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The Scheria of the ODYSSEY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
Two main views of the country called in the Odyssey the Land of the Phaeacians or Scheria are current among Homeric scholars. Some think it is, or is in, the island known to the ancients as Corcyra, and that the people who are described as living in it were ordinary flesh and blood mortals. The other view, the belief of the majority, though of great variety, is that Scheria is in fairyland or some other supramundane sphere, and a creation of the poet's fancy. In Class. Rev. XXIV. 204 Mr. Evelyn-White says, after quoting Monro, that it ‘cannot be disputed’ that the Phaeacian and other adventures of Odysseus are Märchen, so the matter is as good as closed. But as many of the Homeric choses jugées of last century have been proved of recent years to be unsubstantial, it has seemed worth while to examine the fairyland theory afresh. I begin with a survey of the literature of the question, and shall then inquire in a second paper what Homeric foundation there is for the supernatural theory. Elsewhere I shall endeavour to show that Homer describes a real people, and that Scheria can be fitted into the Mediterranean world, as we now know it, of the latest Minoan or Mycenaean period, and is in fact a Minoan settlement in Corcyra.
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1919
References
page 5 note 1 This is one point of resemblance — cf. μ 432 sq. — which is deemed very striking. But it is to be noted that it is no part of the Phaeacian story, and, further, that the ‘fig tree’ is not the same in the two tales. The έρινεóς of the Odyssey is the wild progenitor of the edible fig (Ficus Carica). The tree in the Somadeva is the banyan (Ficus Indica), made famous by the description in Paradise Lost XI. IIOI sqq. Cp. Tawney's Translation of the Kathā Sarit Sāgara I. 220. Reading this story of Śaktideva in that collection, and others in it, I do not feel of impressed by the resemblances: and perhaps too little attention has been paid to the differences, In the Arabian Nights (Lane, Vol. iii. 7) a hero similarly saves himself by clinging to a branch.
page 6 note 1 Siecke, , in Hermes der Mondgott, 38Google Scholar , says a Moon God. He does not appear to deal with the adventure in Phaeacia, which presumably must be interpreted as an eclipse.
page 8 note 1 Osterwald, op. cit. 90, had thought of Atlantis. But he wrote in 1853, long before the archaeologist had restored the Minoan Age.
page 9 note 1 A friend has sent me the Occult Review for January, 1913, and copies of Light for March, 1917. What value can be assigned to the papers in them on Atlantis I am unable to say.
page 10 note 1 I do not think that among the numerous attempted derivations of the name there is, so far, any explanation by the Cretists that would suit their theory.
page 11 note 1 So some ‘learned man’ in Dodwell's time. See his Tour through Greece, I. 32. Alkinoos is Solomon!