Imaginary Place Research Articles

Samuel Butler and the Site of Scheria

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.