No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
In all European literature there is nothing more justly famous than Odysseus' meeting with Nausicaa in Bk. vi of the Odyssey. Editors of the Odyssey from antiquity to the present day have agreed in regarding the land of the Phaeacians and Scheria, their city, as an imaginary place, although it is remarked from time to time that it may be drawn from some real place and the Phaeacians from a real people. But there is in fact sufficient internal evidence in the poem to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that Scheria is to be identified with Trapani in northwestern Sicily. The extraordinary thing is that no one ever realized this seemingly obvious fact or sought to make the identification until Samuel Butler did so some sixty years ago. His book, The Authoress of the Odyssey, published in 1897, was, however, so badly received that all its contents, good and bad alike, were rejected as so much rubbish. The only informed consideration his theories have ever received came from Professor Farrington (recently retired from the University College of Swansea), who wrote in general support of them in 1929, when lecturer at Cape Town University. No one, so far as the author of this article has been able to ascertain, has ever so much as paid a visit to Trapani in order to see Butler's country and to check his facts, until he and his son did so in the summer of 1952.
page 125 note 1 Cf. Od. i. 73Google Scholar, vii. 54 ff., 205–6. The title of the Odyssey is omitted in subsequent references.
page 125 note 2 vi. 4–9.
page 126 note 1 vii. 319–23.
page 126 note 2 vi. 204–5.
page 126 note 3 vi. 264.
page 126 note 4 The Travels of Ihn Jubayr, trans, by Broadhurst, R. J. C. (London, 1952), pp. 351–2.Google Scholar
page 126 note 5 vi. 263.
page 126 note 6 vi. 264–9.
page 126 note 7 v. 436–43.
page 128 note 1 v. 475–93.
page 128 note 2 vi. 85–101.
page 128 note 3 viii. 567–9, xiii. 149–52, 154–8, 175–7, 183.
page 128 note 4 viii. 35; cf. Thuc. i. 14. i.
page 129 note 1 xiii. 155–8.
page 130 note 1 Ap. Rhod., Arg. iv. 986–91.Google Scholar
page 130 note 2 Pro Plancia, 64.Google Scholar
page 130 note 3 Strabo i. 2. 37.
page 130 note 4 [Since this article was written in 1953 the author has taken the argument further in two recent publications (see Notes on Contributors, p. 148). Another book, The Phoenician Background of the Odyssey, is in preparation.—EDD.]