Strabo Geography 10.2.12

[12] The following verse also is thought to disclose a sort of contradiction: ¹ for chthamale means “low,” or “on the ground,” whereas panypertate means “high up,” as Homer indicates in several places when he calls Ithaca “rugged.” ² And so when he refers to the road that leads from the harbor as ³ and when he says ⁵ Now although Homer’s phraseology presents incongruities of this kind, yet they are not poorly explained; for, in the first place, writers do not interpret chthamale as meaning “low-lying” here, but “lying near the mainland,” since it is very close to it, and, secondly, they do not interpret panypertate as meaning “highest,” but “highest towards the darkness,” that is, farthest removed towards the north beyond all the others; for this is what he means by “towards the darkness,” but the opposite by “towards the south,” as in ⁶ for the word aneuthe is “at a distance,” or “apart,” implying that the other islands lie towards the south and farther away from the mainland, whereas Ithaca lies near the mainland and towards the north. That Homer refers in this way to the southerly region is clear also from these words, ⁷ and still more clear from these words, ⁸ For it is indeed possible to interpret this as meaning the four “climata,” ⁹ if we interpret “the dawn” as meaning the southerly region (and this has some plausibility), but it is better to conceive of the region which is along the path of the sun as set opposite to the northerly region, for the poetic words are intended to signify a considerable change in the celestial phenomena, ¹⁰ not merely a temporary concealment of the “climata,” for necessarily concealment ensues every time the sky is clouded, whether by day or by night; but the celestial phenomena change to a greater extent as we travel farther and farther towards the south or in the opposite direction. Yet this travel causes a hiding, not of the western or eastern sky, but only of the southern or northern, and in fact this hiding takes place when the sky is clear; for the pole is the most northerly point of the sky, but since the pole moves and is sometimes at our zenith and sometimes below the earth, the arctic circles also change with it and in the course of such travels sometimes vanish with it, ¹¹ so that you cannot know where the northern “clima” is, or even where it begins. ¹² And if this is true, neither can you know the opposite “clima.” The circuit of Ithaca is about eighty stadia. ¹³ So much for Ithaca.