DOI Kapitel:
Chapter V: To the West of Naples
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.59000#0201
To the West of Naples
that the Greek Homer was the sole author, while
Odysseus, the great navigator, was himself a Phenician.
For the Greeks, he argues, travelled but little in those
days, a thousand years before Christ, while the Phenicians
were of course the great sailors of the world, spread-
ing the stories and legends of their birthplace to far-off
lands, and thus providing the vast material from which
Homeric descriptions are drawn. The idea that the
Greek mind could be so exquisitely visionary as to blend
into their great legends purely imaginative and almost
fantastic scenery, is contrary to his conception of their
character, and is a view (he thinks) detracting from the
value of the poems, which can be fully understood only
by those who, accepting the Homeric geography as exact
in every detail, realise that since the days of antiquity
the mariner’s route is still all unchanged, and that the
names and terms through which the Odyssean voyage
has been transmitted to us are in sense identical still.
To illustrate this view, Monsieur Berard traces
Phenician roots in the Greek names lingering round the
Italian coast from Capri to Antium. In the Cape of
the Vulture, between Cumas and Gaeta, he finds the
secret of the genealogy of Circe, daughter of Kyrkos, a
bird sacred to Apollo, and of Perse, a word which in
Greek would have no apparent meaning, but in Semitic
signifies a bird of prey and has been translated “ eagle
of the sea.” Then, again, the strange drug, “ Moly,”
which Hermes gave to Odysseus, black at its root and
with a flower like milk, and so hard to uproot that only
the Gods succeeded, has itself a Semitic name which
95
that the Greek Homer was the sole author, while
Odysseus, the great navigator, was himself a Phenician.
For the Greeks, he argues, travelled but little in those
days, a thousand years before Christ, while the Phenicians
were of course the great sailors of the world, spread-
ing the stories and legends of their birthplace to far-off
lands, and thus providing the vast material from which
Homeric descriptions are drawn. The idea that the
Greek mind could be so exquisitely visionary as to blend
into their great legends purely imaginative and almost
fantastic scenery, is contrary to his conception of their
character, and is a view (he thinks) detracting from the
value of the poems, which can be fully understood only
by those who, accepting the Homeric geography as exact
in every detail, realise that since the days of antiquity
the mariner’s route is still all unchanged, and that the
names and terms through which the Odyssean voyage
has been transmitted to us are in sense identical still.
To illustrate this view, Monsieur Berard traces
Phenician roots in the Greek names lingering round the
Italian coast from Capri to Antium. In the Cape of
the Vulture, between Cumas and Gaeta, he finds the
secret of the genealogy of Circe, daughter of Kyrkos, a
bird sacred to Apollo, and of Perse, a word which in
Greek would have no apparent meaning, but in Semitic
signifies a bird of prey and has been translated “ eagle
of the sea.” Then, again, the strange drug, “ Moly,”
which Hermes gave to Odysseus, black at its root and
with a flower like milk, and so hard to uproot that only
the Gods succeeded, has itself a Semitic name which
95