ard of
Cephallenia, but northeastward. A reasonable inference is that Homer
was not an Ithacan, and did not know the island very well, though he
may have seen it in a passing visit. Anaximander with his first map
comes after Homer several hundred years.

The present Book has three plainly marked portions. First comes the
wanton attack on the Ciconians, which connects immediately with the
Trojan experience of Ulysses. Second is the country of the
Lotus-eaters, to which he and his companions are driven by wind and
storm. Third is the Land of the Cyclops, especially of Polyphemus, with
whom he has his chief adventures. The first two portions are quite
brief, are in fact introductory to the third, which takes up more than
four-fifths of the Book, and is the Fairy Tale proper. We may observe
the gradual transition: the Ciconians are a real people in geography
and history; the Lotus-eaters are getting mythical, are but half-way
historical; the Cyclops belong wholly to Fableland. Thus there is a
movement out of the Trojan background of reality into the Fairy World.

Having marked the dividing lines, the next thing will be to find the
connecting links between these three portions. They are not thrown
together haphazard or externally joined into one Book; they have an
internal thought which unifies them and which must be brought to light.
The poet sees in images which are separate, but the thinker must unite
these images by their inner necessity, and thus justify anew the poet.

I.

The first sentence strikes the leading thought: "The wind, bearing me
from Troy, brought me to the Ciconians." Troy is the starting-point,
the background out of which everything moves. After the fall of the
city Nestor gives an account of the disputes of the Greek leaders and
their separation (Book III. l. 134 et seq.); Ulysses is driven alone
with his contingent across the sea toward Thrace, where he finds a city
in peace, though it had been an ally of Troy. "I sacked the city, I
destroyed its people;" he treated them as he did the Trojans, "taking
as booty their wives and property." Such is the spirit begotten of that
ten years' war in the character of Ulysses, a spirit of violence and
rapine, totally unfitted for a civilized life, at bottom negative to
Family and State. This is the spiritual starting-point from which he is
to return to home and country through a long, long, but very needful
discipline.

He is well aware that he has done so