(uncaptioned)
ON THE TRACK OF
ULYSSES
TOGETHER WITH
AN EXCURSION IN QUEST OF THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS
TWO STUDIES IN ARCHOLOGY, MADE DURING A CRUISE AMONG THE GREEK ISLANDS
BY
W. J. STILLMAN
(uncaptioned)
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1888
Copyright, 1887,
By W. J. STILLMAN.
All rights reserved.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge:
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
To
WENDELL PHILLIPS GARRISON.
In times when the feverish ambition of our people so generally climbs to distinction by ways offensive to the true intellectual and moral life, and when we find the old standards of human dignity so often forgotten; it renews ones faith in the future of humanity to meet a man whom neither the Olympian dust nor that of California has been able to deflect from that line of perfect rectitude of life which, if existence is to be anything but an indecent scramble, we must recognize as entitling the man who holds it, to the highest respect of his fellow-men. When besides this claim to our respect he has been able to maintain undimmed the lustre of a name such as you bear, the distinction is still brighter. If therefore my insignificant tribute were only as the dust which, catching the sunshine, males it visible, let me offer this dedication in recognition of the true standard of nobility as I know it in your fathers son.
W. J. STILLMAN.
PREFACE.
The series of papers herewith committed to the more or less permanent condition of book form were originally (less some development of their arguments) printed in the Century magazine, being the results of an exploring visit to Greek lands taken as a commission for that periodical. I have sought in them to solve, in a popular form, certain problems in archology which seemed to me to have that romantic interest which is necessary to general human interest; and while necessarily, in such a study, dealing much with conjecture, I have not ventured to assume anything which I am not satisfied is true. The problem of the so-called Venus of Melos is one of those which archology has fretted over for two generations, and I cannot pretend to have offered a solution which will command assent from the severely scientific archologist; but I have an interior conviction, stronger than any authority of ancient tradition to my own mind, that that solution is the true one. I do not wish it to be judged as a demonstration, but as an induction in which a kind of artistic instinct, not communicable or equally valuable to all people, has had the greatest part; and, for the rest, I am satisfied to let it be taken by the rule of highest probability, by which we solve to our satisfaction, more or less complete, problems of the gravest importancea rule, indeed, which is for many such the only standard of truth. In archology, as in some other inexact sciences, opinion has with most people greater weight than it always merits, but it should have weight in proportion to the knowledge its originator may have of his subject. As to this I have done all that any man can to penetrate to the material which exists for forming an opinion, and I rest in the sincere conviction, sustained through a study of many years, that the so-called Venus of Melos is really the Nik Apteros of the restored temple dedicated to that goddess.
I must acknowledge the courtesy of the proprietors of the Century magazine in according me the use of the admirable illustrations accompanying my text, which were put on the blocks by Harry Fenn from my own sketches or photographs.
W. J. STILLMAN.
New York , September, 1887.
ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES.
CHAPTER I.
THE ROUTE OF ULYSSES.
What remains for exploration to find on the surface of our little earth? The north and south poles, some outlying bits of Central Africa, some still smaller remnants of Central Asia,all defended so completely by the elements, barbarism, disease, starvation, by nature and inhumanity, that the traveler of modest means and moderate constitution is as effectually debarred from their discovery as if they were the moon.
What then? I said to myself, searching for adventure. Let us begin the tread-mill round again and rediscover. I took up the earliest book of travel which remains to us, and set to burnish up again the golden thread of the journey of the most illustrious of travelers, as told in the Odyssey, the book of the wanderings of Odysseus, whom we unaccountably call Ulysses, which we may consider not only the first history of travel, but the first geography, as it is doubtless a compendium of the knowledge of the earths surface at the day when it was composed, as the Iliad was the census of the known mankind of that epoch. Spread on this small loom, the fabric of the story, of the most subtle design,art of the oldest and noblest,is made up with warp of the will of the great gods, crossed by the woof of the futile struggles of the lesser, the demi-gods, the heroes, and tells the miserable labors of the most illustrious of wanderers, the type for all time of craft, duplicity, and daring, as well as of faith and patient endurance.
ITHACA AND ADJOINING ISLANDS.
But as Homers humanity mixes by fine degrees with his divinity, so his terra cognita melts away into fairy-land, and we must look for a trace written on water before landing on identifiable shores. The story opens finding Ulysses the prisoner of Love and Calypso, in Ogygia, a fairy island of which the Greek of Homeric days had heard, perhaps, from some storm-driven mariner, or which may be a bit of brain-land. The details of the story make it very difficult even to conjecture where Ogygia was, if it was. where time touches eternity, and the shades of the dead come to visit the unterrified living; and here Tiresias, the dead soothsayer, tells the future wanderings of the Ithacan chief. Again, returning to a, he is redirected toward home through the strait where Scylla and Charybdis menace his existence. This we recognize by later tradition as the Straits of Messina, but the fabulous so dominates the slight element of geography in it, that it is clear that Homer never passed that way, and gained his knowledge only from far remote report; while his second passageafter the sacrilege committed in the Island of the Sunthrough the straits, is puzzling, and the recital makes it clear that till Phacia was reached the poet was not in terra cognita.
The indications are hardly reconcilable with the map. Leaving Circe to go home, he passes the straits, and stopping at the Island of the Sun, his comrades commit a sacrilege which leads to their destruction and his being driven back to Ogygia through the straits, a solitary survivor. But on his departure for Phacia direct, he does not pass again through the straits, evidently returning to the south of Sicily.
Released by Calypso, he goes on a raft with the sailing direction to keep the Great Bear, which is also called the Wain, on his left,that is, he sails eastward, and for seventeen days splits the waves, and sees on the eighteenth the wooded mountain of the island of the Phacians, the Scheria of the ancients. The continuity of tradition and the consistency of the narrative leave me no doubt that this was our Corfu, the uttermost of the lands positively known to the geography of that day. The actuality of Scheria has been disputed by certain German critics, who will have it that all the local allusions of the Odyssey are imaginary. But in the neid, when neas is going to Butrintum, which is now Butrinto, opposite Corfu on the Albanian coast, he says that no land was in sight except Scheria. This makes it certain that in Virgils time there was no question on the point.
