Boston University - HUB Yearbook (Boston, MA)

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28 BOSTON UNIVERSITY YEAR BOOK. Hayman, according to whom the poet did not intend that we should have any idea Whatever as to the real location, and 'hence deliberately and purposely locked up his mys- tery in a manner intended to be effectual. The passage in which he presents this view is curious enough to quote: Homer does not say the 'wind and water ' as elsewhere, but the 'gods,' brought him Cn-6AaaavD thitherg i.e., the whole course is regarded as due to their interposition. By this contrivance the poet seems to intimate that no prdinary reckoning of distance or rate is applicable. He thus breaks away from the group of eastern localities which lie in connection with Aiaie,-viz., the Sirens, Thrinacie, and Scylla,-and lands us in a new region. The name, if meaning, as Mr. Paley on Eschylos CEumen. 989D thinks, a dark gulf or chasm, suits well the idea. suggested by that of Calypso, 'the Concealerg' similarly Hesiod CTheogony, 803D applies it to the water of Styx. . . . Thus, by the very names Ogygia and Calypso, the poet may mean to hint that their whereabouts is not to be retraced, and that this part of the hero's course is not to be squared with previous notes of time or place. The same idea suits the 6fL4Jl1.lx.O9 dlamifrfrvle, i.e., the centre of the sea where it rose high, as land rises highest in some point far inland, and thus of unknown remoteness. So, from Ogygia reaching Scheric in twenty days Cvi. 170, vii. 268- 297j, he is from Scheric brought back into known regions by a supernatural machinery,-the magic galleys Cviii. 558-563D which knew not human laws, and therefore baffle calculation. Thus the poet locks up his mysteryg and all attempts to open it are idle in themselves, and are a violation of his idea. 1 That there is no need for such a hewing-asunder of the Gordian knot, the briefest glance at the true I-Iomeric earth sufiices to show. Nobody can fail to find the 6,1.4w.Mq of a hemispherical shield, and nobody can have 1 IIayman's Odyssey, vol. i., Appendix D, p. xlvii.

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HOMEIPS ABODE OF' THE LIVING. 27 Mr. Gladstone apologetically remarks, The poet's descriptions are very vague, especially as to the island of Calypso. The fact seems to be that he was misled, not only by falsehood, but also by truth. When informants, Speaking of the same region, described it as one of all-but perpetual day, and also as one of night all-but perpetual, although both of these statements were true, he had not the key to their truth, and thus could only seek refuge in vagueness from contradiction. 1 Nearly two thousand years ago, the best geographers knew as little as now what to make of Hon1er's language. Here is Pliny's attempt to wrestle with it: ff The island of Ogygia, so called by Homer, is the habitable land an that whole hemisphere which the ancients believed to be surrounded on all sides by the Ocean, for which reason it is called Navel Island, that is, the middle of the Ocean. There he places Calypso, the daughter of Atlas, who knows the foundations of the Ocean, and supports upon immense pillars the weight of Heaven and Earth. This is Nature herseUQ such as she appears in that hemisphere, and Homer gives her the name of a woman then very well known, because there are many things in nature which she keeps concealed 5 the word Kalufvrmv signifying to conceal. 2 Perhaps the latest and most convenient method of dis- posing of the whole question is that adopted by Henry 1 Juventus Mundi, p. 480. 2 Compare the following: It is hardly necessary to observe that the Homeric geography in regard to all these distant lands must he considered as altogether fabulous. We are wholly at a loss to account for the locali- ties assigned by the Greeks in later days to the scenes of the Odyssey: it is certain that nothing can less accord with the data Csuch as they areb supplied by Homer than the identifications they adopted. Edward H. Bunbury, in Sinith's Dictionary Qf Greek and Roman Geography, art. 0g,vgia Many years ago, after a personal inspection of Ithaca and Corcyra., Lencadia and Strongyle, Seylla and Charylnlis, Taphros and the Hellespont, mythical Scheric and the land of the Lotophagoi, the present writer reached the conclusion that the shores and islands of the Mediterra- nean afford no key to these immortal Homeric voyages, and that the secret of many of the traditional identliications reported by scholiasts and gcographers is substantially the one suggested in motto third to the present paper.

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HOIllER'S ABODE OF THE LIVING. 29 any greater difficulty in finding the aaqmadg of that ter- restrial hemisphere which Homer makes his Abode of Living Men. It can be nothing else than the Pole. And as the sea was supposed to surround it Qas it doesj, and as the known countries around the Mediterranean were conceived of as little more than large islands in a sea which covered the 'greater part of the northern hemi- sphere Csee Straboj, it was the most natural thing in the world that the polar island should be called the 6,,tq5qJt5g Heade-0-179, ff the navel of the sea. 1 As if to make it im- possible to misunderstand his language, the poet calls the earth-picturing shield of Achilles not flat, but fiinvxaos, well-orbedg and by placing the Ocean-stream around its rim makes it, as on the earth of ancient East-Aryan mythology, everywhere equidistant from its 6,a4mA6g or Pole. In its application to the Pole of the heavens, the same metaphorical term has often been employed among other peoplesg2 and if, as Dr. Hayman .thinks, divine agency seems to supersede natural in its vicinity, it is 1 The term forcibly recalls the oft-recurring, not yet fully understood Avestan expression, apdm napzit, the Navel of the VVaters. Without claiming an entire correspondence in its meaning, we may yet note with interest, that, in the Middle Ages, the Parsees certainly associated this Navel of the Waters with their mythical, north-polar, world-mountain, and assigned to it somewhat of the divinity and sanctity of the latter: that Neriosengh, ln translating the Yaona into the Sanskrit, understood and ren- dered it in the same wayg and, finally, that such scholars as Spiegel and Bnrnouf have lent to the interpretation the authority of their great names, though the former, in his commentary, is inclined to change his opinion. See BLIEIECIUS Avesta, pt. il. pp. 30, 133,137,141g pt. iii. pp. 46, 91, 130, 145, 148.149, 152, etc. Wnsnisonivmnn, Zoroastrische Studicn, Yasht v. p. 177. Hovrznacqua, L' Avesta Zoroastre et le Mazdefisme, Paris, 1880, pp. 252-254. 2 Extremely interesting is the Vedic use of the terms navel of the heavens, navel of the world, and navel of the earth. See Rig Veda, i. 105, 110, l. 164, 1. 185, x. 90, 14, ct passim. Even Fontana, who finds the Vedic cosmology embryonai1'c, is impressed by the scientific attainments disclosed in one of these umbilical hymns. Qlrulc Vcfdiqile, Paris, 1881, p. 200.1 The name of the celestial Pole with the ancient Finns was tctivahan napanan, navel of the heavens. fCAs1JnizN, Finnische Mytholoyie, St. Petersburg, 1853, p. 320 Comp. GMMM, Deutsche Mylhologic, pp. 766, 1225, See chapters on The Eden Zenith, and The Navel of the Earth, in W. F. WAnanN's Paradise Found .' the Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole, Boston, 1885. ,