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Ithaca was the first of the great Homeric places of renown to “swim into my ken,” if it can be said to have swum into my ken when I saw it by the light of the full moon in sailing from Corfu to Patras. But I became acquainted with Troy and Mycenæ long before I really appropriated Ithaca. This I got by the method of gradual approach, a method which has a certain charm only granted to one who is privileged to reside a series of years near his goal.

On a journey to Dodona, the year after this moonlight view, our steamer, in passing from Patras to Prevesa, put in at Bathy, officially called Ithaca, on the east side of the island; and I had just one hour ashore which was more tantalizing than satisfactory as far as studying the topography of Ithaca was concerned; and yet one may believe that he sees in the beautiful bay and harbor the very harbor of Phorkys, where Ulysses landed after his twenty years’ absence. The cave of the Nymphs, where the jolly Phæacians laid him asleep with his treasures about him was not visible; but we were told that this is now farther up the hill.

After an interval of several years, in which I had passed Ithaca several times in the night, I set foot on it again in a more satisfactory fashion. Taking refuge from the August heat of Athens in the Ionian Islands, I was spending a few days in Argostoli, the chief town of Kephallenia, and seized this opportunity to approach Ithaca from the back side, so to speak. A drive of four hours brought us clear across from the west side of Kephallenia to Samos on the east side, over the high backbone of the island. During the last hour of the journey, the descent, as “the sun was setting, and all the ways were growing shady,” our eyes were fastened upon Ithaca lying peacefully in the bosom of Kephallenia—a beautiful sight.

As we had planned for only one day in Ithaca, we determined to make it a long one, and started from Samos in a sail-boat at half-past two in the morning; but, although the sail was filled most of the time, so gentle was the breeze that, even supplemented by the work of the oars, it did not bring us to Ithaca until half-past five. My boy of twelve years, companion of many of my wanderings in Greece, was asleep most of the way, but broke the parallel with Ulysses by waking up when the keel touched the shore.

We landed at the foot of Mount Aëtos, on the top of which Gell and Schliemann place the city of Ulysses, but deferred climbing this until we might see whether our time and strength held out, and pushed at once for our main goal, some ruins near Stauros, at the northern end of the island, nine or ten miles distant. We followed all the way, with an occasional cut-off, the fine carriage road made by the English, to whose occupation the Ionian Islands owe most of their good roads, notably the one on which we had crossed from Argostoli to Samos, which required much difficult and expensive engineering. The road crossed the backbone of Ithaca twice at points where this is somewhat low; but in the last seven miles it followed the western shore about half way up the steep slope which runs down into the sea, leaving almost no strip of level coast. In fact, Ithaca smiles in very few spots, being nearly all mountain, just the country to get attached to. Ulysses naturally enough calls it “rugged, but a good bringer-up of boys,” and adds: “I never could find anything sweeter than my native land.” In one respect it is doubtless somewhat changed. As we passed along the foot of the principal mountain of the island, a bare height of over 2,600 feet, I asked a peasant its name, and was glad to hear him answer “Neriton.” But this is now as undeserving of its constant Homeric epithet of “leaf-shaking” as is Zakynthos of its epithet of “woody.” The denudation of the Greek mountains is a sad theme, and is most strikingly illustrated in the Ionian Islands. Mount Aenos, over 5,000 feet high, on Kephallenia, had until about the beginning of the present century its slopes covered with large pines, which were known in all the world as Abies cephalonica. But at that time a destructive fire swept away nearly half of this treasure; and two years ago about one-third of the remainder went in the same way. What has occurred here goes on every summer all over Greece; but the loss is in no case so conspicuous as in this. I have seen Pentelicus burning for three days—a brilliant illumination for Athens—and, in sailing from Poros to Nauplia in midsummer, I counted twenty-six fires on the mountains of Peloponnesus; but all these could do nothing more in the way of damage than to help on a little the aridity into which Attica and the Argolid are helplessly sinking. Where it scarcely ever rains during six months of the year, the grass and weeds become like tinder, and a fire once started from some shepherd’s carelessness is difficult to stop.

Water was rather scanty on our road, and what we got came from cisterns. Springs are, indeed, rare in Ithaca. But when we came to the famous spring Melanhydro (Blackwater), near Stauros, in the hope of finding something fine, we found the water not only warm, but having three-quarters of a very ripe tomato in it, as well as pieces of a big cactus stalk, and rather full of little pollywogs besides. The proper care of springs is something which the Greeks do not seem to appreciate. I have seen the famous spring Pirene on Acro-Corinth treated even worse than this.

