Page:The geography of Strabo (1854) Volume 1.djvu/83

 CHAP. ii. 36. INTRODUCTION. 69 of the real facts, but merely to amuse by a deceptive narra- tion of the impossible and marvellous. If they appear to do this in ignorance, it is because they can romance more fre- quently and with greater plausibility on those things which are uncertain and unknown. This Theopompus plainly con- fesses in the announcement of his intention to relate the fables in his history in a better style than Herodotus, Ctesias, Hel- lanicus, and those who had written on the affairs of India. 36. Homer has described to us the phenomena of the ocean under the form of a myth ; this [art] is very desirable in a poet ; the idea of his Charybdis was taken from the ebb and flow of the tide, and w r as by no means a pure inven- tion of his own, but derived from what he knew concerning the Strait of Sicily. 1 And although he states that the ebb and flow occurred thrice during the four and twenty hours, instead of twice, " (Each day she thrice disgorges, and each day Thrice swallows it,") 2 we must suppose that he said this not through any ignorance of the fact, but for tragic effect, and to excite the fear which Circe endeavours to infuse into her arguments to deter Ulysses from departing, even at a little expense of truth. The following is the language Circe makes use of in her speech to him : " Each day she thrice disgorges, and each day Thrice swallows it. Ah! we 11 -forewarn'd beware What time she swallows, that thou come not nigh, For not himself, Neptune, could snatch thee thence." 3 And yet when Ulysses was ingulfed in the eddy he was not lost. He tells us himself, ' It was the time when she absorb'd profound The briny flood, but by a wave upborne, I seized the branches fast of the wild fig, To which bat-like I clung." 4 1 The Strait of Messina. 2 For thrice in a day she sends it out, and thrice she sucks it in. Odyssey xii. 105. 3 For thrice in a day she sends it out, and thrice she sucks it in terribly. Mayest thou not come hither when she is gulping it ; for not even Nep- tune could free thee from ill. Odyssey xii. 1U5. 4 She gulped up the briny water of the sea ; but I, raised on high to the lofty fig-tree, held clinging to it, as a bat. Odyssey xii. 431.