[1]It has been conjectured that the Ogygia of Calypso was a small barren island just south of Sardinia. There is no evidence in favor of the theory, but it is possible. I adopt it in the route map faute de mieux.
[2]The Lotophagitis has been recently plausibly identified with Jerba, on the coast of Tunis, the word rotos being still used there, evidently a survival of some primitive language, for the date; and the transliteration of rotos to lotos being according to Grimm’s law, see Reinach’s letter to the Nation (Mar. 13, 1884) on Jerba. It is easy to understand that the Greek, coming from a country where the conditions of life were hard and the fare of Homeric simplicity, should find the conditions of North African existence tempting beyond resistance, and the delicious date, (constituting the principal and often exclusive food of the people, quite sufficient, in fact, for all needs,) a temptation to abandon the toils and dangers of a return home. The inevitable poetical exaggeration adds the magic power.
[3]Cimmerians have been conjecturally identified with the Cymri, the Cimmerian darkness with the fogs of England and the North Sea countries, and there is nothing but conjecture in the case.
[4]The text leaves a doubt if he even retained his hold on this, as it describes his striking out with the veil of Leucothea under his breast.
[5]I saw, at a recent meeting of the German archÆological Institute at Rome, exquisite bronze castings found in a lake city of northern Italy, of which the latest possibly assignable date is 1500 B. C. Various data, which it is not the place here to discuss, have led me to the conclusion that bronze working was independently discovered in Italy at a period long anterior to any intercourse with Greece, and that it probably went from Italy to Corinth, where it is said to have been discovered.
[6]I suspect the word which I have translated Sicilian to be a mistake in transcribing, for Homer evidently knew nothing of Sicily or he would have given it its name when dealing with the hero’s adventures there. It is however possible that he knew the island by name but had not identified it with Ulysses’ Cyclops-land.
[7]The confusion which is so common between Aphrodite, the Greek goddess, and Astarte, the Phoenician, had its beginning at Cythera. It is only in later Greek mythology that they are confounded. The true Aphrodite was the first-born of Zeus, the creating Intelligence, and Dione the prolific Earth—Spirit and Matter—and Aphrodite was Divine Love;—Astarte, lust.
[8]The worthlessness of the testimony of d’Urville is shown by this statement—no hand has ever held or touched this drapery, as the least examination shows.
