Page:The Odyssey (Butler).djvu/238

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204
PEEHISTORIC SYRACUSE.
[ODYSSEY

look in another direction.[1] It is not very thickly peopled, but the soil is good, with much pasture fit for cattle and sheep, and it abounds with wine and wheat. Dearth never comes there, nor are the people plagued by any sickness, but when they grow old Apollo comes with Diana and kills them with his painless shafts. It contains two communities, and the whole country is divided between these two.[2] My father Ctesius son of Ormenus, a man comparable to the gods, reigned over both.

415"Now to this place there came some cunning traders from Phœnicia (for the Phœnicians are great mariners) in a ship which they had freighted with gewgaws of all kinds. There happened to be a Phœnician woman in my father's house, very tall and comely, and an excellent servant; these scoundrels got hold of her one day when she was washing near their ship, seduced her, and cajoled her in ways that no woman can resist,


  1. Literally "where are the turnings of the sun." Assuming, as we may safely do, that the Syra and Ortygia of the Odyssey refer to Syracuse, it is the fact that not far to the South of these places the land turns sharply round, so that mariners following the coast would find the sun upon the other side of their ship to that on which they had had it hitherto.

    Mr. A. S. Griffith has kindly called my attention to Herod iv. 42, where, speaking of the circumnavigation of Africa by Phœnician mariners under Necos, he writes:

    On their return they declared—I for my part do not believe them, but perhaps others may—that in sailing round Libya [i.e. Africa] they had the sun upon their right hand. In this way was the extent of Libya first discovered.

    I take it that Eumæus was made to have come from Syracuse because the writer thought she rather ought to have made something happen at Syracuse during her account of the voyages of Ulysses. She could not, however, break his long drift from Charybdis to the island of Pantellaria; she therefore resolved to make it up to Syracuse in another way.

  2. Modern excavations establish the existence of two and only two pre-Dorian communities at Syracuse; they were, so Dr. Orsi informed me, at Plemmirio and Cozzo Pantano. See "Authoross of the Odyssey," pp. 211—213.