Ithacan Days

I.

PHORKYS’ HAVEN AND THE NAIADS’ GROT.

THE day-star had not yet risen, and Ithaca lay pitch-dark, save for stray lights twinkling here and there along the water’s edge, when the trim little Pylaros steamed into port. But on looking about us in the gray dawn we needed no Athene to tell us where we were. Had we been floating without chart or compass on unknown seas, we could hardly have mistaken the spot.

“ There is in the land of Ithaca a certain haven of Phorkys, the ancient of the sea, and thereby are two headlands of sheer cliff, which slope to the sea on the haven’s side ; and when the strong winds blow, they are a shelter from the great wave without, but within the decked ships ride unmoored when once they have attained to that landing place. Now, at the harbor’s head is an olive tree with spreading leaves, and hard by is a pleasant cave and shady, sacred to the nymphs that are called Naiads.”

I let Homer speak and call the sun to witness his fidelity to fact. In Ithaca, at least, the old poet’s topography is true ; few blind men have ever seen so straight. There are the twin headlands guarding the narrow ingress ; the deep, sheltered harbor, where to this day “ large ships moor in perfect safety close to their masters’ doors ; ” and the hill across the harbor head is one stretch of olive woods. The sole feature not now in the visible foreground is the Naiads’ grotto, “ with great looms of stone whereon the nymphs weave garments of purple stain, a marvel to behold; ” but fifteen minutes’ walk up the glen will bring you to a spacious chamber in the hillside (one hundred and sixty feet above the sea), with its side entrance for mortals, and its vertical one for immortals, while wonderful stalactites depending from roof and walls readily suggest the Naiads’ looms, as well as the mixing bowls and jars of stone wherein the bees store honey. Any one who has visited the great stalactite grotto on Mount Pentelicus will realize how simple and spontaneous is the poetic suggestion. If the grotto is less conveniently placed than we could wish for stowing away Odysseus’ goods, Homer is not to be denied the poet’s license ; and the poet who shifts the hot and cold springs of the Skamander from Mount Ida to the plain of Troy could readily think away the quarter of an hour between the grotto and the harbor head.

In this solitude — where the modern town of Yathy, or Deephaven, now stands — Odysseus, after his wondrous voyage and unconscious landing, wakes, and rubs his eyes ; for, wrapt in Athene’s mist as he was, “ all things showed strange to the lord of the land, — the long paths and the sheltering havens and the steep rocks and the trees in their bloom.” So, moaning and upbraiding the authors of his fancied miscarriage, he proceeds (the ruling passion ever strong in him) to reckon up his goods that lay in a heap under the long-leaved olive tree ; and lo ! of the fair tripods and the caldrons and the gold and goodly woven raiment, — thanks to Phæacian honesty, — naught is lacking. Yet, homesick for his own country, he paces the shore of this gently murmuring bay, — for in the shelter of the twin headlands the poet’s ownπολυϕλοίσβιο θαλάσσης appears purely conventional, — and makes sore lament, till the solitude is broken by a spruce young shepherd’s appearance on the scene to comfort the castaway, whose eyes are still holden, with this word picture of a familiar landscape: “ Not so nameless the land but full many a man doth know it. . . . Verily it is rough, and not fit for driving horses; yet is it not a very stingy soil, albeit no wide expanse. For it bears store of corn untold, and wine as well, and ever the rain doth visit it, and quickening dew. And it hath good graze for goats and kine, all manner of trees, and springs that never fail. And so, stranger, Ithaca’s name hath reached even unto Troy, which they say is far from this Achaian land.”

That dramatic climax, coupling Ithaca and Troy, must have fetched any other hero on the Homeric roll; but patient, goodly Odysseus, glad as he was, could not forget his guile or forbear a Cretan yarn. And so we have that exquisite play of wits, that loving tilt between the subtlest of gods and the subtlest of Greeks, until the Phæacian goods are safely stored, the Ithacan situation laid bare, the plot of vengeance hatched, and the lord of the isle, now all rags and wrinkles at the touch of Athene’s wand, “ fares forth from the haven by the rough track up the wooded country and over the heights ” to visit his old henchman and set the ball a-rolling.

II.

AT THE SWINEHERD’S STEADING.