But if the water which we needed for our eighteen-mile walk in the August sun was bad, we found consolation in grapes. I suspect, though I cannot verify it from actual weighing, that my regular allowance of grapes in an August or September day’s walk in Greece is ten pounds. One rarely pays anything for these, inasmuch as they are much cheaper than New England huckleberries. While it is considered contra bonos mores to take them without asking, peasants seem always glad to give them. On the hottest part of the return journey, as we stopped at a house and asked for grapes, the man of the house said that his vineyard was two kilometres distant, but insisted upon going to it at once. This I could not allow, whereupon, in spite of my protests, he got upon the very top round of a rickety ladder, leaning against the wall of his house, and, at the risk of his neck, pulled down from a vine running over a high trellis two clusters which he feared were not ripe, as proved to be the case. In the meantime his wife had been with great difficulty restrained from setting before us eggs, bread, and cheese, which we refused on the ground that we had just eaten. To be strictly truthful, I ought to state that, not being enough used to the Greek language to discriminate fine shades of meaning, I am not sure but that the man meant to send his wife the two kilometres in question. Greek custom would incline me to this supposition.

Although Ithaca is noted for its hospitality, this treatment is not mentioned as an isolated, but as a typical case of Greek hospitality. I doubt whether there is any people so hospitable as the Greek. The longer I live here and the more I travel about, the more I am impressed with this hospitality. It is not only on this rugged island where men live by “wresting little dues of wheat and wine and oil,” “an ill-used race of men,” one might be tempted to call them, that the stranger at the gate must come in and have the best that the house affords; at Platæa, six years ago one November night, a house-holder received the American School at Athens, carrying more mud on their persons than it is often the lot of four men to carry, into the only room in his house which had a fire, turning out his family, who were evidently enjoying it, to pass the night in a colder room. And they seemed to take it as a matter of course.

But I have wandered from our goal. I had expected to find in the remains near Stauros corroboration of my belief that here lay the Homeric city. For I had long supposed, with Leake of the older topographers, and Bursian, Partsch, and Lolling of the later ones, that it must be here. Here are massive walls, rock-cut steps, ancient cisterns, and the niches in the rock passing under the name of the “School of Homer.” But at the close of the day, in order not to be unjust to the dissenters, I climbed Aëtos, and saw that the walls there, resembling those of Tiryns, had about as good claim as those at Stauros to be regarded as those of a Homeric fortress. The question where the Odyssey locates the city is not at present to be decided by remains, but by certain other indications which seem to point to the region of Stauros.

The suitors of Penelope, who wished to kill Telemachus on his return from “Sandy Pylos,” lay in wait for him on an island called Asteris, “midway between Ithaca and rugged Samos.” Opposite the northern end of the island, though much nearer to Samos (Kephallenia) than to Ithaca, is the only island in the whole strait, needing to be magnified a good deal to suit the story of the Odyssey; but what poet ever denied himself the right to magnify? And looking toward this little island is the only harbor on this (western) side of Ithaca, a deep indentation running far into the land, now called “Polis Bay,” a reminiscence of the fact that a city once stood here. This name is a genuine survival from old times, and not a revamping of a classical name, as is the case with Mount Neriton. About this bay and up as far as Stauros, and even farther to the west and north, is the main smiling spot of the island. It was autopsy that I wanted more than anything else; and, as I stood on the rocks near Homer’s school, autopsy forced upon me the conviction that here, and here only, must have been the important city of the island, the city from which the faithful Paladin of Agamemnon ruled not only Ithaca but also Kephallenia. Here, amid the remains of an ancient settlement, one looks into three harbors about equally distant, Polis on the west side of the island, a broader one on the east side, now called Phrikes, in which we saw a good-sized vessel anchored, and on the north end one still more capacious, probably the Reithron of the Odyssey. The situation was well adapted to a city ruling the island and possessing easy communication with the coast, east and west.

