The Cruise of the Branwen

FROM ITALY TO GREECE "the Pleiads and BolStes that setteth late, and the Bear, which they likewise call the Wain, which turneth ever in one place, and keepeth watch upon Orion, and alone hath no part in the baths of Ocean." * The last line recurs in Iliad xviii. 489, and is evidently taken straight out of the Phrenician "Pilot's Guide," on which Homer based his seafaring episodes. The thing which modern critics have never discovered is that if you followed these directions now your course would lie about 500 miles in the interior of Africa. But the Rev. Dr. Pearson, D.D. (Proc. Cambs. Phil. Soc. 1881, vol. iv. pt. ii. p. 93),has calculated that in the springtime on the Mediterranean the Bear was just above the horizon, near the sea but not touch– ing it (having" no part in the baths of Ocean"), at a period before 750 B.c. and after 1000 B.c., exactly the time in which the origin of the poems is deduced from other arguments that have never employed this striking and beautiful confirmation. Modern Homeric scholars are not alone in their inattention to astronomical accuracy in classsical authors, for Pliny and Columella, writing in the latter half of the first century A.D., carelessly copy Hesiod in saying that Arcturus was visible early on the 23rd or 21st February, whereas on those days the sun set in Rome at about half past five, and the star would not have passed their horizon * IlA17iaaar r' £<TopruvT( ,cal ofE avovm {3ochr17v "Ap,crov IP, ~v ,cal a.JULtav £TrLKA1J<TLV ,ca'A.fovuiv, "H r' avrov <rrpl.<pffat ,cal r' 'flplwva aolC(UH, 0,17 a' cf.µµopor E<TTL AOffpruv 'il,crnvo'io. Od. v. 272-5.