Nowhere is Homer’s precision more remarkable, than in the numerous passages where he appears before us as a real geographer or topographer. Indeed, by virtue of this accuracy, he enables us to define with considerable confidence the sphere of his knowledge and experience; by which I mean not only the countries and places he had visited, but those with respect to which he had habitual information from his countrymen, and unrestricted opportunities of correcting error. In the direction of the west, it seems plain that he knew nothing except the coast of Greece and the coastward islands. Phæacia hangs doubtfully upon his horizon, and it is probable that he had only a very general and vague idea of its position. Towards the north, there is nothing to imply, that his experimental knowledge reached beyond the Thracian coast and, at the farthest, the Sea of Marmora. He speaks of Ida, as if its roots and spurs comprised the whole district, of which in that quarter he could speak with confidence[418]. To the east, he probably knew no region beyond Lycia on the coast of Asia Minor, and to the south Crete was probably his boundary: though he was aware, by name at least, of the leading geographical points of a maritime passage, not wholly unfrequented, to the almost unknown regions of Cyprus, Phœnicia, and Egypt. The apparent inconsistency however of his statements[419] respecting the voyage to Egypt, affords proof that it lay beyond the geographical circle, within which we are to consider that his familiar knowledge and that of his nation lay.
While he is within that circle, he is studious alike of the distances between places, the forms of country, and the physical character of different districts: but, when he passes beyond it, he emancipates himself from the laws of space. The points touched in the voyage of Ulysses are wholly irreconcilable with actual geography, though national partialities have endeavoured to identify them with a view to particular appropriation. Some of them, indeed, we may conceive that he mentally associated with places that had been described to him: nay, he may have intended it in all: but the dislocated knowledge, which alone even the navigators of the age would possess, has suffered, by intent or accident, such further derangement in its transfer to the mind of Homer, that it is hopeless to adjust his geography otherwise than by a free and large infusion of fictitious drawing. This outer sphere is, however, peopled with imagery of deep interest. For the purposes of the poem, the whole wanderings both of Menelaus and Ulysses lie within it, and beyond the limits of ordinary Greek experience. And throughout these wanderings the language of Homer is that of a poet who, as to facts, was at the mercy of unsifted information; of information which he must either receive from a source not liable to check or scrutiny, or else not receive at all: and who wisely availed himself of that character of the marvellous with which the whole was overspread, to work it up into pictures of the imagination, which were to fill both his contemporaries and all succeeding generations with emotions of interest and wonder.