Staying only to establish ourselves at the Odysseus Inn, and to pick up a rickety trap and a pair of sorry nags, we follow suit. At first the road gives us a lift, and a good hour, mainly through a stretch of olive woods and vineyards, brings us to a saddle in the ridge, where we leave our carriage. Thence we scramble, by a track that no man could trace without help from above, — a winding, breakneck track quite true to the Homeric epithets, — up and down, and up and down again, until, turning a great shoulder of cliff, we find ourselves at the head of a deep glen and facing Raven Rock. It is a sheer precipice, one hundred and ten feet high ; and in a tomblike cutting at its middle base the Arethousa spring wells up, — black water, indeed, as you look down into the dark depths, but crystal-clear in the light as it overflows in a brook that tumbles down the wild glen to the sea. Here we made our nooning ; and out of the tanglewood below our guides fetched us a load of the most brilliant and delicious arbutus, — far and away beyond any I had ever met with on the Marathon or Dekeleia road ; yet the bright clusters had not half the charm of the one fat acorn I picked up on the spot where Eumæus used to water his mast-fed swine.

If the scramble hither had been trying, the climb to the upper plateau was terrific. We saw to our left, across the gorge, what looked like the course of a recent avalanche, — a slippery red loam toboggan slide, scarcely less perpendicular than Raven Rock. But our guide maintained that it was the only way up to Eumæus’ pastures; and so we scaled it, often on all fours, finding it in fact a stiffer climb than it looked. Yet it proved worth while. We had reached beyond any decent doubt the royal swineherd’s steading, if ever it was, — a commanding plateau, covered with ancient olives as fine as Attica’s best, and rude stone sheepfolds which may have served Eumæus for sties. There was not much life astir, — but a few peasants digging, a fair girl (who shied at Powell’s camera) gathering olives, one young heifer to remind us of kine-grazing Ithaca, and more than enough dogs. The flocks were afield at this hour, — on our way to Arethousa we had seen black goats wide ranging down by the sea, — though the litter of the folds attested their abundance. Swine there were none, and in fact we found but one poor black shoat on the island, as if to witness the thoroughgoing work of the suitor crew.

If ever it was, I say, this should have been Eumæus’ steading. It answers point by point to Homer’s picture : a place of wide outlook all around, on a mighty rock, remote from the town, at the south end of the island, and on the only road that leads or ever could have led from the little Bay of St. Andreas — the first landing a ship from Pylos could make, and where Telemachus, at Athene’s bidding, disembarked — to the city, whether that was on Aëtos or at the polis. Present names prove nothing, — Raven Rock and Arethousa are but recent restorations of the learned ; but if Ithaca be Ithaca, and “ the singer of the Odyssey was absolutely familiar with its local features ” (as Reisch maintains), then this is the spot hallowed forever by the dearest scenes in the whole literature of country life.

In Odysseus’ twenty years of war and wandering the little realm of Ithaca has not stood still; at least the devoted swineherd has improved his holding. On his own account, without a word to his mistress or old Laertes, he had builded him a stone cabin, such as we see amid the olives now, and inclosed it with a wall of these rough rocks, coped with this thorny wild pear, and further guarded without by a palisade of thick-set oaken stakes. Such Eumæus’ strong keep, with twelve sties (in lieu of towers) to shelter twelve times fifty brood swine (instead of men at arms) ; “ but the boars lay without, and their tale was three hundred and threescore, and by them always watched four dogs as fierce as wild beasts, which the swineherd had bred, a master of men.”

At the moment the swine are abroad with three of the hinds, there at the foot of Raven Rock, by the spring of Arethousa, crunching acorns to their hearts’ content, and drinking the dark water, — things that lay on swine the blooming fat, — while the fourth hind is driving the pick of the boars to garnish the suitors’ daily feed at the palace. Thus, at a still hour, we catch our first glimpse of Eumæus sitting in his humble doorway, not idly. He is cutting a good brown oxhide, and fitting sandals to his feet, when all at once the stillness is broken. For, trudging along the rough track, up the wooded country and over the heights, the long-lost master draws nigh. And the dogs, quick to divine the goddess herself whatever form she take, but not to pierce the sorry transformation she has wrought in the lord of the land, give tongue and would tear him to pieces, save that Odysseus, in his wariness, sits down and drops his staff, while Eumæus scatters the pack with a volley of stones.

