Greek Texts & Translations

and that the daughter of Atlas ^note dwells there. And the following concerning the Phaeacians, Remote amid the billowy deep, we hold
Our dwelling, utmost of all human kind,
And free from mixture with a foreign race. ^note
Odyssey vi. 204.

These passages clearly refer to the Atlantic Ocean, ^note but though so plainly expressed, Polybius slily manages to overlook them. Here he is altogether wrong, though quite correct about the wandering of Ulysses having taken place round Sicily and Italy, a fact which Homer establishes himself. Otherwise, what poet or writer could have persuaded the Neapolitans to assert that they possessed the tomb of Parthe- nope ^note the Siren, or the inhabitants of Cumae, Dicaearchia, ^note and Vesuvius [to bear their testimony] to Pyriphlegethon, the Marsh of Acherusia, ^note to the oracle of the dead which was near Aornus, ^note and to Baius and Misenus, ^note the companions of Ulysses. The same is the case with the Sirenussae, and the Strait of Messina, and Scylla, and Charybdis, and Aeolus, all which things should neither be examined into too rigorously, nor yet [despised] as groundless and without foundation, alike remote from truth and historic value. 19

Eratosthenes seems to have had something like this view of the case himself, when he says, Any one would believe that the poet intended the western regions as the scene of Ulysses' wanderings, but that he has departed from fact, sometimes through want of perfect information, at other times because he wished to give to scenes a more terrific and marvellous appearance than they actually possessed. So far this is true, but his idea of the object which the poet had in