IN Od. 10. 81–86 we read: ‘On the seventh day we came to the steep city of Lamos … where herdsman bringing in his charge hails herdsman taking his charge out, and he who takes them out returns the greeting. There might a sleepless man have earned a double wage, as cowman for the one part, as shepherd of white sheep for the other. For close ‹together› are the paths of night and day.’

The Civil War of 49 B.c. is one of the most important wars of European history, if only for the fact that it ended an old world order and paved the way for a new one which was to endure in Europe for nearly two thousand years. It is also one of the most dramatic wars of history, perhaps the most truly ‘tragic’, in the Greek sense of the word, of them all—so ‘tragic’ that it has never found a poet to do it justice, or to bring its leading characters fairly upon the stage. It was certainly the most unnecessary of wars. It involved the whole of Western civilization, and yet no really deep-seated emotions or animosities, racial, national, social, or even individual, caused the conflagration. It was, in fact, nothing but a trial of strength, with no constructive objective in view, between two men, highly educated, humane, related by marriage, not unfriendly to one another, members of the same society and the same clubs, as it were, whose interests, even, need not have been incompatible. It is generally agreed that the great majority of the senatorial aristocracy very definitely did not want the war; and it seems quite clear that the small minority, of some twenty-two, who did were powerless to commence it or wage it without the will and leadership of Pompeius. It is also agreed that Caesar, while prepared to fight for his skin and his dignitas, and to that extent responsible, did not want war and made sincere efforts both to avoid it and to stop it.

In all European literature there is nothing more justly famous than Odysseus' meeting with Nausicaa in Bk. vi of the Odyssey. Editors of the Odyssey from antiquity to the present day have agreed in regarding the land of the Phaeacians and Scheria, their city, as an imaginary place, although it is remarked from time to time that it may be drawn from some real place and the Phaeacians from a real people. But there is in fact sufficient internal evidence in the poem to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that Scheria is to be identified with Trapani in northwestern Sicily. The extraordinary thing is that no one ever realized this seemingly obvious fact or sought to make the identification until Samuel Butler did so some sixty years ago. His book, The Authoress of the Odyssey, published in 1897, was, however, so badly received that all its contents, good and bad alike, were rejected as so much rubbish. The only informed consideration his theories have ever received came from Professor Farrington (recently retired from the University College of Swansea), who wrote in general support of them in 1929, when lecturer at Cape Town University. No one, so far as the author of this article has been able to ascertain, has ever so much as paid a visit to Trapani in order to see Butler's country and to check his facts, until he and his son did so in the summer of 1952.

(1) In Cicero, In Vatinium, § 29, occur the words: ‘ Fecerisne foedera tribunus plebis cum ciuitatibus, cum regibus, cum tetrarchis?’

With this are to be compared:

(2)Ad Fam. I. 9, 7:‘In quo omnia dicta sunt libertate animoque maximo de ui, de auspiciis, de donatione regnorum.’

(3)Att. II. 9, I:‘Irnprobitate istorum, qui auspicia, qui Aeliam legem, qui Iuniam et Liciniam, qui Caeciliam et Didiam neglexerunt … qui regna quasi praedia tetrarchis … dederunt.’

‘Tu tuo praecipitante iam et debilitato tribunatu auspiciorum patronus subito exstitisti …; tibi M. Bibulus quaerenti se de caelo seruasse respondit idemque in contione dixit, ab Appio tuo fratre productus, te omnino, quod contra auspicia adoptatus esses, tribunum non fuisse. tua denique omnis actio posterioribus mensibus fuit, omnia quae C. Caesar egisset, quod contra auspicia essent acta, per senatum rescindi oportere; quod si fieret, dicebas te tuis umeris me custodem urbis in urbem relaturum.’