Mythological island of the goddess-sorceress Circe:
In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus tells Alcinous that he stayed here for one year on his way home to Ithaca. Before leaving Aeaea, Odysseus was given instructions by Circe about how to cross the ocean and assisted by the North Wind to reach the underworld.
Homer describes Aeaea as covered with a mixture of pasture and dense woodland of oak and beech. There were high hills or bluffs from which the sea could be seen encircling the island in all directions. Circe's stone house was located in a "dense forest of trees" "in a place that could be seen from far.
The somewhat inconsistent geography of Homer's Odyssey is often considered more mythic than literal, but the geography of the Alexandrian scholar and poet Apollonius of Rhodes is more specific.
In his epic Argonautica, he locates the island somewhere south of Aethalia (Elba), within view of the Tyrrhenian shore (western coast of Italy).
Aeaea was later identified
by classical Roman writers with Mount Circeo on Cape Circeo (Cape Circaeum) on
the western coast of Italy—about 100 kilometers south of Rome—which may have
looked like an island due to the marshes and sea surrounding its base but which
is a small peninsula.
It was already a peninsula
according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus.
However, it may have been
still an island in the days of Homer, with a long "lido" or sandy
peninsula that gradually became attached to the mainland, in a common
geological process.
Archeologists have
identified one cave or grotto on the cape as "Grotta della Maga
Circe", the cave of Circe.
A second was found on the
nearby Island of Ponza.
It is believed that Circe
had her summer home on Mount Circe and her winter home on Ponza, which may
possibly be the island of Aeaea.
Look it up on Wikipedia
Photo: Pixabay/GDJ
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