Even in a less imaginative age than that of Homer, the love of the marvellous, both by the givers and by the receivers of information, would act powerfully in colouring all narratives, of which the scene was laid in tracts unknown except to the narrator. But a more powerful motive might be found in that spirit of monopoly, which is so highly characteristic of the earlier stages, in particular, of the development of commerce[431]. To clothe their relations in mystery and awe, by the aid both of natural and supernatural wonders, would be, for a people possessed of an exclusive navigation, a powerful means of deterring competitors, and of maintaining secure hold upon profits either legitimate or piratical. We have before us these facts in evidence: on the one hand, a people who in maritime enterprise had far surpassed all others, and had a virtual monopoly of the knowledge of the waters and countries lying beyond a certain narrow circle. Then, on the other hand, we have a multitude of adventures laid by Homer in this outer sphere, and associated wholly with the persons and places that belong to it. Upon these grounds it seems hardly possible to avoid the conclusion, that the Phœnicians must have been the people from whom Homer drew, whether directly or mediately, his information respecting the outer circle of the geography of the Odyssey. Such is the judgment of Strabo. He says τοὺς δὲ Φοίνικας λέγω μηνυτάς; he considers that even before the time of Homer they were masters of the choice parts of Spain and Africa: and it appears that the traces of their colonization remained until his day[432]. _Traditions of the Outer Geography._ But further; the traditions themselves bear other unequivocal marks, besides their lying in parts known to Phœnicians only, of a Phœnician character; and whether these marks were attached by Homer, or came ready made into his hands, has no bearing upon the present argument. I have spoken of the tradition of Atlas; and of the likelihood that the Phœnicians would cast a veil over the regions of which they knew the profitable secrets. In conformity with these ideas, the island of Ogygia is the island of Calypso, the Concealer: and this Calypso is the daughter of Atlas. Phæacia is, in the Odyssey, the geographical middle term between the discovered and the undiscovered world; Ogygia is the stage beyond it, and the stage on this side of it is Ithaca. I do not understand the Phæacians to be a portrait of the Phœnicians[433]: but the very resemblance of name is enough to show that Homer had this people in his eye when he endowed his ethereal islanders with the double gift, first, of unrivalled nautical excellence, and, secondly, of forming the medium of communication between the interior space bounded by the Greek horizon, and the parts which lay beyond it. _Minos the ὀλοόφρων._