is Greek, he bought a copy of
the Odyssey and was so fascinated by it that he could not put it
down. When he came to the Phoeacian episode of Ulysses at Scheria
he felt he must be reading the description of a real place and that
something in the personality of the author was eluding him. For
months he was puzzled, and, to help in clearing up the mystery, set
about translating the poem. In August, 1891, he had preceded me to
Chiavenna and on a letter I wrote him, telling him when to expect
me, he made this note:

It was during the few days I was at Chiavenna (at the Hotel
Grotta Crimee) that I hit upon the feminine authorship of the
Odyssey. I did not find out its having been written at Trapani
till January, 1892.

He suspected that the authoress in describing both Scheria and
Ithaca was drawing from her native country and searched on the
Admiralty charts for the features enumerated in the poem; this led
him to the conclusion that the country could only be Trapani, Mount
Eryx, and the AEgadean Islands. As soon as he could after this
discovery he went to Sicily to study the locality and found it in
all respects suitable for his theory; indeed, it was astonishing how
things kept turning up to support his view. It is all in his book
The Authoress of the Odyssey, published in 1897 and dedicated to his
friend Cavaliere Biagio Ingroja of Calatafimi.

His first visit to Sicily was in 1892, in August--a hot time of the
year, but it was his custom to go abroad in the autumn. He returned
to Sicily every year (except one), but latterly went in the spring.
He made many friends all over the island, and after his death the
people of Calatafimi called a street by his name, the Via Samuel
Butler, "thus," as Ingroja wrote when he announced the event to me,
"honouring a great man's memory, handing down his name to posterity,
and doing homage to the friendly English nation." Besides showing
that the Odyssey was written by a woman in Sicily and translating
the poem into English prose, he also translated the Iliad, and, in
March, 1895, went to Greece and the Troad to see the country therein
described, where he found nothing to cause him to disagree with the
received theories.

It has been said of him in a general way that the fact of an opinion
being commonly held was enough to make him profess the opposite. It
was enough to make him examine the opinion for himself, when it
affected any of the many subjects which interested hi