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THE first place in Greece on which a traveller from the West usually sets foot is Corfu, one of the Ionian Islands, which were given up by Great Britain in 1864 to gratify the patriotic aspirations of the Greeks. The sacrifice was not without its compensations, as it relieved Britain from an annual outlay of £100,000, which had been the cost of administration.

The principal Ionian Islands are five in number, namely, Corfu (Corcyra), Santa Mauro (Leucas), Ithaca, Cephalonia (Cephallenia), and Zanté (Zacynthus). They represent a territory of more than 1000 square miles, with a population of about a quarter of a million, who are mainly dependent on shipping and on the trade in oil, wine, and currants.

A romantic interest attaches to the promontory of Leucas, which terminates in what is still known as Sappho’s Leap, in allusion to an old tradition which tells how the famous poetess, who shares with Alcæus the chief honours in Æolian lyric poetry, here put an end to her life to escape from the pangs of unrequited affection. In Zacynthus we have an illustration of the historical accuracy of Herodotus in the existence of some curious springs on the south-west, from which the water comes out mingled with pitch.

From an antiquarian point of view, however, still greater interest attaches to Corcyra, Ithaca, and Cephallenia, as they have Homeric associations which carry us back to a still earlier period.

Corfu or Corcyra, although not the largest, is the most populous of the whole group. It is a beautiful island, with a beautiful situation, looking out on the blue waters of the Southern Adriatic, with the snowy mountains of Epirus in the distance. It has two commodious harbours, in which the shipping of many nations may be seen. The streets of the city are narrow and old-fashioned, but it has an interesting old fortress with a handsome esplanade. Near the harbour is the former residence of the British High Commissioner (an office once held by Mr. Gladstone), with beautiful public gardens in front of it. The environs of the city are charming, with orange-groves here and there glowing in the brilliant sunshine, amid a profusion of roses, geraniums, and other blooms almost growing wild, with miles on miles of olive-trees in the background.

From the earliest times the island was a place of importance to the shipping world, as the ancients, in sailing, liked to keep near to land, and generally put in to shore at night, unless they wished to take advantage of some favourable breeze which did not

CORFU. THE OLD FORT FROM THE WEST

To the left the Albanian Mountains.

rise till after sunset. In this way the island afforded convenient shelter for those who were sailing from the Peloponnesus to Italy, and facilitated Greek traffic with Epirus. It became the seat of a Corinthian colony in 734 B.C., when Syracuse was also founded, but it never showed much sympathy or affection for the mother-city. Indeed, the first sea-battle we read of in authentic history took place between the ships of Corinth and Corcyra (c. 665 B.C.), when the latter came off victorious. Before the Peloponnesian war broke out there were great complaints on the part of Corinth on account of due respect not being shown to her representatives at the public festivals in the daughter-city; and the subsequent action of the latter in putting herself under the protection of Athens, when she became involved in difficulties with Corinth and Epidamnus, was largely the cause of the great war which proved so injurious to the prosperity and power of Athens. In the course of its early history Corcyra was the scene of some terrible conflicts and cruel slaughters, almost without a parallel in any other part of Greece. Since that time it has passed through many vicissitudes under Roman, Byzantine, Crusading, Venetian, French, and British rule.

But the greatest interest of the place arises from the tradition which identifies it with the Phæacian island Scheria, on which Odysseus was cast after his stormy voyage from the island of Calypso. No remains have been found of the palace of Alcinous, where Odysseus met with such generous hospitality, but about two miles from the esplanade at Canone (One-Gun Battery), near the end of a promontory, we get a view of the secluded bay or gulf (Lake of Kalikiopoulo) on which the weary voyager is said to have been cast ashore, at the mouth of a brook (Cressida), which falls into the lake, and where Nausicaa and her maidens were amusing themselves after their great washing was over. At a little distance from the shore lies the rocky islet of Ponticonisi (“Mouse-Island”), which tradition identifies with the Phæacian ship that was turned into stone by the wrath of Poseidon, as it was beginning its homeward voyage to Ithaca with Odysseus on board.

