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view while composing, is false; real advantage, not trifling, being his aim. We may justly reprehend his assertion on this point, as also where he says, that Homer places the scene of his marvels in distant lands that he may lie the more easily. Remote localities have not furnished him with near so many wonderful narrations as Greece, and the countries thereto adjacent; witness the labours of Hercules, and Theseus, the fables concerning Crete, Sicily, and the other islands; besides those connected with Cithaerum, Helicon, note Parnassus, note Pelion, note and the whole of Attica and the Peloponnesus. Let us not therefore tax the poets with ignorance on account of the myths which they employ, and since, so far from myth being the staple, they for the most part avail themselves of actual occurrences, (and Homer does this in a remarkable degree,) the inquirer who will seek how far these ancient writers have wandered into fiction, ought not to scrutinize to what extent the fiction was carried, but rather what is the truth concerning those places and persons to which the fictions have been applied; for instance, whether the wanderings of Ulysses did actually occur, and where. 20
On the whole, however, it is not proper to place the works of Homer in the common catalogue of other poets, without challenging for him a superiority both in respect of his other [excellences] and also for the geography on which our attention is now engaged.
If any one were to do no more than merely read through
the Triptolemus of Sophocles, or the prologue to the Bacchae
of Euripides, and then compare them with the care taken by
Homer in his geographical descriptions, he would at once
perceive both the difference and superiority of the latter, for
wherever there is necessity for arrangement in the localities
he has immortalized, he is careful to preserve it as well in
regard to Greece, as to foreign countries.
They
On the Olympian summit thought to fix
Huge Ossa, and on Ossa's towering head
Pelion with all his forests. note
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Strabo, Geography (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose] [word count] [lemma count] [Str.].