Only one can tell that story. But we can see and hear it all: the beggar’s welcome by his own slave, — a king’s son born; the brace of sucking pigs promptly roasted on the hearth to break the poor tramp’s fast, and the ivy-wood bowl of honey-sweet wine to wash them down withal, while the swineherd’s loving heart runs over with reminiscence of his gentle lord and hopeless longing for his return ; the long afternoon confab, as the wily stranger reels off his second Cretan yarn, and gives his word that Odysseus shall presently come home, — else “ set thy thralls on me and hurl me from this high rock.” We see the herds driven up the steep at eventide, and penned, grunting, in their sties. That is, all but one fat boar, which is solemnly sacrificed and roasted for the stranger’s cheer, whereupon舠 the good swineherd stands up to carve, for well he knew what was fair,” — cardinal virtue in a carver; and we may be sure that not one of the seven portions lacked aught of a square meal, certainly not the portion devoutly set apart for the nymphs and Hermes who had blessed him in his hut and in his herds, nor yet the whole chine reserved for the vagrant guest.

Such the scene whereon the swift night falls foul in the dark of the moon ; and all night long Zeus rains and showery Zephyr blows strong, — so like our Ithacan nights that we yet feel the chill in our bones. How perfectly motived the after-supper tale of bivouac under Troy walls, when night came on foul with frost, and snow fell bitter cold, and ice set thick about the shields, and of the ruse that won a warm cloak then and there, as the recital of it assures such comfort as the bleak cabin can afford here and now ! For Eumæus takes the hint, and prepares the wanderer a shakedown of sheep and goat skins by the fireside, and over him throws a great thick mantle, kept by him for a change against a cold snap. And then, leaving him and the young men to take the boon of sleep, the good swineherd — who has no mind to lie here in a bed away from the boars — dons a wind-proof cloak and shaggy goatskin, and, armed with sword and spear to defend him against dog or man, proceeds to make his own bed with the white-tusked boars under a hollow rock in shelter from the north wind.

But even on the spot we may not linger on these Ithacan nights of Homer, — nights longer than immortal tongue can tell, affording not only time to sleep, but time to listen and be glad, — as Eumæus relates how he was kidnapped out of his royal cradle in the isle of Syriê, and limns withal a living picture of those old Phœnician trinket-hawkers and manstealers with whom commerce took its rise. Nor can we stay for the dawn, which brings Telemachus — fresh from Helen’s radiant palace — to this rude lodge as the two old men are busy getting their simple breakfast, and the churls are already afield with the swine, though the dogs are here to give the young master welcome. We can feel the glad wagging of their tails to this day, even as we feel the emotion of the old servant when he drops the wine bowl and falls upon his young lord’s neck, — kissing his head and both his beautiful eyes and both his hands, and hailing him “ Sweet light of my life,” to be fondly greeted in turn as “ Daddy.” All this while the real daddy in the background bides his time, humbly making way for the son whose eyes are holden, but who —true prince that he is— bids the beggar keep his seat, and contents himself with the green brushwood and a fleece thereon, which Eumæus shakes down for him. Flaxman has strangely overlooked these touching scenes of the steading, but Genelli has limned nothing in all the Homeric story more genial and gracious than this welcome of Telemachus. And this, after all, but ushers in a day of genial and gracious scenes, — Eumæus’ errand to Penelope, Athene’s coming to restore Odysseus to his prime, the son’s recognition of the sire and the plot of doom, the swineherd’s return with good news, — rounded to a close again by the equal feast and the boon of sleep.

Then the dawn once more lays rosy fingers on Raven Rock and these pale gray olives, and Telemachus is off for the town, leaving Odysseus (again in rags and wrinkles) to follow in the warm of the day, and take up his rôle of public beggar in his own palace. As Eumæus leads him on his way, after providing a stout staff for him to lean upon, because the path is parlous, we may follow ; for with the dear old gossips our poet quits the lodge.

It is a still hour, unbroken by the delving hinds or the fair girl gathering black olives, as we trudge away in the wake of the immortals over the stony track; resting our eyes now on far-off Taygetos, now on an old Hellenic wall by the wayside, all bright with arbute and cyclamen.

III.

NERITOS AND THE POLIS.