All this local tradition, however, is rejected by a recent explorer, M. Victor Bérard, who has taken enormous pains to investigate the matter. He is convinced that the palace of Alcinous and the whole scene described by Homer in connection with the visit of Odysseus lay on the western side of the island, near the Convent of Palæocastrizza, and he concludes from indications in the poem that the Phæacians had come from the ancient city of Cumæ (Hypereia), driven out by the Œnotrians (Cyclopes). But whatever view we may take on these points there can be little doubt that Corfu, which lay as it were on the outskirts of the ancient Greek world, and not far from Ithaca (to which Odysseus sailed from it in a night), is the island which Homer had in view when he described the home of the Phæacians.

Still more interesting, from a Homeric point of

CORFU. THE OLD FORT FROM THE SOUTH

view, is the small island of Ithaca (about 37 square miles in extent), where the poet locates the home of his wandering hero and his wife Penelope, the one the early Greek ideal of practical sagacity, as Achilles is of martial impetuosity, and the other the model of conjugal devotion, as Nausicaa is of maidenly grace. The identity of the island has recently been called in question by an eminent archæologist (Dörpfeld), who regards Leucas as the island referred to in the Odyssey. But it would require strong evidence to overcome the presumption in favour of the island which now bears the name of Ithaca, and which corresponds to the poet’s description as well as we have any right to expect, considering the want of maps and guide-books at the time that he wrote. Perhaps its claim may yet receive fuller confirmation as the result of excavations; but in the meantime it is interesting to know that a terrace wall built of rough-hewn blocks has been discovered on the west coast, in the neighbourhood of a port to which the name Polis (City) is still applied, though there is no modern town to justify the name.

In this connection some interest also attaches to Cephallenia, the largest island of the group. There is a little village on its east coast, called Samos, from which the boat sails to Ithaca, and as an island called Samé is often mentioned in the Odyssey in connection with Ithaca, and the subjects of Odysseus are sometimes called Cephallenians, we are evidently not far from the scenes depicted by the great poet.

It would scarcely be possible to exaggerate the influence which the Homeric poetry has exercised on the intellect and imagination of the Greeks, and it is impossible for any one to enter into the spirit of Greek history and literature without some acquaintance with it. Homer has often been called the “Bible of the Greeks,” and there is truth in the saying both from a religious and a literary point of view. Herodotus was mistaken when he said that Homer and Hesiod had created the religion of the Greeks, but they certainly did much to systematise it, and, by giving Jupiter a place of supremacy among the gods, they paved the way for the triumph of monotheism.

In course of time Homer came to be regarded by his countrymen as their chief authority, not only on religious subjects but in almost all matters of interest to a thoughtful and inquiring mind. The reading and hearing of his poetry was the chief means of education. It was no uncommon thing for a boy to be able to recite both the Iliad and the Odyssey from memory. Classical writers speak of Homer in terms not only of admiration but of reverence. Æschylus said that he had gathered up the crumbs from Homer’s table; and Sophocles was so much in sympathy with the Odyssey that he was spoken of as “the tragic Homer.” There was, therefore, nothing strange in the sentiment which led Alexander the Great to carry about with him in his eastern campaigns a copy of Homer, said to have been edited for him by his old tutor Aristotle, and kept in a precious Persian casket. About a third of the recently discovered Egyptian papyri are inscribed with passages from the Iliad and the Odyssey.

While the oldest poetry of Greece, as of other countries, was probably of a lyric character, called forth by the joys and sorrows of common life or by the festive celebration of the seasons, the more stately epic, dealing with grander themes, and chanted rather than sung, with occasional accompaniment on the harp, found more favour with princes and their nobles, and attracted the most gifted authors to its service, till it reached the high stage of development which we find in the writings of Homer. These poems may be described as the oldest literature in existence, but they were doubtless the result of many previous efforts of a more archaic character, traces of which may be found in the older bards and legendary themes that are mentioned by Homer himself.

The Iliad and Odyssey show to what a high degree of civilisation and culture the Hellenic race had attained not much later than 1000 B.C. In the freeness of their spirit, combined with reverence for law, and in their vivid portraiture of the different members of the Pantheon, seen through the medium of a rich and sympathetic humanity, the poems present a pleasing contrast to all other heathen pictures of things human and divine. Their language is as admirable as the thought,—so rich and flexible, entirely free from the crudities that might have been expected in such primitive literature. Matthew Arnold sums up Homer’s characteristics from a literary point of view, as rapidity, plainness of thought, plainness of style, and nobleness. These qualities give the poet as strong a hold on the sympathies of his readers as he assigns to the minstrel in the Odyssey, when he makes Eumæus say of his old master, now returned, but still in disguise: “Even as when a man gazes on a minstrel whom the gods have taught to sing words of yearning joy to mortals, and they have a ceaseless desire to hear him as long as he will sing, even so he charmed me, sitting by me in the halls.”

