What if Ulysses was trapped on a Spanish islet? Yes, that Ulysses, the Homeric one, the same one who managed to stop the Greek army, who defeated Polyphemus with lies and avoided the misfortune of being drowned by siren songs. Discussion issue For decades, the thesis that it proposes is Victor Berard. In 1902 he published ‘Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée‘ and in it he emphasizes that the Odyssey is not a story, it is a geographical document, a poetic painting but faithful to a concrete reality. And the key to everything is that triangular islet of 15,000 square meters, without drinking water, without inhabitants, 200 meters from the Moroccan coast. That is the island of Perejil today, remembered by many because in 2002 it was the protagonist of an armed incident between Spain and Morocco that was resolved on July 20, after an eviction by Spanish troops of the Moroccan gendarmes that had occupied it. Every little there is noise around the boulderso there will be some magic in there. Was Ulysses imprisoned there? One hundred years earlier, a French professor and the rector of the University of Salamanca agreed that Ulysses was kept locked up there and, in fact, that the name of Spain was born from there. This is big and I want to explain it well. Bérard baptized his method “topology”: under each Greek name he looked for the Semitic original, because the Hellenes, arriving later, translated the Phoenician toponym without completely erasing it. Applied to Calypso, for example, the method gives this: Ogygiathe island where the nymph holds Ulysses for seven years, is Parsley. The Odyssey cave fits with the royal cave—entrance 20 meters high by seven or eight meters wide, two interior rooms. And the nymph’s name comes from “kalypto”, which is to hide in Greek. Hiding Island. From there, Bérard maintains, comes “I-spania“. And from there Spain. From thesis to literature. Eduardo Gómez de Baquero, known as Adrenio after the character of Baltasar Gracián, was a furious columnist in magazines of the time, with thousands of columns. He summarized the discovery of the thesis in the Cartagena newspaper ‘The Era‘, on June 10, 1902. Seventeen days later, Miguel de Unamuno signed in the magazine ‘Around the World’ your own article“Spain-Parsley and the Island of Calypso”, published on June 27, 1902 (its reissue can be found, volume VI). The great of the Generation of ’98, philosopher and total writer, puts the tie to the thesis, celebrating Bérard’s ingenuityand sneaks in an anecdote from his Greek teacher Lázaro Bardón about the Guadix River (Semitic + Arab + Spanish. From Arabic wadia word that is usually used interchangeably for both valley and river). He only has one but: he prefers Basque. According to him, Spain comes from “ezpaña”, lip, due to the shape of the peninsula on the map of Europe. And accept the rest. On July 25, 2002, five days after the Perejil crisis was resolved, El País took the opportunity to republish the article by Unamuno. It is curious because serious philology had barely documented it. Already in 1904, reviews of Bérard’s book in the ‘Revue des Études Anciennes’ and the ‘Revue des Études Grecques’ separated the wheat from the chaff. The principle of topology seems unquestionable to them: yes, human settlements follow laws that derive from their environment. It’s just that in the application to this specific case, not so much. Georges Radet said that admiration that prohibits criticism is not worth much. Ogygia, that nonsense in question. The location of Ogygia remains one of the most disputed questions of the Odyssey. A study by the University of Malta counts at least twelve candidate islands throughout history, from Ozoni (Greece) to Corfu. It is that island that exists everywhere and at the same time nowhere, the prison for the daughter of Atlas that also served to trap Ulysses. And here, the investigation placed Bérard and, later, the author LG Pocock as the responsible for identifying Ogigia with Parsley. The dominant candidate since Antiquity is another: Gozo, in the Maltese archipelago, already proposed by Evémerus in the 4th century BC and by Callimachus in the 3rd BC Strabo and Plutarch, meanwhile, placed Ogygia directly in the Atlantic Ocean. A recent volume from the École française d’Athènes closes the historiographic debate: Bérard’s theory has no support in the literary tradition and no one took it up afterwards; Its value today is to serve as a counterweight to the “Greek miracle” and to an ahistorical reading of Homer—especially from the more nationalist German prism. Explain where Spain comes from. The good thing is that that thesis may well help us identify another name. The origin of “Spain” is documented. The thesaurus of historical toponymy of the Ministry of Culture places the consensus on a Semitic root – Ugaritic, Phoenician or Hebrew – from the second millennium BC, although it disputes the meaning. The most popular version, that of Samuel Bochart in 1646, is “land of rabbits”: it is based on Catullus, who calls the peninsula “cuniculous.” Others read “northern coast” or “metal coast.” And a nuance that Bérard ignores is that the Phoenician word “is-pan-ya” never appears in any registration. So it is pure linguistic reconstruction. From Bacchus (Bacchanal theory), from the god Pan… Iberia is the town of the Iber River and Hispania is many more things: the Phoenician theory says that Hispania was the nomenclature adopted by the Romans. Isidore of Seville focused more on native origin. The founder, Hispalo, son of Hercules, was the one who coined it by accident, when moving Hispalia to Hispania. And, thus, the beautiful Hispalis and current Seville would have given its name to our entire great nation. It is impossible to clarify completely. The islet remains. 74 meters high, rock and bushes and a cave capable of housing 200 men according to the Mediterranean route of the time. And parsley, of course, the plant that gives it its name in Spanish, which according to the Odyssey itself … Read more