We too are bound for the city, but break our journey to dine on a roast lamb — short commons for five of us, considering the old Ithacan breakfast ration of a brace of pigs — and sleep at the Odysseus Inn. It is a Homeric night, with no moon, and rain to spare ; but the sky clears a bit by half past eight, and we are off again with the same sorry nags and the same rickety trap.

If old Ithaca had no speedways to encourage horse breeding or driving, present Ithaca — thanks to English occupation and example — is largely a land of good roads. From Vathý across the island to Pissaëto the civilizing English set an object lesson in roadmaking, which the Ithacans have bravely followed up ; and thanks to both, the new polis is joined to the old by a highway, — not wide, indeed, but as enduring as the rock out of which it is hewn. Its first stage alongshore and over the saddle between the two havens (Vathý and Dexia), and then around the head of the Gulf of Molo, is one of the most agreeable drives in the world. The wide gulf cuts five miles deep into the island, leaving but a very narrow neck to hold the two mountain masses together : this neck is Mount Aëtos, at whose eastern base the gulf curves in a delicious pebbly beach, while from the water’s edge up the slope extends a noble growth of olive, orange, lemon, fig, almond, pear, cactus, cypress, and roses, with one spreading pine.

Thus far Ithaca is distinctly carriageable, and the drive enchanting ; but it is when the road winds in triple loop up to the narrow saddle overlooking both seas, and then runs for miles under the very comb of Neritos, with the channel of Ithaca lying hundreds of feet sheer below, that the excursion becomes an adventure. The rocks are radiant with cyclamen, and now and then the blue iris mediates between the azure of the sea and the azure of the sky, — an iris that pales, by contrast both of type and tone, any of its kind in other lands. But these rocks yield more than bloom and fragrance. Out of every crevice grows the prickly shrub laden with acorns such as nourished the blooming fat of Eumæus’ swine, and would do so still if swine there were in Ithaca to fatten on them. To-day the steeps of Neritos show no life but a bunch of goats tended by a boy and girl, — happier pair, we may hope, than Melanthios and Melantho. We must discount Gell’s “thick forest of arbutus and prickly - leaved oak,” which he represents as extending nearly to the mountain top ; still, Schliemann’s keen eyes served him ill, or he could never have said that the oak had vanished from Ithaca.

We drive on through the charming village of Levké, and at a quarter before twelve reach Stavros, a petty hamlet, with olive woods and cedars stretching from sea to sea. It lies between two harbors, — an inlet of the Ionian Sea to the northeast, and a sheltered bay opening southward into the strait. The latter is the only safe harbor on this side of Ithaca, and almost due west of it lies the sole islet in the channel. These two tokens alone would lead us to look for the Homeric city in this quarter; and in fact traces of ancient occupation are not wanting. Twenty minutes’ walk to the north rises a sheer rock, draped with fern and topped with olives, with a fine spring welling up at its base to feed a rivulet which creeps eastward through the orchards to the sea. This Blackwater is a softened copy of Arethousa and Raven Rock, more frequented, and for that reason less tidy, but still a spot Theocritus’ swains might have chosen for a nooning. Here we fall in with the village schoolmaster and a troop of his boys, who pilot us up an ancient rock-hewn stairway to the “ School of Homer.” It is a narrow plateau, occupied on the very verge by an ancient structure, which measures on the ground some eighteen by thirty feet, and whose massive walls still stand eight or ten feet high, though these are partly built over by a modern church. The spot is notable for a fine clump of oaks and a widebranching cedar of Lebanon, — enough to recall the shady grove of far-darting Apollo whither, on the wooers’ doomsday, the long-haired Achaians conveniently gather with their hecatomb. It is a fit temple site, if temple there was in Homer’s Ithaca ; and hard by we find a rock-hewn tomb and an ancient subterranean wellhouse. By these and other remains all the way down to Stavros the archæologist traces a considerable city, dating back as far as the seventh century B. c., and existing down to the latest Roman Empire, as its memory seems to have lived on in the name “ polis ” to this day. Still, this does not carry us back to Homer, — Homer’s School being of good Square masonry, and the name probably struck out in a genial moment by the then high priest of Ithaca for Sir William Gell’s benefit. Ihat his reverence was quite up to it we can hardly doubt when we find him confiding to Gell the fact that “ Homer visited this spot in order to wash in the source called Melainudros, which restored his sight.” Fitly enough, this Blackwater is still on terms with the Muses ; being part of the estate of Kyr Mavrokephalas (anglice Mr. Blackhead), who is not only a member of the Greek Parliament, but a translator of Dante.

