Page:The geography of Strabo (1854) Volume 1.djvu/54

 40 STRABO. BOOK i. view while composing, is false; real advantage, not trifling, being his aim. We may justly reprehend his assertion on this point, as also where he says, that Homer places the scene of his marvels in distant lands that he may lie the more easily. Remote localities have not furnished him with near so many wonderful narrations as Greece, and the countries thereto ad- jacent; witness the labours of Hercules, and Theseus, the fables concerning Crete, Sicily, and the other islands ; besides those connected with Cithaerum, Helicon, 1 Parnassus, 2 Pelion, 3 and the whole of Attica and the Peloponnesus. Let us not therefore tax the poets with ignorance on account of the myths which they employ, and since, so far from myth being the staple, they for the most part avail themselves of actual oc- currences, (and Homer does this in a remarkable degree,) the inquirer who will seek how far these ancient writers have wandered into fiction, ought not to scrutinize to what extent the fiction was carried, but rather what is the truth concern- ing those places and persons to which the fictions have been applied ; for instance, whether the wanderings of Ulysses did actually occur, and where. 20. On the whole, however, it is not proper to place the works of Homer in the common catalogue of other poets, without challenging for him a superiority both in respect of his other [excellences] and also for the geography on which our attention is now engaged. If any one were to do no more than merely read through the Triptolemus of Sophocles, or the prologue to the Bacchce of Euripides, and then compare them with the care taken by Homer in his geographical descriptions, he would at once perceive both the difference and superiority of the latter, for wherever there is necessity for arrangement in the localities he has immortalized, he is careful to preserve it as well in regard to Greece, as to foreign countries. " They On the Olympian summit thought to fix Huge Ossa, and on Ossa's towering head Pelion with all his forests," 4 1 Cytheeron and Helicon, two mountains of Boeotia, the latter of which is now named Zagaro Voreni. 2 Parnassus, a mountain of Phocis, near Delphi. 3 Pelion, a mountain of Magnesia, in Thessaly. 4 They attempted to place Ossa upon Olympus, and upon Ossa leafy