of the labors of these authors, he justly has heretofore that our topographical knowlege of the plain of Troy has heretofore been very imperfect. He accounts for this imperfection, also, from the inconveniences of travelling along so unfrequented a coast; those who visited it having been obliged, by the want of alle accommodation on shore, to pass the night in boats anchored at Tenedos or in the Dardanelles, and being therefore unable to penetrate above ten or twelve miles into the country. Some persons also examined the Troad in the rainy and others in the dry season; a circumstance sufficient to create considerable discordance in their observations. Mr. W., therefore, felt the necessity of looking for the sources of the rivers among the mountains, and resolved to trace the course of every brook which watered the plain. His party accommodated themselves at night in the best asylum that they could procure; and they were assured by the hospitable mountaineers of the district, that no Frank had ever been there before them. The following comments on Homer, as himself an evidence on this interesting question, are too valuable to be omitted: It is really singular that, up to a certain period, no one had compared Homer, not with the present aspect of Phrygia, or with the antient historians and geographers, but with himself; or had inquired whether, in his descriptions of this country, the poet has been uniformly consistent. This, however, has at length been done in the laborious treatise of Spon. We must not be surprized at the result of such an examination, for we are not to expect from a poet the exactness of a geometrician. It is the province of his art to paint every object in captivating and beautiful colours; for the same apparent credibility is alike bestowed by his pencil on all his descriptions, whether of the inaccessible caves of ocean, the etherial palaces of Olympus, the plain of Troy, or the perilous rocks of Ithaca. A poet has the licence to feign that which never happened: πάρεστι μέν γάρ τῷ ποιητὴ καὶ πλαττειν τά μή οντα *; and, as to the geographical faith which is to be conceded to the poesy of Homer, and the propensity natural to poetry of magnifying and embellishing its subjects, Thucydides remarks, Oppe minded axin mal ἐνταῦθα πιστέυειν, ἣν εικος επί το μείζον μεν ποιητήν κοσμήσαι, † In an other place, Strabo adds that it was an assumption of Homer that no Phrygians came "from afar" to Troy, & Aguavíns ‡ ; and the word ', in this passage, ought to be taken as a mere superfluous and expletive phrase, as when he speaks of the venerable mother of Io, or of the large hand of the beautiful Penelope." Moreover, when he speaks of the Troad in the thirteenth book, he remarks that his principal difficulty arose from the dis Il. 1. 2. v. 863.29 15 Strab. p. 345. + Thucyd. 1. i. ། བ crepancies and obscurities of writers who had already treated the subject, and particularly those of Homer himself: whence it may be inferred that the antients did not receive Homer's authority as indisputable and conclusive. The moderns have brought still more serious accusations against him. Wolfe, in his Prolegomena, shews that the identical Pylæmenes, who was killed by Menelaus in the fifth book, re-appears in the thirteenth, accompanying the corse of his son; and numerous discrepancies of this kind were collected by the indefatigable Spon. Diomed, for instance, is said to have been covered with armour made by Vulcan: but, in the sixth book, he changes all his arms, as being of little value, for the golden mail of Glaucus. In his geography, which more particularly concerns the argument, we shall find still greater confusion. Troy, for example, is generally described as placed on an eminence: 'Ixía ameivñs: but in the twentieth book, v. 216., επει επω Ἴλιος ίρή it appears to have been built upon a plain. How are we to find the hill of fig-trees, ipives? In the sixth book, v. 433., and in other passages, it is placed near the wall of the city; and in the eleventh book, it is situated in the midst of the plain, proov nanπεδιον παρ ̓ ἔρινεον εσσεύοντο, and the Trojan fugitives could not for a considerable time regain from it the Scæan gate and the beechtree. (P.18-21.) UT ין The author then enters into an elaborate topographical inquiry respecting the site of the tomb of Ilus; completely overturns the pretensions of Bonar-Baschi to be the place of "the sacred city" and shews the labyrinth of absurdity into which the hypothesis of Le Chevalier conducts us. He