To a yet older polis, a real Mycenæan castle, Dr. Dörpfeld confidently assigns a construction on the northern headland of the bay : it is a “ terrace wall of great rough-hewn blocks, preserved for a length of thirty paces.” There, next season, he is to put in the spade, and (let us hope) to lay bare the castle of Odysseus, as he has already let in the light on Tiryns and Troy.¹ Until that be done, the old story can hardly possess the imagination here as it does at the swineherd’s lodge, where landscape and atmosphere are all we seek. Field huts and pigsties may pass away and leave the idyl in its perfect setting; but for the Comedy of the Wooing and the Tragedy of the Doom we want the castle and the palace, — not the mighty walls of Mycenæ nor the radiant halls of Helen ; for Odysseus is but a petty potentate, with “many other kings in seagirt Ithaca ” to share his sway, and the whole island realm sends but a dozen ships to Troy. Homer lets him describe his own “ fair mansions,” at a moment when home, be it ever so homely, would appeal to one above all things else ; yet it is but a glimpse of “ chamber after chamber, with a battlemented court and wellwrought folding doors,” — apparently a simple house that grows as new tenants come with new tastes. And in fact we know just how the Royal Bedchamber was added on by Odysseus himself when he thriftily turned to account a rooted olive tree as a bedpost. Of such a mansion, if ever it was, we can hardly look for very imposing remains, after a thousand years of historical occupation of the ground in later antiquity. Yet the mere certitude of its site would be a great boon.

Even the School of Homer commands a landscape not unworthy of its ancient fame. Far above rises to a height of fifteen hundred feet Mount Neion (now Exoge), somewhat as the mountains rise behind Mycenæ or the ridge of Akontion behind Orchomenos, — certainly a nobler background for an Achaian castle than Tiryns or Knossos can boast. The present village of Exoge, perched less than halfway up the steep, with its cottages set in green gardens, makes as fair a picture as heart could wish. Restore Odysseus’ castle with its dependencies even on the lower slopes, backed by Neion’s windy headlands and fronted by the loftier range of Neritos, and you have a prospect quite in keeping with the heroic age : with constant Penelope as she waits and weaves and watches her pet geese ; with young Telemachus as Athene all at once makes him man enough to assert himself in the house and in the first town meeting since Odysseus’ day ; with the suitor crew at their revels, and the blind minstrel singing the Achaians’ pitiful return ; with the twenty maids drawing water from the fountain (where we have just nooned) and toting it up the castle hill; with poor old Argos on the dungheap, loyal to the last wag of his devoted tail, which is the long-lost master’s only welcome home, as he arrives this moment from the steading with dear old Eumæus, to usher in the day of doom.

Our survey and daydream done, we follow the schoolmaster down the myrtle-fringed brook, — which is indeed the chief river of Ithaca, — not knowing whither, till we turn into the big road, and come to the most inviting of the detached houses which now occupy the site of Odysseus’ lower town. Shy as the good man had been about sharing our basket dinner, he cannot let us go without some entertainment under his own roof ; and in the big upper chamber — a place of wide prospect, with three sea views — the good wife serves coffee, while the schoolmaster talks on of the Ithaca that now is. He is proud of his native eyrie on Neritos, — Anoge, Upland, — which also claims Homer’s birth. Still, he himself makes no pretension to being a Homerid, — in this more modest than another Ithacan, Constantine Koliades, once professor in the Ionian University, who deduced his lineage from Eumsæs, and wrote a book to prove that Odysseus was his own Homer, or vice versa, and the veritable author of both Iliad and Odyssey. This autobiographical theory of the Odyssey must now divide the honors with that which endows Nausikaä with the authorship. But the schoolmaster betrayed no knowledge of Koliades, who had been long forgotten, nor any prevision of Nausikaä’s sponsor, who has not yet been heard from in these parts ; and he would have scouted the old heresy that Homer was no Ithacan, but merely a chance sojourner, overtaken on his travels here by a distemper of the eyes, and entertained by Mentor, who thus wins his place in the Odyssey!

