1. That Homer has dislocated or transplanted the traditions he had received. For example, he has either carried the Bosphorus westwards[546], or else the Straits of Messina eastwards. [546] Müller’s Orchomenos, p. 274. 2. That therefore as we are on this occasion inquiring not into the geographical information Homer can give us, but into the errors he had embraced, we must not be surprised if we fail to arrive at any conclusions, either wholly self-consistent or demonstratively clear. We must exact from his text, with something less than geographical rigour, even the conditions of inward harmony. It may then reasonably be asked, if this be so, how are we to find any clue to his meaning. My answer is, by laying down rules which will enable us to discriminate between his primary and his secondary statements; between the results of his knowledge, and the fruits of his fancy. By his knowledge I mean, what he had seen, what he had travelled over, what was familiarly and habitually known to his countrymen, so as to give him ample opportunities of refreshing recollection, of enlarging knowledge, and of correcting error. By the fruits of his fancy I mean, the forms he has thought fit to give to statements of geography lying outside the world of his own experience, and that of the Greeks in general. These statements, gathered here and there as time and opportunity might serve, he could hardly have moulded into a correct and consistent scheme. Emancipating himself wholly from obligations which it was impossible for him to fulfil, he has treated them simply as the creatures of his poetic purpose, and has analysed, shifted, and recombined them into a world of his own, in the creation and adjustment of which, the principal factor has of necessity been his own will. ~_Postulates for the inquiry._~ I therefore lay down the following postulates: 1. That, Homer having an Inner or known and an Outer or imagined world, between which a line may be drawn with tolerable certainty, the voyage of Ulysses, from the Lotophagi to Scheria inclusive, lies in the Outer world. 2. That we may not only implicitly accept the geographical statements of Homer, when they lie within his own horizon or the Inner world, but may fearlessly argue from them. 3. That arguments so drawn are available and paramount, as far as they go, for governing the construction of passages relating to the geography of the Outer world. 4. That we have no title to argue, when we find a point in the Outer world described in such a manner as to correspond with some spot now known, that Homer gave to that tract or region in his own mind, the site which we may now know it to occupy, but that he is quite as likely to have placed it elsewhere.