observes that this fanciful writer, whose system has been so readily adopted, marks the springs of Bonar-Baschi on his chart as being one hot and the other cold, in order to make them correspond with the Homeric description; whereas, in point of fact, those springs were found to be of the same temperature by Clarke and Hobhouse: while a little contemptible pool about fifteen feet wide, creeping ingloriously among bushes, and flowing from these springs, is converted into the Scamander itself, the great, the terrible, the deep, the rushing, the immortal Scamander; and, to complete the picture, this insignificant puddle pours its waters into the Mender, a mighty stream, almost the second river in Asia! Mr. WEBB satisfactorily exposes the other absurdities of M. Le Chevalier's theory, and then refers to the traditional notices still extant concerning Troy; arguing that they * they contain every species of evidence that can be rationally expected on such a question. He asserts that Homer availed himself of the existing traditions of the country; that his episodes celebrate the actions of the chiefs of the race of Pelops, and those of Eolian descent; and that he seems to have collected all the traditions respecting the colony which peopled this part of the coast. Many bards, before Homer, had sung the war of Troy, and it was from their rhapsodies that he gathered the materials of his poem. Mr. W. regrets with Heyne the loss of the "Cyclic poems," and of the Homerides, from which Thucydides takes much of his narrative of the Trojan war: but time has spared many precious relics of antient art in gems and vases, representing events of the Trojan war which Homer has not recorded. The traditions, in which all antiquity believed, coming in aid of the Homeric geography, formed the basis on which the antients raised their system, combined with the testimonies of the poet himself. Comparing antient authorities with existing localities, the author attempts, we think, successfully, (and the excellent map annexed to his dissertation confirms the truth of his reasoning,) to frame a solid and coherent system. ! The ensuing remarks contain several useful and valuable. hints. 1 We require new facts, new observations, new discoveries of historical localities, exact distances, &c. &c. We want, moreover, a good map of Asia. There are few tolerable roads in Turkey; and the natives in their journeys express the distance of places by hours, having no other rule of admeasurement. Every hour may be generally reckoned as three miles; and travellers must adopt the same mode of computation: observing also that the reckoning of the natives denotes the time which the caravans take, and which is so uniform through the Turkish empire as to constitute a steady rule of computation, whereas that of foreign travellers varies individually. Many new scites of antient cities are still to be discovered; and the word Eski, or Palaio, added to the name of a place, ought invariably to induce a traveller tot deviate from his route and visit it, as he will in all probability find something to repay his trouble. It is also of great use to notezʊ the locality of coins; that is, the places where they are founding great abundance. The course of rivers and the bearings of mountains are too generally neglected, though they are the most durable testimonies. Astronomical instruments, however, though absolutely necessary, cannot be carried without injury. A common chronometer will not bear the motion of a horse or a camel. but pocket-watches are made in London so strongly constructed· as to answer the purpose.' (P. 31.); MIT Mr. W. TO Mr. W. then proceeds to establish the site of Troy by an other course of reasoning. The chain of mountains, of which, the modern Kasdagh is the summit and the nucleus, (the Garganus of the antients,) he shews to be the Ida of Homer. Here, then, is a fixed point to determine the situation of the city; and another fixed Homeric point is the Hellespont, which no one has ever doubted to be the streights of the Dardanelles," separating," as Homer himself says, "Thrace from Asia." (Il. I. ii. v. 844.) This streight terminates at Sigæum, or near Rhætium. We have thus a plain defended, by mountains, and "girt by the wide Hellespont." He next goes on to fix the coast and its boundaries; and, as we cannot pursue him into this elaborate and learned inquiry, we can only pronounce it to be our sincere opinion that his argument is clear, satisfactory, and convincing. In Tepe he shews