A house could hardly be cleaner or emptier than this of my Ithacan colleague. The furnishing was simplicity itself, and if there were books they were out of sight. But bright faces and good cheer made the place right homely: the good wife beamed on us, as Greek wives in out-of-the-way places often do, with no language but a smile, and the youngsters were clean and civil. Eustathios Surmes himself, like my schoolmaster host at Spata, is no rolling stone. For thirty-two years running he has taught the boys’ school at Levké, and for that service he now receives fifteen dollars a month. Happy man to hold a post no spoilsman can covet, under a system which at every change of ministry — and that averages once every ten months — may bid even the schoolmaster move on !

The chance acquaintance whets our curiosity to revisit Levké, which had delighted our eyes as we drove through. On our return, the good priest and most of his parish were waiting to receive us, with wine and oranges and orange blossoms from their own gardens. It is the Eden of Ithaca, — this picturesque village swung up on the terraced slopes of Neritos. With its wealth of bloom and greenery, — orange trees in fruit and flower at once, grand old olives, almonds, cherries, cedars, and carobs,—it recalls the well - wooded Ithaca of olden times : no wonder its sylvan charm drew down a good part of Anoge from their bleak hilltop, some sixty years ago. Producing much of the good wine and most of the delicious honey of the island, — with its notable schoolmaster and its genial old priest, who seemed to have infected the little community of eight hundred souls (fishermen, farmers, and potters) with their own simple kindness and good cheer, — Levlte comes near being a poem itself, and one can hardly fault Sir William Gell for recognizing in it the Garden of Laertes.

IV.

EAGLE’S CLIFF.

We had kept for our third day’s goal what the Ithacan pilgrim usually seeks at once, — the steep, strong-walled hill of Aëtos, popularly accredited as Odysseus’ castle. It is an hour’s drive from Vathý, and affords further glimpses of the Bay of Dexia, which disputes with Vathý the fame of being Odysseus’ landing place. Vathý certainly has its claims as a deep haven and for its twin headlands; but it is only here, on this gradually sloping sand beach, that the Phæacian bark could have run half her length ashore. Thus far it is the same fine English road we traveled yesterday, and a bright sun and stiff wind give a new atmospheric quality to the few bits of life by the way, — among them an old peasant (who might have been Laertes) sowing barley on a patch of rocks at the water’s edge. Thence rising over the pass, between Hagios Stephanos and this Eagle Rock which holds the two mountain masses of Ithaca together, the road leads on down to Pissaëto, the little ferry port for Kephallenia. But we stop short at the roadhouse where the ascent begins.

A glance is enough to show that we have above us one of the strongest hill forts of prehistoric Greece. Strong enough by nature, — for it rises some six hundred and fifty feet at an angle of thirty-five degrees, or (as Schliemann observed) seven degrees more steeply than the upper cone of Vesuvius, — some Titan hand has led two mighty walls converging up these slopes, one of them almost intact to-day, with a third still traceable to form the broad base of an approximately triangular circumvallation, while the summit is surrounded by yet stronger walls, which still stand twenty to twenty-five feet high, and show single blocks that would square from twenty-five to thirty feet. But impregnable as it looks from below, it is only by climbing that one comes to feel how secure and how uncomfortable a seat it was. I shall never forget that scramble over sheer rock tumbled in jagged masses, nor the blessed relief of finding a bit of level to stand on at the top. Certainly Penelope’s suitors were no milksops, if they scaled this eagle’s nest day after day to press their suit, to say nothing of getting down again when fuddled, as they mostly were before the revel ended. Nor can one readily fancy them “ putting the stone ” and casting the spear in this contracted space, where any sport ascribed to them beyond a quiet game of checkers would be impossible. A student of mine, indeed, once established the Olympic games on Mount Olympus; but Aëtos is a church steeple in comparison with that many-glenned mountain of the gods. Gell and Schliemann have between them mapped Odysseus’ lower city on the steeps between the two converging walls up which we had crept on all fours, where the former reports “ terraces . . . without doubt once occupied by the houses and streets of the town,” while the latter actually counts there “ about one hundred and ninety Cyclopean houses ; ” but they have carefully refrained from giving measurements of the narrow plateau within the upper walls which they identify as the castle. Measured by our eyes, there is scant room for a megaron to entertain a hundred suitors and more, together with a royal family that kept fifty maids, not to mention the “ assembly place before the spacious town ; ” nor could any creature but an eagle or Athene herself come down to this eyrie, as visitors are always coming down to the palace of the Odyssey. At the moment of our visit we had fain put away our unbelief, for two eagles were poised in the blue above us, recalling the pair 舠 Zeus of the farborne voice sent forth in flight from on high, from the mountain crest,” as a sign to Telemachus. The prospect, too, was one to allure a potentate of that foretime when it was convenient for him literally to keep an eye on his realm, — a fact which may throw light on Pindar’s use of the word “ watchman ” for “ king.” Whatever this high place lacked as a dwelling it made good as a watch tower: it quite commands the royal domain. Across the channel, in this transparent atmosphere, stand out Kephallenia’s “ bare mountains covered with walls like a vine leaf with veins ” (to quote my young friend Tucker’s apt figure), and among them we clearly distinguish the ruins of Samê, whence came four-andtwenty of the suitors, including that bad marksman, Ktesippos. In the dim eastern distance looms snow-clad Parnassus. So Odysseus from his castle, had this been his castle, had always in view his mother’s native hills. Who that ever thumbed his Homer lovingly can forget how “ old Autolykos, coming to Ithaca’s fat land, found a boy new born to his daughter, and when he had finished his supper Eurykleia set the child upon his knee,” and all that tender tale of How They Named the Baby, and the thrilling tale that follows of How They Hunted the Wild Boar !

