260 THE SICANS XXXV 1896 of the Iliad and Odyssey at his own risk. He says he has felt Aet. 61 the pulse of the booksellers and they do not think the public would buy them; so, having got them ready for press, I have tied them up in a parcel and am just beginning a popular book about the Iliad and the Odyssey generally. Murray thinks that if I do this I shall have a better chance with my translations. To-day Alfred and I have been for a walk from Harrow to Wembley and Kingsbury. We always go out on a Thursday but it was very cold and foggy with a thick white frost hanging from the trees and all over the grass. The lies I have to tell now to get even three or four new-laid eggs are something awful and then I have to pay twopence apiece for them. I shall be so glad when the shortest day is over. You will have seen all about the [Brighton] chain pier's tumbling down. Was it not spiteful of it to immediately go and attack the other pier and break it in two with the wreckage which it sent against it? And then they say that the inorganic world has no intelligence! You will also see in the papers all about the earthquake. We felt nothing of it in London, though it seems it was felt by some few. It seems to have been worst in the Midland counties. Butler to S. H. Burbury, F.R.S. Dec. 20th, 1896-I quite admit the force of your argument that a writer will not make his work flatly contradict the experience of his hearers, but I do not think the introduction of Cyclopes and Laestrygonians into Sicily does this. According to my view, which I base entirely on Thuc. vi. 2 as the most reliable source I can get, there were, say about B.C. 1000, several races on the Lilybaean promontory, or rather on Mt. Eryx and its neighbourhood. There were the Sicans, who had been there from time immemorial and who seem to have been at one time the main possessors of the island. Before them, according to the same writer, the Cyclopes and the Laestrygonians were a still earlier race; but Thucydides says he can tell nothing about them and regards the Sicans, who he tells us came originally from Spain, as the earliest historic inhabitants. Now, according to me, the Cyclopes and Laestrygonians are none other than the Sicans themselves to whom the writer of the Odyssey gave these names; and the reason why Thuc. could say nothing about them is because they never existed except in a work of fiction. I imagine the writer of the Odyssey to have belonged to the XXXV GIANTS 261 Asiatic colonists who migrated to this part of Sicily from the 1896 Troad and were joined by certain Phocaeans (not Phocians) see Aet. 61 pp. 5, 6 of my second Italian pamphlet. The writer of the Odyssey belonged to this Phocaean body, who, no doubt, brought the Iliad with them. She hates her own countrymen, the episode of Proteus being, I do not doubt, introduced solely to insult them: Teîpe yàp aivos φωκάων 2 ἁλιοτρεφέων ὀλοώτατος ὀδμή. τίς γάρ κ' εἰναλίῳ παρὰ κήτεϊ κοιμηθείη; Od. iv. 441-443. This must be connected with Od. vi. 275, etc. where Nausicaa describes how her countrymen blamed her for turning up her nose at them and not marrying one of them. This last may be too speculative-cut it out, then, and let me begin again. The writer according to me belonged to this Phocaean body, and she has peopled her own neighbourhood mainly with the ordinary men and women whom we meet with in Scheria and Ithaca; over and above these, however, there were the remnant of the old Sicans who had been routed in the time of Nausicaa's great-grandfather (Od. vii. 56, etc.) and who were called Giants on account of the gigantic stones with which their walls were built-stones which still remain in situ both at Eryx and at Cefalù: see illustration in my second Italian pamphlet. The dislike between the two races, the Asiatic and Sican, was very great. It still exists. The people on the top of Mt. Eryx and the people of Trapani hate one another, hence the poetess introduces them as savage monsters. Pray ask Mr. Powers to give me back my pamphlets unless he really wants them. If he wants them for serious study by all means let him keep them. I am afraid I have not made myself very clear, but will endeavour to be clearer in the book which I am about writing. Butler to S. H. Burbury, F.R.S. Dec. 22, 1896.-If you were not confined to the house with a cold, which I am sorry to learn has not left you, I should hardly 1 The Italian pamphlets referred to in these letters to Burbury are enumerated in the Bibliography printed at the beginning of this Memoir. The substance of them was incorporated in The Authoress of the Odyssey. Under pwxdwv, which is the word in the text, Butler has written in square brackets pwxnwv. Cf. The Authoress, pp. 219-220. 