ITHACA. POLIS BAY FROM THE NORTH

It is not so very many years ago that general scepticism prevailed about Homeric topography. But now, just as one smiles, in listening to Dörpfeld’s masterly exposition of the thoroughly excavated walls of Troy, at the thought that “if Troy ever stood” was catalogued by an almost contemporary poet with insoluble riddles, like "if Israel’s missing tribes found refuge here," so, in passing over Ithaca with the Odyssey in hand, one smiles to think that not long ago Hercher could maintain that there was no agreement between the Ithaca of the Odyssey and the Ithaca of reality. It may be granted that Hercher knocked out the somewhat visionary Gell; but he did not touch Leake; indeed, it seems as if he had not read Leake at all. There is one passage in the Odyssey which seemed to support Hercher, in which Ithaca is spoken of as “a low island,” and as “lying apart and farther to the west than Samos and Zakynthos.” How the poet, be he the original poet of the Odyssey or an epigonos, ever happened to say this of Ithaca, the rugged island lying close up against the eastern shore of Kephallenia, no one has yet satisfactorily explained. But, apart from this Homeric crux, there is a most gratifying coincidence between “the Land and the Book.” The topography of Ithaca has gained respect in proportion as attempts have been given up to force Corfu into identity with the land of the Phæacians.

In respect to Schliemann’s and Gell’s acropolis on Mt. Aëtos at the narrowest part of the island, it must be granted that this was an important fortress of the Homeric period, controlling communication between the northern and southern halves of the island, as well as the nearest approach from Samos, which was probably always in antiquity the main city of Kephallenia. But that the main city of Ithaca was ever on this eagle’s eyrie is in accordance neither with antecedent probability nor with the poet’s story.

It is curious to see how different have been the estimates of the height of this mountain, according as one wished to make it the site of the Homeric Ithaca or not. And, indeed, the figures given in different books which might be supposed to rest on measurements vary also. Probably the figures given by Partsch, 380 metres, are correct. This would make the top about 1,200 feet above the sea level, but only about half that above the high ground over which the road from Bathy passes to the mooring place—it can hardly be called a harbor—opposite Samos. Partsch makes merry at “those whose faith can not only remove mountains, but also make them lower than they actually are, and who speak of the run up the steep sides of Aëtos as if it were only a matter of half an hour.” I was in my turn amused to find that in my eagerness to go up this height and down again as soon as possible, in order to take our boat back to Samos, I had made the ascent in considerably less than half an hour. Perhaps the fleet-footed shepherd boy who led me up may have taken me along a good deal faster than Partsch would have gone making his way alone. He ought, however, to have looked out not to spoil a good case by underrating the powers of English pedestrians.

At half-past three we reached the shore, where our boat was tied by the stern cables waiting for us, and we set sail for Samos in such a splendid breeze from the north which had just sprung up, right on our quarter, that no Homeric ship ever sped over the waters with more life than ours. In just one hour and five minutes we landed in Samos, in time for me, though tired, to wander before dark over the high hills containing the acropolis of Samos, the remaining walls of which are most impressive.

The next morning, starting with a carriage at half-past three, we were at eight o’clock in Argostoli. During the slow ascent I kept my eyes fastened upon Ithaca every moment when it was possible to do so. I wanted to see the sunlight once more illumine that long chain of four separate peaks stretched out in the sea from north to south; but before sunrise we had already got into the gorge through which the road pushes up to the top. Our first sight of the island was in the evening twilight and our last in the morning twilight. As I thought it over afterward I could not help thinking that there was an especial propriety in this; for was not Ithaca pre-eminently a land of twilight?

Note.—Since excavating near Stauros in 1901 without finding any Mycenæan remains, Professor Dörpfeld has come to the conclusion that the true Homeric Ithaca was the Island of Leukas, that there was a grand confusing of names prior to Strabo, so that what was really the Homeric Same is now called Ithaca, and what was really Dulichion is now called Kephallenia. Something like this had been previously suggested in order to find a place for the Homeric Dulichion, and also to place Ithaca where it would lie “farthest out to the darkness” and “apart from the other islands.” In these two points Homer’s geography has never been quite satisfactory, but it is doubtful whether we shall get any revision of it which will be entirely satisfactory. It is possible that the results of Professor Dörpfeld’s excavations on Leukas may bring to light such Mycenæan remains as to make the scale tip in his favor. One point in his contention seems certain, viz., that Leukas is geologically an island, and as such should have found a place in the Homeric naming. But the whole question is adhuc sub judice.