Of castle and city, stony steeps and strong walls, the lord paramount at the moment is a goatherd named Euripides, with a very small boy to help him tend a dozen black goats. Their pasture is the little grassy plateau about the deep rockhewn cisterns and foundations which certainly indicate a prehistoric dwelling of some kind. Here is the spot where Dr. Schliemann began his marvelous career with the spade ; it would seem from his own words in the naïve hope of finding the roots of Odysseus’ olive-tree bedpost ! But after his conquests at Mycenæ and Tiryns and Troy, who shall smile at that simple faith ? Even Cicero might have shared it; for he may well have had in his mind’s eye this hill fort, as seen on his voyage to Athens, when he praises Odysseus for his patriotism in 舠 preferring even to immortality that Ithaca which is fixed like a bird’s nest on the most rugged rocks.”

Apart from the physical infelicity of the site, we have Dr. Dörpfeld’s word for it that the walls and all the pottery found here are post-Mycenæan. Still there can be no doubt that we have here, as Dr. Reisch puts it, “ a fortress of great age and strength, which in times of danger served as a refuge to the dwellers round about, and was of the utmost importance for the defense of the whole island ; for it commanded not only the landing places to the southeast and northwest of Mount Aëtos, but protected the only means of communication between the north and south ports of the island.”

We found the descent of Aëtos rather more nerve - shattering than the ascent, and vowed to offer in thanksgiving for deliverance the pick of the flock of fat turkeys we had seen strutting about the lonely farmhouse by the chapel of St. George at the foot of the mountain. But the price was prohibitory, — possibly because these new-fangled fowl have succeeded to the privileged estate of Penelope’s geese ; yet we hardly envied the greedy, gorging suitors as we reclined on the sunny side of the roadhouse, and stretched forth our hands to the viands from the Odysseus Inn, and then strolled down the Pissaëto road for the pure pleasure of gazing at the dimpling sea, and listening to the tinkle of sheep bells under the olives which fill the glen quite to the water’s edge.

V.

A DAY ABOUT TOWN.

Even with the Odysseus Inn and the Penelope Club the present Ithacan capital is hardly a gay or stirring town. It boasts, to be sure, a bigger fleet than the one Odysseus led to Troy, and the Ithacans are bold sailors, pushing their ventures, on occasion, even to Burmah and Boston. Then there is a steam oil press to-day where Odysseus’ long-leaved olive may have stood ; and our young host makes a hundred barrels of good red wine from his own vineyards, near Eumæus’ pastures, — proof enough that, if Ithaca no longer yields corn past telling, it is still true to its Homeric fame for wine as well as for the rain that is on it evermore.