262 ACTUAL SICILY XXXV 1896 venture to trouble you further with my speculations; as it is, Aet. 61 however, I will chance one more letter before I start for my Xmas outing to-morrow. You say, "I do not see that any of the nautical prodigies necessarily took place in or near Sicily except the Cattle of the Sun." I will not argue this point, but should wish to place on record that I differ from you in toto. If I did not find myself inexorably driven to conclude: 1. that the Odyssey deals invariably with actual places; and 2. that those places are on the coast, or on islands adjacent to the coast of Sicily, I should never have ventured to say what I have said. Having turned the question over and over in my mind and attempted many a different answer to it, I have found myself easily beaten off from all others, while the answer that I have settled down to gives me satisfaction-rightly or wrongly and quiets me. I say this in spite of the profound respect I have alike for your scholarship and acumen, but I should not venture to do so if I had not focussed my attention on the Odyssey for the last six years in a way that I question whether anyone else has had the leisure or inclination to do. You say that "all the story from Circe's island onwards" seems to you to be " a yarn spun by some old salt to the writer of the Odyssey." I agree with you so far as this, that the writer got her information about everything beyond the island of Aeolus (which in clear weather is visible from Mt. Eryx) to the Cattle of the Sun from Trapanese sailors; and as regards the Wandering Rocks her information is obviously missing. Twice does she scuttle over them in a way that makes it clear that she does not know where to place them. Pantellaria, which I make the island of Calypso-guided thereto by the sailing instructions given by Calypso to Ulysses-is also sometimes, though rarely, visible from Mt. Eryx. But I differ from you inasmuch as I am convinced that the writer went to the sailors for definite information about certain points which she meant to introduce, instead of merely taking sailors' stories told to her at random. But I will not argue this point either. That there was an element of burlesque about the inception of the poem I do not doubt, and have insisted on it somewhat fully in my [pamphlet on the] Trapanese Origin (preface p. 18) but this had dropped off by the end of Bk. viii. and in the voyages of Ulysses I think she is only piling it on. I am sure you will not press #λwτŷ (Od. x. 3) to be a moveable island-any more than you would the oñow of xv. 299. Пλwry only means an island that seems to float upon the waters. It does not move or appear to do so during the month Ulysses stayed there—nor yet during his voyage to Ithaca and back. XXXV IDENTIFICATION 263 And now for your two questions. You ask me how I 1896 explain [x. 86] ἐγγὺς γὰρ νυκτός τε καὶ ἤματός εἰσι κέλευθοι (Ι Aet. 61 got the accents out of the book)-I translate: "For the ways of the night and of the day are near to one another " and I take the passage to mean simply that the people in that place work much the same by night as they do by day-a piling-it-on way of saying "they are very hard-working people." The avroλai 'Heλíolo [xii. 4] (accents from the book), I take to mean simply this: "We left the dark sunless land of the Cimmerians and the regions of the dead and returned to places where there is dawn and sunrise as in other places." There! Liberavi animam meam. I am just beginning my book in which I deal fully with all these matters and your letters have been of great use to me as showing me the sort of objection that I shall have to meet. All in my mind turns on the question whether both Scheria and Ithaca can be so identified with Trapani as to leave no reasonable doubt that the writer was drawing both places from Trapani and its immediate neighbourhood. If I fail here I fail altogether, but it seems to me that the amount of evidence I can adduce is conclusive. CHAPTER XXXVI 1897-PART I THE AUTHORESS OF THE ODYSSEY 1897 THE "popular book about the Iliad and the Odyssey Act. 61 generally," referred to in Butler's letter to Hans Faesch of 17th December 1896, was Butler's chief occupation now, and appeared as The Authoress of the Odyssey later in the year. He wrote to Hans, 14th January 1897, that he had begun it and also that Queen Elizabeth at Harrow Weald was dead. "I got 9 new-laid eggs to-day without having to tell a single lie. The hens are beginning to lay again. In March 1897, Butler received from Mr. W. E. Heitland of St. John's College, Cambridge, who had been at school at Shrewsbury and remembered Butler's aunt, Mrs. Lloyd at the Whitehall, two or three copies of The Eagle containing a review by him of The Life and Letters of Dr. Samuel Butler. Butler to Mr. W. E. Heitland. 19 March 1897-I received your very kind present and letter last night and thank you very cordially for the review of my book, which I may say quite truly is the most gratifying that any book of mine has yet met with, if for no other reason yet for this, that it convinces me I have done that which it was my most earnest desire to do-i.e. show Dr. Butler in his true colours and attract my readers to him as he assuredly-and his friendsattracted me to himself. Take old Lord Grimthorpe who is not a very easy man to please-he said to me the other day : |