The controversy which has been going on for more than a hundred years regarding the authorship of the poems does not much affect their interest for the general reader. Similar questions were raised more than two thousand years ago. Even before Plato’s time there had been a sifting process by which a number of hymns and minor poems formerly attributed to Homer (as the whole book of Psalms used to be to David) were found to be the work of unknown authors of a later date. A century or two later there were Alexandrian critics who denied that the Iliad and the Odyssey could have come from the same author. But modern critics have assailed the integrity of the two great poems themselves. They have based their theories partly on the improbability of such long poems being composed and transmitted before writing had come into general use (an argument which has lost its force owing to recent discoveries of early writing), and partly on the apparent repetitions, interpolations, and discrepancies, which are supposed to have been

THE TEMPLE OF ATHENA AT SUNIUM (CAPE COLONNA)

Distant view over the hills.

due either to the accidents of compilation or to the need for adaptation to suit the varying tastes of readers in different parts of the Greek world. Perhaps the strongest proof of composite authorship is to be found in the different stages of civilisation and religion which are discernible in different parts of the poetry, and the marked inconsistencies in certain of the leading characters. It is also very significant that Mount Olympus, the dwelling of the gods, is at one time the snow-clad mountain in the north which still bears that name, and in other and later passages is a bright and gladsome region, free from rain or snow or stormy wind. It is now generally agreed that the nucleus of the Iliad was a series of ancient lays concerning Achilles, derived from Northern Greece, and moulded by Æolic art, while the remainder of the poem and the bulk of the Odyssey were of a considerably later date, and came from an Ionic source. The poems as a whole were probably touched up and put into their present form by some one living on the coast of Asia Minor (perhaps at Smyrna, the meeting-place of Æolic and Ionic traditions), who sang of the glories of a by-gone age with the patriotic pride of a colonial. Whether his name was Homer is a different question, for it is quite possible the word may have been, as some maintain, a common term, meaning “compiler.” It is well to remember that the “blind bard who dwelt in rocky Chios,” so often identified with Homer since Thucydides set the example, is merely the description applied to himself by the writer of the Hymn to the Delian Apollo, whom no one now believes to have been the author of the Iliad or the Odyssey. We know that the Great Unknown, whoever he may have been, was succeeded by the Homeridæ of Chios, and these again, by the Rhapsodes or professional reciters, whom we come across in the pages of Plato and Xenophon.

Another subject of controversy has been as to whether the Homeric narratives have a historic basis to rest upon. Some have gone so far as to doubt whether the Trojan War ever took place; and it has been suggested that many of the stories in the Iliad are due to solar myths. But the excavations of Schliemann at Ilium and Mycenæ have rather discredited such scepticism; and the recent explorer already mentioned (Bérard), who has sailed over the course which appears to have been taken by Odysseus,—extending from Troy to Gibraltar,—has found the topographical and maritime allusions so accurate as to come to the conclusion that the poet must have had the benefit of some ancient book of reference, corresponding to the Pilot’s Guide, and drawn up in all probability by the Phœnicians, who were masters of the Mediterranean before the Greeks. But while the main thread of the narrative in the Odyssey may be historical, the poet has worked into it many fanciful legends, like those to be found in the literature of many nations. Indeed the story of Odysseus’ adventures as a whole is perhaps no more historical than the tale of Robinson Crusoe, created by Defoe out of the experience of Alexander Selkirk on the island of Juan Fernandez.

SUNSET FROM THE NORTH-EAST CORNER OF THE ACROPOLIS

To the left, a bit of the east front of the Parthenon; to the right, the precipitous north side of the Acropolis; in the middle distance the Erechtheum, showing all three of its porticoes; in shadow, between the Parthenon and the Erechtheum, the upper part of the Propylæa.

No criticism, however, can alter the fact that we have in the Odyssey some of the most charming pictures of social and domestic life that are to be found in any literature, touched up with a colouring of the strangest old-world romance, and deriving lustre from a religion which, however defective from an ethical point of view, was wedded to an imagination so rich and powerful as almost to efface in the mind of the reader the distinction between the natural and the supernatural.