Meantime the little isle has seen worse days. The opening of the sixteenth century found it practically depopulated, and so the Venetian Senate offered lands in fee simple and tax-free for five years to any who would take and till them. Many Kephallenians and mainland Greeks responded, and pitched their town upon the mountain to the southwest of Vathý, where the ruins of Palaiochori still show on either side of the road to Eumæus’ pastures. The two principal families among the founders dwelt apart patriarchally, giving each its own name to its quarter ; and when (about 1730) the site was abandoned to found Vathý, the clan lines were still drawn, and to this day the clans divide the town,—the Karabias giving to the eastern quarter the name of Karabata, the Petalas to the western that of Petalata, while a younger clan (Mazarata) mediates between them. This is a rare institutional survival.

From the comfortless Penelope Club, where the present head of the clan Karabias had opened to us these new chapters of Ithacan history, we betake us to the Hellenic School, which occupies three mean rooms over a barber shop, just across from the old Parnassus Inn. We catch Dr. Theodysseus — whom I had known in his university days at Athens — drilling his boys furiously in old Greek synonyms of new Greek words, laying foundations for a classical diction that should be the joy of all Hellenists who shall hereafter visit Ithaca ; while the head master, in his deacon’s robe, is hammering away at Xenophon’s Hellenica in the good old Attic. A keener lot of boys than the twenty of his first form, including one full-bearded opsimathes, I have never seen in any school. The school enrolls eighty - two boys under three masters.

From the Hellenic School, piloted by its head boy (a Greek Russell Lowell in the making), we proceed to the Parthenagogeion, which is short for girls’ school. It is a brand-new schoolhouse, built by Odysseus Karabias, on the higher ground above the harbor, with free space about it and fine outlook. In its two rooms, both on the ground floor, two mistresses are at work. The first, a graduate of the Arsakeion, and a beauty, is in charge of the two lower classes, one of which reads an entertaining lesson on Town and Country; the other mistress, dignified, but plain, teaches the two upper classes, one of which makes a most effective recitation on Solonian history. Nor is the headwork all. The hands, too, are in training to turn out beautiful things and useful, after the fashion of Penelope. The school enrolls one hundred and twenty girls, though there are two private schools for girls in the place, besides ; and the teachers would certainly take good rank in an American city twenty times as populous as Ithaca.

The Demotic School of two hundred boys we did not see; but there are ten schools of this grade in the island, with six hundred pupils.

The Ithacans (says Meliarakes) are distinguished for their love of learning; and the Earl of Guilford was bent on establishing his Ionian University here, “ amid mountains and rocks hallowed by a thousand memories, and in groves and gardens which Plato would have preferred to his Academe.” The president of that university (which was, in fact, founded in Corfu), Sir George Bowen, wrote of Ithaca fifty years ago, “ There are very few peasants who do not possess at least the rudiments of a good education,” whereas Schliemann declares (1868) that scarcely one man in fifty can read! Doubtless the Englishman was better authority, after a three years’ residence, than the German, whose stay was not as many weeks.

VI.

AT HOME WITH HOMER.

We had Rainy Zeus, or (as Otto Gilbert might say) his double of the Heavenly Wet, to thank for one more Ithacan day. Our company were bent on crossing the channel to see old Samê, and there meet the Pylaros on her return from Leucadia ; but the dismal daybreak cooled even the youngest ardor, and gave me what I coveted, — an almost unbroken day at home with Homer. Over the best fire mine host could provide — alas ! it was no ten-foot-through Homeric hearth piled high with blazing logs, but only a battered tin bathtub filled with hot ashes and embers — I bent me to the delightful task of reading all the Ithacan story on Ithacan soil. The task was done when, at five o’clock, the masters of the Hellenic School dropped in to afternoon coffee. Over the cups we discussed the South African War to please them, and to please us they took turns at rhapsodizing snatches of their own poet.

The day’s reading had rounded to its proper close my Ithacan pilgrimage ; I had lived over the whole great story from Athene-Mentes’ first appearance to the final brush with the suitors’ friends. I had followed Odysseus’ every step, from his landing here, fast asleep, until the gray-eyed goddess stayed his red right hand ; and, taking due note of dawns and sunsets, I found the poet had given him just five days for the whole business, ere he need fare forth again, where landlubbers should mistake his oar for a winnowing fan. We too had done Ithaca in five days, — and brief December days at that, — and were content to board the prompt little Pylaros as the sun went down, and launch out again on the wet ways.

J. Irving Manatt.