A HOME FOR ULYSSES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 941, 23 August 1957, Page 17

A HOME FOR ULYSSES

THE SICILIAN ORIGIN OF THE ODYSSEY, a study of Topographical Evidence, by L. G. Pocock; New Zealand University Press, Wellington. "HIS booklet is fresh proof of how ‘much the Odyssey, which has been called the world’s first novel, and still perhaps the best, belongs, like the Iliad, to mankind. It also shows that, however much the classics may be on the defensive in new lands, such societies can contribute to classical scholarship. New Zealand was still in the pioneering stage when she began to send classical scholars to win distinction overseas. Now Professor L. G. Pocock, born in Cape Town, educated in England, and for many years Professor of Classics at Canterbury College, has published locally (another sign that we nourish the ancients) revolutionary theories about Homer. True, a German view that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not by the same poet, was widely accepted last century, but opinion swung round to what Andrew Lang called Homer’s "indivisible supremacy." We have been brought up to accept without question the Odyssey as Homer, and the island of Ithaca, off the coast of Greece, as the Ithaca, Ulysses’ home, in the story. It is to this Ithaca that Uly$ses returns after his wanderings. Professor Pocock says "No." Following Samuel Butler, whose theory must have suffered with scholars by being joined to the idea of a woman poet, Professor Pocock places "Ithaca" where the town of Trapani stands today in north-west Sicily, 500 miles westward. He contends that the Odyssey is a Western Mediterranean story, and not an Eastern (he puts Ulysses’ underworld in the Strait of Gibraltar), and that it was written late and not by Homer. He has, of course, to refer freely to the text, but he translates, and the reader should be able to follow step by step this fascinating piece of literary detection. Professor Pocock has done a great deal of research, including visits to places concerned. Landscape and seascape, islands, sea shores, palaces, caves, rivers, winds, maps, landfalls, farm production, customs, myths and historyall are cited to support his thesis. Firmly but modestly he accepts Butler’s claim for the Sicilian Trapani; "the most important discovery in the whole history of Homeric scholarship." New Zealand has her own stake in Butler. May he have been helped to his theory by the mixture of classical scholarship and mountain air in the’ Canterbury settlement? Professor Pocock plans to give us more of this informative and stimulating analysis. How the champions of orthodoxy will

react remains to be seen.

A.

M.