Note 39 — CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

B. Homer’s Geography.—There is an extensive literature on the geographic attainments of Homer, but it is for the most part rather sad reading. The later Greeks had a local identification for every place mentioned in the Odyssey; but conservative scholars at present are chary of such, while agreed in confining the scene of the wanderings to the western Mediterranean. Gladstone, in Homer and the Homeric Age, has argued with ingenuity for the transfer of the scene from the West to the East, and has constructed on this basis one of the most extraordinary maps of “the ancient world” known. K. E. von Baer (Wo ist der Schauplatz d. Fahrten d. Odysseus zu finden? 1875), agreeing with Gladstone, “identifies” the Lastrygonian harbor with Balaklava, and discovers the very poplar grove of Persephone. It is a favorite scheme with others to place the wanderings outside the columns of Hercules, among the Atlantic isles,[372] and to include a circumnavigation of Africa. The better opinion seems to me that which leaves the wanderings in the western Mediterranean, which was considered to extend much farther north than it actually does. The maps which represent the voyage within the actual coast lines of the sea, and indicate the vessel passing through the Straits to the ocean, are misleading. There is not enough given in the poem to resolve the problem. The courses are vague, the distances uncertain or conventional,—often neither are given; and the matter is complicated by the introduction of a floating island, and the mysterious voyages from the land of the Phaeacians. It is a pleasant device adopted by Buchholtz and others to assume that where the course is not given, the wind last mentioned must be considered to still hold, and surely no one will grudge the commentators this amelioration of their lot.