User:Paul August/Aeolia (mythical island)

Aeolia (mythical island)

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=New text= Aeolia ('Αἰολία), the island kingdom of Aeolus, the ruler of the winds, visited by Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey. In the Odyssey, Aelolus' Aeolia was purely mythical, a floating island surrounded by "a wall of unbreakable bronze" where the "cliffs run up shear".

Homer does not say anything about where the island was located, but later writers came to associate Aeolia with one, or another, of the Lipari Islands (also called the Aeolian Islands), north of eastern Sicily. The Greek geographer Strabo, reports that Strongyle (modern Stromboli), one of the Lipari Islands, was said to be Aeolus' island. Others associated the island of Lipara (modern Lipari) with Aeolia.

Homer
Odyssey
 * 10.1–4
 * “Then to the Aeolian isle we came, where dwelt Aeolus, son of Hippotas, dear to the immortal gods, in a floating island, and all around it is a wall of unbreakable bronze, and the cliff runs up sheer.

Pausanias
10.11.3
 * The people of Lipara too dedicated statues to commemorate a naval victory over the Etruscans. These people were colonists from Cnidus, and the leader of the colony is said to have been a Cnidian, whose name was Pentathlus according to a statement made by the Syracusan Antiochus, son of Xenophanes, in his history of Sicily. He says also that they built a city on Cape Pachynum in Sicily, but were hard pressed in a war with the Elymi and Phoenicians, and driven out, but occupied the islands, from which they expelled the inhabitants if they were not still uninhabited, still called, as they are called by Homer,1 the Islands of Aeolus.

Strabo
6.2.11
 * Of Lipara, then, and Thermessa I have already spoken. As for Strongyle,1 it is so called from its shape, and it too is fiery; it falls short in the violence of its flame, but excels in the brightness of its light; and this is where Aeolus lived, it is said.
 * 1 i.e., "Round," the Stromboli of today.

Virgil
Aeneid
 * 8.416
 * An island near Aeolian Lipara

Grimal
s.v. Aeolia 1
 * ('Αἰολία) I. the Odyssey the island of Aeolia is the home Aeolus the Lord of the Winds. It was a rocky floating island, surrounded by a wall of bronze. In later days it was sometimes identified as the island of Strongyle (today's Stromboli) and sometimes as the island of Lipari, both of which belong to the group of Aeolian Islands. [Hom. Od. 10.1ff.; Strabo 1.2.32, p. 40; Diod. Sic. 5.9]

Hard
p. 494.
 * His [Aeolus'] kingdom is a purely mythical place in the Odyssey, a floating island surrounded by cliffs of unyielding bronze; but it came to be suggested in the later tradition that he lived on one of the Aeolian (Lipari) islands to the north of Sicily.

Smith
s.v. Aeolus
 * The Aeolian island of Homer was in the time of Pausanias believed to be Lipara (Paus. 10.11.3), and this or Strongyle was accordingly regarded in later times as the place in which the god of the winds dwelled. (Verg. A. 8.416, 1.52; Strab. vi. p.276.) Other accounts place the residence of Aeolus in Thrace (Apollon. 1.954, 4.765; Callim. Hymm. in Del. 26), or in the neighbourhood of Rhegium in Italy. (Tzetz. ad Lycophr. 732; comp. Diod. 5.8.)

Tripp
s.v. Aeolia
 * The island kingdom of Aeolus, keeper of the winds. Homer did not locate the island in the Odyssey, but later writers identified it as one or another of the islands north of eastern Sicily that are called the Aeolian Islands (Isole Eolie), as well as the Lipari Islands, their more modern name.