More About Backward-flowing Ocean

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31030, 9 April 1966, Page 4

More About Backward-flowing Ocean

■ [By L. G. POCOCK] “Orthodoxy” is defined in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary as “belief in or agreement with what is or is currently held to be right esp. in religious matters,” “and scholastical matters also” we might add. For the last 12 years the present writer has been assailing a wholly erroneous orthodoxy, in classical scholarship, which has been in existence, strange to relate, for 2j thousands years—soo B.C. to the present date—viz., that the fictitiously-named places in the Odyssey existed only in the poet’s mind, and that (to quote the new Companion to Homer (MacMillan, 1962) “in the world of the Epic, once we are out of sight of western Greece, the Mediterranean stretches for uncharted distances to west and north.”

In all the 600 odd pages of this book not a single mention of the Straits erf Gibraltar occurs. And yet there is the clearest possible evidence fn the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Theogony of Hesiod (the three great works which are the foundation of all recorded European literature) that, even if the poets concerned did not know the Straits themselves. they all used sources who did. (The Theogony is almost entirely concerned with them and their neighbourhood, though Hesiod in the Works and Days tells us that his longest voyage had been from Aulis to Euboea and back, about a quarter at a mile in all.) If you look up “Ocean" in the Shorter Oxford, you will find it stated that “Homer’s Oceanus was the great river supposed to encompass the disk of the earth; hence the outer sea as opposed to the Mediterranean.” This I am sure is wrong. Some of his waters indeed surrounded the earth—in the myth of the epic he was Father of all waters:— Jus River is never said to have done so. <Nor is the word -disk” or its equivalent ever found in the ancient Epic.) If you look up the word -apsorroos” in Liddell and Scott’s Greek Dictionary, you will find it described as “backflowing or refluent, an epithet

of Ocean regarded as a stream encircling the earth and flowing back into itself” (in Homer, Hesiod and the Odyssey). But the word does not mean flowing round and round or “back into itself.” It means flowing backwards—refluent—as well as forward as a river must run. There is the clearest possible evidence, once you look for it. that in all three poets Okeanos (meaning the “swiftflowing”) was the great River God, father of all rivers and flowing waters, salt and fresh, whose abode and head waters were thought of as being deep down in the Straits of Gibraltar, from whence he flowed, eastward through the Mediterranean (as the great Atlantic current does), and backwards also, as does the great Mediterranean saline undercurrent, which piles up and flows out westwards over the sill of the Straits. Furthermore there are the very impressive and visible surface Atlantic currents, which race into the Straits on the flood ' and race out again on the ebb, i creating- violent eddies the length of the i Straits—as the ancient mariners veiy well knew, even if I the ancient Greek scholars did I not. It was these chair-borne | ones who established the “orthodoxy,” not the ancient seamen whose tales the poets had used. _ V

The present writer, in two books and some 15 professional papers, has given the evidence and argument for these findings, and a number of others arising from them. It is interesting to note that according to the author of the Iliad, Ocean is not only the father of waters but the father also of all the gods, and (agreeing thereby with modern evolutionary science) the father of all living things. All this is at the least a very splendid myth, which deserves a fuller appreciation. There also in the Straits (as was published first in “The Press”), in what is now known as the Hall of St. Michael in the Rock of Gibraltar was the abode of Ocean’s eldest daughter, Styx, whose falling water made its way through the limestone caverns below, past the gates of Hades (the original European hell) to be added to the sources of Father Ocean below. I have thought therefore that readers of “The Press,” who may have been interested in my earlier papers on this page, might be interested also in the two following extracts concerning the Straits, one from the pages of Livy, Book XXVIII, Ch. 30, which deals with the second Punic War and one from the very interesting pages of a modern oceanographer. Naval Engagement in the Straits, 206 B.C. (Not very far from Trafalgar) It had been hoped, as stated above, that Gades (Cadiz) might be taken without a fight, by betrayal from within. The plot however was prematurely disclosed. the conspirators were all arrestecj and handed over by Mago to Adherbal. his second in command, to be taken to Carthage. Adherbal put his prisoners on board a quinquereme; and sending it on ahead as being slower than a trireme followed himself, at no great distance, with a squadron of eight triremes. Laelius had set out in pursuit from the gort

of Cartela, in a quinquereme himself, with seven triremes in company; and coming up with Adherbal and his triremes, just as the quinquereme was entering the Straits, he prepared to attack, judging that the quinquereme was sufficiently involved in the swift-flowing current to make it impossible for it to turn and make headway against the flow of the tide. At this critical moment Adherbal hesitated whether to follow his quinquereme or to turn about and engage the enemy. The moment of hesitation lost him the choice of refusing battle: for they were already within range, with the Roman ships closing in around him and the tide making it almost impossible to steer. The engagement that followed was like no other sea fight ever fought. Nothing went according to the will of the captains; seamanship and tactics were of no avail. The nature of the Straits and the tidal currents took charge completely, carrying the combatants towards their own or the enemy’s ships, however hard they strove to row in the opposite direction. A ship in flight might be seen whirled round by the eddying water and bearing down on its victorious foe, while the pursuer, falling into a contrary current, turned away as though seeking to escape. Even in close actior one vessel in the very act of ramming another, might be flung broadside on, and rammed itself by the prow of an enemy, whose flank a moment before had been at its mercy.

With fortune holding the scales the triremes on neither side had any advantage. But the Roman quinquereme. whether because its weight held the water better or its more numerous banks of oars broke the force of the eddies, proving easier to steer, sank two triremes and passing the flank of a third at speed swept away its oars: and it would no doubt have similarly punished any others it chanced upon had not Adherbal made sail with his five remaining ships for the African coast. From “The Frontiers of the Sea” (p. 171). Robert C. Cowen. Gollancz, 1960) There is one other distinctive water mass in the North Atlantic. It comes from the Mediterranean in a vigorous exchange of water that makes the Strait of Gibraltar one of the world’s famous “millraces.” The Mediterranean is one of the saltiest seas on earth.

Evaporation that removes an average of 70,000 tons of water a second raises the surface salinity until, in eastern waters, it may run as high as 39 parts per thousand—five points above the oceanic average. With winter cooling, this salt-heavy water sinks down at such a rate that rivers and rainfall cannot replace it. Surface water flows in from the North Atlantic in a shallow current that brings nearly two million tons of new water into the Mediterranean every second. Beneath this, a compensating current of heavy saline water pours out over the sill at the strait and spreads at an intermediate depth over the south-eastern North Atlantic. Each of these currents carries as much water as eight Mississippis. During the last war submarine commanders sometimes tried to ride these currents to sneak in and out of the Mediterranean without giving themselves away by using their motors.

In a curious passage in the Theogony (787 f.) which I think Hesiod did not understand himself, 'he tells us that one-tenth of the sources of Ocean is supplied by the fresh water of Styx, which “falls through the dark night” from a high point in her glorious cavern above (from the roof of St. Michael’s Hall, that will be, and down through the dark descending caves below it—to supply his fresh-water rivers): and continues: “With nine silvery-swirling streams he winds about the earth and over the sea’s wide back” (the Mediterranean that will be) “and then falls into the main” (as the Loeb translator renders it, and which it may mean; though the Greek words literally mean “into the salt”).

This also is interesting, mythical though it be. Truth and knowledge of some sort lie under the myth, and give it a splendid value that later Greek myths for the most part lack. They sadly misunderstood their own prehistoric Epic; and scholarship ever since has followed them.