Homer’s experience did not supply him with any example of a great expanse of land: but the detail and configuration of the countries, with which he was acquainted, was minute. This probably was the reason why he so readily assumed the existence of that sea to the northward of Thrace, in which he has placed the adventures of Ulysses. To that sea, as we perceive from the terms of days which he has assigned to the passages of Ulysses, he attached his ideas and his epithets for vastness; epithets, which he never bestowed on regions of land; and ideas, which were sure, indeed, to form a prominent feature in the Phœnician reports, that must have supplied him with material. Acting on the same principle, it would appear that he greatly shortens the range of Asia Minor eastwards. Through the medium of the Solymi (Il. vi. 184, 204) he appears to bring the Solyman mountains close upon Lycia. A chain now bearing that name skirts the right bank of the Indus: but it is probable that Homer identified, or rather confounded, them with the great chain of the Caucasus between the Euxine and the Caspian, and with the Taurus joining it, and bordering upon Lycia: for, on the one hand, we cannot but connect them with the Solymi, the warlike neighbours of the Lycians: and on the other, since Neptune, from these mountains, sees Ulysses making his homeward voyage from Ogygia, it follows that they must have been conceived by Homer to command a clear view of the Euxine, and of its westward extension. Thus he at once brings Egypt nearer to Crete (helping us to explain the Boreas of Od. xiv. 253), and Phœnicia nearer to Lycia: and it is in all likelihood immediately behind Phœnicia that he imagined to lie the country of the Persians and the ἄλσεα Περσεφονείης (Od. x. 507), on the shore of that eastern portion of Oceanus, for which the reports both of the Caspian and of the Red Sea, probably, as we have seen, have formed parts of his materials. Thus we find much and varied evidence converging to support the hypothesis, that Homer greatly compressed his East, and brought Persia within moderate distance of the Mediterranean. In the obscure perspectives of Grecian legend, we seem to find various points of contact between Egypt, Phœnicia, and Persia; and each of these points of contact favours the idea that Persia and Phœnicia were closely associated in Homer’s mind. Proteus, a Phœnician sea-god, is placed only at a short distance from the Egyptian coast. Helios, strongly associated with Egypt through his oxen, is associated with Phœnicia and with the remoter east by his relationship to Circe, and by his residence, the ἀντολαὶ Ἠελίοιο. And again, from the family of Danaus, a reputed Egyptian, descends Perseus, in whose name we find a note of relationship between the Persians and the Greeks. Lycia, too, is near the Solymi, and the Solyman hills are really Persian. Here is a new ray of light cast on Homer’s passion for the Lycians of the War[649]. [649] See Achæis, sect. iii.