ulysses, in The F'o1'mightly, London, 1871, pp. 758, 759. 2 KEIGH'ELEY, Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy. 41511 611-, L0nll0l1v 1877, p 238, 0 Ilislory of Ancient Geography, vol. i. p 70.

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20 BOSTON UNIVERSITY YEAR BOOK. in Europe. In the present paper it is proposed to show what light and beauty the new and true conception of Homer's Earth immediately brings into the chaos of sur- mises and guess-work which envelopes and for centuries has enveloped the problem of the Odyssean voyagings. To enumerate all the conflicting opinions of the Homeric interpreters touching the direction of these voyages, and the location of the different lands visited, would require a special treatise. Even the ancient Greek writers were themselves far from agreed in respect to these questions, while modern scholars have carried their ingenious conjec- tures to what would seem to be the farthest bound of possibility. A fair idea of the' indescribable confusion which still reigns in this field of- Homeric teaching may be formed from the account given in Ukert'sA Geographic der Griechen und Romer, part first, subdivision second, pp. 310-319, to which the interested reader is referred? No one can proceed far in these discussions without dis- covering that every thing turns upon two pointsg to wit, the location of Aiaie, and the location of Ogygia. Could these once be fixed, the Homeric geographers and carto- graphers would have little trouble with the remaining details. Where, then, is Aiaie? Mr. Gladstone, in the map pre- fixed to his Juventus Mundi, places it in the farthest known, if not indeed in the unknown, East? Mr. Bun- bury on the contrary, in the somewhat later sketch-chart inserted in his History of Ancie11t Geography, locates it in the farthest West!-i Each represents the opinion of a 1 In view of these apparently insurmountable diflicultles, many have been willing to lend an ear to those all-explaining champions of the Sun- myth, who with Dr. George Karl Cornelius Gerlund assure us: Die gauze Fable des heimkehrenden Odysseus beruht auf eine Personiflcation der Sonne. Altyriechische Mdrehen in der Odyssee, Magdeburg, 1869, p. 50. Compare Cox, Mythology of the Aryan Nations, and Comparative Mythology and Folklore. 2 London and Boston, 1868, p. 490. 3 E. H. BUNBURY, History of Ancient Geography among the Greeks and Romans, London, 1879. , ,

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22 BOSTON UNIVERSITY YEAR BOOK. Heimreich formulates this charge of absent-mindedness or forgetfulness still more definitely as follows: ff All the hanging-back and hand-wringing of the interpreters avail nothing. The abodes and dancing-places of the early- born Aurora, and the risings of the Sun, are in the Eastg and to transport them to an island in the far West, is worse than absurd. I can explain it only as a thought- lessness on the part of the poet, who had in memory similar verses taken from the poem of the Argonauts, of which he made useg and for the moment he forgot, that, in consequence of his fiction that Odysseus also was come to Aiaie, the adoption into his poem of this perhaps formelhaften Wbndung had become impracticablef' 1 One of our latest mythographers first places the elusive islet in the East, as most in accord with Homeric tradi- tionsg but at length triumphantly explains all difficulties by identifying it with the Moon, which, naturally enough, ff is now in the East, and now in the West. 2 How would the wise old poet smile at such semi- accusatory, semi-apologetic criticism! On the actual earth, the East is reached by sailing Westg and if inter- preters had only been willing to concede to the ancient sages a little of their own abounding knowledge of the natural world, they would have spared themselves many a rnortifying mistake. They should have read, in Lanier's ff Psalm of the West, of that H Big, perilous theorem, hard for king and priest, - Pursue the West but long enough, 'tis East. 5 So plain is Homer's language, that some readers still ad- dicted to the traditional view have here and there seen its force, and only by a hair's-breadth missed the true Homeric geography. Thus Mr. Gladstone, in his Juventus Mundi, before his abandonment of the flat-earth theory, 1 HEIMREICH: Die Telcmachie und zlcr jtingcre Nostos, Flensburg,1S71, p. 20. 2 Ronmrr Bnowx, Jun.: The Myth of Kirkb, London, 1893, pp. 24 and 27. 3 Poems ofSi1.lncy Lanier, New York, 1884, p. 123.