to have been the Aianteum; and Rhætium being also demonstrated to be about thirty stadia southward of it, he proves that the Sigaan and Achillean promontories must be nearly at the same distance. The exact site of the city of Sigæum he also makes out very satisfactorily, and fixes the tombs of Achilles, Patroclus, and Antilochus. This, however, is but vague and hazardous conjecture; at variance, indeed, with Homer, who tells us that Achilles hastily erected a tumulus over Patroclus, having deposited his remains in an urn, and intimating his wish⠀ that his own ashes were to be placed in the same sepulchre: There let them rest, with decent honour laid, Till I shall follow to the infernal shade. Meantime erect the tomb with pious hands, A common structure on the humble sands. 2: Hereafter, Greece some nobler work may raise, And late posterity record our praise ;" " that afterward the remains of Antilochus were mixed in the same urn; and that the sons of the Greeks, as it appears from a passage in the Odyssey, raised a vast tumulus over them. The separate tumulus of Antilochus is therefore a superfluous conjecture. The result of Mr. W.'s investigations is that the Achilleum, or the hill usually called the tomb of Achilles, was constructed by the antients, and actually was the place where that hero was buried. He is also of opinion that the new Ilium, which the Æolian colonists erected on the coast after the fall of Troy, was not built on the ruins of the antient city, but at some distance from it; in consequence, as Strabo asserts, of the sinister augury inherent to a place renowned for its disasters. The ruins discovered at Palaio Califatli, by Dr. Clarke, HAW were 3 1 were with good reason considered by that traveller to be those of New Ilium, and Mr. W. strongly concurs with him. It stood in a commanding station immediately above the Grecian camp, two miles and a half from the embouchure of the Scamander, and a mile and a half from the sea. It was fortified by Lysimachus, and was afterward a and was afterward a Roman colony. Forty stadia or five miles eastward of New Ilium, was a remarkable hill; which even in the time of Strabo retained the Homeric appellation of Callicone, and the base of which was watered by the Simois. It was between these two points, according to Dr. Clarke, ten stadia from the Callicone, and thirty from New Ilium, that the village stood which was supposed to mark the site of the antient capital of Priam. This village, which was also believed by Strabo to be its real site, was in his days called Ilia; (Iliensium pagus;) and it is to Dr. Clarke that we are indebted for pointing out Tchiblak as the probable place where it stood. However this may be, we perfectly agree with the present author that the New Ilium was not the city of Troy; a conclusion to which both he and Dr. Clarke were led by the correct guidance of Strabo. If nothing farther be established, then, by these reasonings, the errors of Le Chevalier, and of the tourists who successively acquiesced in his hypothesis, are fully demonstrated. That author having unfortunately stumbled on Bonar-Baschi, both he and his followers occupied themselves in the vain attempt to reconcile contradictions on the western bank of the Meander, instead of pointing their researches eastward a direction to which Strabo expressly points. An important addition, which Mr. WEBB has made to our very imperfect knowlege of the Troad, is to be found in his researches concerning the rivers of the plain: si vixi2 to 1 A tongue of earth divided Simoisia (the plain in the midst of which ran the Simois) from the Scamandrian plain the last being properly the Ilian or Trojan plain, and the largest of the two. The Scamander, adjacently to the Sigean promontory, and the Simois to that of Rhætium, united their streams in front of Ilium; formsing a marsh, which flows afterward into the sea by the Sigrean promontory. This exact description of Strabo corresponds with the present state of the country. The reader has only to cast his eyes novers our map, to be convinced that the Ghumbrek-dere su, viz. the river of the vale of Ghumbrek, is the Simois; and that the 5 Mendere-su is the Xanthus, or Scamander of the antients. The account given by Pliny is this?" Dein portus Achivoram in quém influit Xanthus Simoenti junetus stagnum prius faciens Palce Sca21201 doitiz acneits *** We have collected these rational conjectures from the second part of this lamented writer's Travels in Greece, Egypt, &c. &c. mander." |