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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: INV-JED |
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ITHACA ('IeaK77) , vulgarly Thiaki (Wan), next to Paxo the smallest of the seven Ionian Islands, with an area of about 44 sq. m. It forms an eparchy.of the nomos of Cephalonia in the kingdom of Greece, and its population, which was 9873 in 187o, is now about 13,000. The island consists of two mountain masses, connected by a narrow isthmus of hills, and separated by a wide inlet of the sea known as the Gulf of Molo. The northern and greater mass culminates in the heights of Anoi (265o ft.), and the southern in Hagios Stephanos, or Mount
chief
Mount
supply ; and olive oil, wine and currants are the principal products obtained by the cultivation of the thin stratum of soil that covers the calcareous rocks. Goats are fed in considerable number on the brushwood pasture of the hills; and hares (in spite of Aristotle's supposed assertion of their absence) are exceptionally abundant. The island is divided into four districts: Vathy, Aeto (or Eagle's Cliff), Anoge (Anoi) or Upland, and Exoge (Exoi) or Outland.The name has remained attached to the island from the earliest historical times with but little interruption of the tradition; though in Brompton's travels (12th century) and in the old Venetian maps we find it called Fale or Val de Compar, and at a later date it not unfrequently appears as Little Cephalonia. This last name indicates the general character of Ithacan history (if history it can be called) in modern and indeed in ancient times; for the fame of the island is almost solely due to its position in the Homeric story of Odysseus. Ithaca, according to the Homeric epos, was the royal seat and residence of King Odysseus. The island is incidentally described with no small variety of detail, picturesque and topographical; the Homeric localities for which counterparts have been sought are Mount Neritos, Mount Neion, the harbour of Phorcys, the town and palace of Odysseus, the fountain of Arethusa, the cave of the Naiads, the stalls of the swineherd Eumaeus, the orchard of Laertes, the Korax or Raven Cliff and the island Asteris, where the suitors lay in ambush for Telemachus. Among the " identificationists there are two schools, one placing the town at Polis on the west coast in the northern half of the island (Leake, Gladstone, &c.), and the other at Aeto on the isthmus. The latter site, which was advocated by Sir William Gell (Topography and Antiquities of Ithaca, London, 1807), was supported by Dr H. Schliemann, who carried on excavations in 1873 and 1878 (see H. Schliemann, Ithaque, le Peloponnese, Troie, Paris, 1869, also published in German; his letter to The Times, 26th of September, 1878; and the author's life prefixed to Ilios, London, 188o). But his results were mainly negative. The fact is that no amount of ingenuity can reconcile the descriptions given in the Odyssey with the actual topography of this island. Above all, the passage in which the position of Ithaca is described offers great
lying, as Ithaca does, just to the east
See, besides the works already referred to, the separate works on Ithaca by Schreiber ( Leipzig
1832) ; N. Karavias Grivas ('Ioropia r;~s vit rov 'I06.hns) (Athens, 1849) ; Bowen
Buchholz
Leipzig
Stuttgart
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