Again, Homer knew of a class of merchants whom he calls πρηκτῆρες in the Eighth Odyssey (v. 152). But where Eumæus enumerates the δημιόεργοι, or ‘trades and professions’ of a Greek community, there are no πρηκτῆρες among them[427]. Again, as the poet knew of the existence of this class on earth, so he introduced them into his Olympian heaven, where gain and increase had their representative in Mercury. From whence could the prototype have been derived, except from intercourse with the Phœnicians? But the imaginative geography of the Odyssey goes far beyond the points, with which Homer has so much at least of substantive acquaintance, as to associate them historically with the commerce or politics of the age. The habitations of the Cyclops, the Læstrygones, the Lotophagi, of Æolus, the Sirens, Calypso, and Circe, may have had no ‘whereabout,’ no actual site, outside the fancy of Homer; still they must have been imagined as repositories in which to lodge traditions which had reached him, and which, however fabulously given, purported to be local. Again, with respect to the tradition of Atlas, it is scarcely possible to refuse to it a local character. He knows the depths of every sea, and he holds or keeps the pillars that hold heaven and earth apart. This must not be confounded with the later representations of Atlas carrying the globe, or with his more purely geographical character, as representing the mountain ranges of Northern Africa. Here he appears[428] as the keeper of the great gate of the outer waters, namely, of the Straits of Gibraltar: that great gate being probably the point of connection with the ocean, and that outer sea being frequented exclusively by the Phœnicians, who in all likelihood obtained from Cornwall the tin used in making the Shield of Agamemnon, or in any of the metal manufactures of the period. Rocks rising on each side of a channel at the extreme point of the world, as it was known to Greek experience, or painted in maritime narrative, could not be represented more naturally than as the pillars which hold up the sky. This figure follows the analogy of the pillars and walls of a house, supporting the roof, and placed at the extremities of the interior of its great apartment[429]. With equal propriety, those who are believed alone to have reached this remote quarter, and to frequent it, would be said to hold those pillars[430].