Note 290 — Chapter I

Mr. Gladstone (Homer and the Homeric age, vol. iii.) transposes these Homeric localities to the east, and a few German writers agree with him. President Warren (True key to ancient cosmologies, etc., Boston, 1882) will have it that Ogygia is neither more nor less than the north pole. Neither of these views is likely to displace the one now orthodox. Mr. Gladstone is so much troubled by Odysseus’s course on leaving Ogygia that he cannot hide a suspicion of corruption in the text. President Warren should remember that Ogygia apparently enjoyed the common succession of day and night. In Homeric thought the western sea extended northward and eastward until it joined the Euxine. Ogygia, located northwest of Greece, would be the centre, omphalos, of the sea, as Delphi was later called the centre of the land-masses of the world.