Note 2 — Chapter I

The Lotophagitis has been recently plausibly identified with Jerba, on the coast of Tunis, the word rotos being still used there, evidently a survival of some primitive language, for the date; and the transliteration of rotos to lotos being according to Grimm’s law, see Reinach’s letter to the Nation (Mar. 13, 1884) on Jerba. It is easy to understand that the Greek, coming from a country where the conditions of life were hard and the fare of Homeric simplicity, should find the conditions of North African existence tempting beyond resistance, and the delicious date, (constituting the principal and often exclusive food of the people, quite sufficient, in fact, for all needs,) a temptation to abandon the toils and dangers of a return home. The inevitable poetical exaggeration adds the magic power.