The location of Aigai, lying exactly due west of SAMOS (Sveti Ilija, Peljesac), from where a sunset at the time of the equinoxes would appear as a shimmering path of light touching the islands of TENEDOS (Korc¼ula), LEMNOS (Vis¼), and IMBROS (Bis¼evo), corresponds with that of a marine grotto, Modra Spilja (‘Blue Cave’) in Bis¼evo’s Balun Cove—

XIII; 17, et pas.:
Forthwith then he [Poseidon] went down from the rugged mount, [Samos wooded Thrace-like] striding forth with swift footsteps… Thrice he strode in his course, and with the fourth stride he reached his goal, even Aegae, where was his famous palace builded in the depths of the mere, golden and gleaming, imperishable for ever.
There is a wide cavern in the depths of the deep mere, midway between Tenedos and rugged Imbros. There, Poseidon, the Shaker of Earth, stayed his horses, and loosed them from the car, and cast before them food ambrosial to graze upon...

That the marine grotto is “…midway between Tenedos and rugged Imbros”, and not in Imbros itself, obeys to the fact that this phenomenon, as observed from a vinograd on the western slopes of Samos—perhaps the highest of all in elevation—would appear to place the diameter of the sun’disk between Imbros and Tenedos the moment the upper rim sank below the horizon. On days when the sea is calm, the midday sunlight, penetrating through an openning in the grotto’s vault, illuminates objects in the water with a silvery sheen and the interior with a blue glow.

The name of Aigai is from a root whence Greek aix, ‘goat’(thus, the famous Blue Grotto of Capri). The relevance of the name does not come through until something is learned about ambrosia, namely...TOPIC: AMBROSIA- The connection between ambrosia—which to this day nobody knows with certainty what it was—and the blue glow of this grotto, are unavaoidable, for Hindu lore says that ambrita is a heavenly dew from which blue sapphires are solidified. Ambrosia was also fed to horses of Hera, when she arrives at the confluence of SIMOEIS and skamandros quote

That it is found in marine grotto suggests that blue ambrosia will have come from some vartiety of conch—murex— and that it was also found at confluence of rivers, that it was some prized sweet-water snail. I have seen for myself, precisely in the area of the confluence of rivers, snail shells large enough to fill one’s cupped hand, from which the inference that ambrosia was an edible snail—marine or sweet-water, since both are delicious.
The occurence of the sunset in Equinox = Capricorn.... (why mention this at all?)


MAPS

VII; 81:
“But if so be I slay him, and Apollo give me glory, I will spoil him of his armour and bear it to sacred Ilios and hang it upon the temple of Apollo, the god that smiteth afar, but his corpse will I render back to the well-benched ships, that the long-haired Achaeans may give him burial, and heap up for him a barrow by the wide Hellespont. And some one shall some day say even of men that are yet to be, as he saileth in his many benched ship over the wine-dark sea: ‘This is a barrow of a man that died in olden days, whom on a time in the midst of his prowess glorious Hector slew.’ So shall some man say, and my glory shall never die.”

XII; 25:
...and Zeus rained ever continually, that the sooner he might whelm the wall in the salt sea. And the Shaker of Earth, bearing his trident in his hands, was himself the leader, and swept forth upon the waves all the foundations of beams and stones, that the Achaeans had laid with toil, and made all smooth along the strong stream of Hellespont, and again covered the great beach with sand, when he had swept away the wall; and the rivers he turned back to flow in the channel, where aforetime they had been wont to pour their fair streams of water.

Hellespontos is a compound-type which emphasizes a topographical condition, derived from the Illyrian root Felj-, connoting the marshy, swampy, banks of a river, + pont-, connoting a long and narrow corridor (as of a river, for instance). The later story about Helle falling from the back of the ram Phrixus at this place, thereafter forever named the Sea of Helle, may well be. Yet the only thing that really falls from the sky into the sea is the sun, and so this story may also well be about that of a midwinter sunset, when the sun, low and golden on the horizon, as seen from Ilios (Gabela), would appear to fall into the brackish waters and soggy marshes at the mouth of the Skamandros (Neretva).
The Hellespontos is dotted with a number of natural cone-like outcroppings, one of which was called Batieia (Kosjak, 82 mts.), also known as the Barrow of Myrine. These odd mounds served, upon a time, as burial sites, a fact which has been archaeologically substantiated.


MAPS

IKARIAN SEA [IKAROPONTOS] (the sea): Korculanski Channel; the inter-island sea, as distinguished from OKEANOS (Adriatic Sea) to the west and beyond LEMNOS (Vis) and IMBROS (Bisevo):

II; 144:
And the gathering was stirred like the long sea-waves of the Icarian main, which the East Wind or the South Wind has raised, rushing upon them from the clouds of father Zeus.

XXIV; 77:
So spake he, [Zeus] and storm-footed Iris* hasted to bear his message, [to Thetis] and midway between Samos and rugged Imbros she lept into the dark sea, and the waters sounded loud above her. Down sped she to the depths like a plummet of lead, the which, set upon the horn of an ox of the field, goeth down bearing death to the ravenous fishes.

The [IKAROPONTOS], as might have been the original name, in keeping with HELLESPONTOS (Neretva's delta), was so named after Ikaros (son of Daidalos and father of Penelope) who flew like a kite or some other bird so high into the sky that his waxen wings melted from the heat of the sun and he plummeted into the sea—not unlike Helle from the ram Phrixius—at the same place where Iris also went down. Perhaps the intended place, more-or-less 'midway between Samos and rugged Imbros', is the rock of Plocica, standing lone though somewhat more to the east than 'midway', where fish might be abundant.
It seems particularly significant, that, in the Odyssey, the name of the IKARIAN MAIN or [IKAROPONTOS] is not a geonym included in the structure of a geographical paradigm for The Sea. This fact obeys, certainly, to the utter moral decadence of the Wanderings of Odysseus, such that there is not even a name for the waters of the western tip of NERITON (Peljesac) which he has criss-crossed back and forth time-and-again.


MAPS

*The sight of Iris--a rainbow--at this place can only mean, that, as viewd from the mainland, the sun will have been just risen, still low on the eastern horizon.

Though the sea is certainly common to all lands, one may easily see that, insofar as the Iliad’s authorship was concerned, Okeanos was a Trojan geonym, and even thought of as a Trojan dominion, as its various locations relative to Troy indicate—

It is odd that Okeanos is mentioned 19 times, a number which suggests the Metonic Cycle,* and therefore also (as Strabo the geographer suspected) a perfect knowledge of the moon’s effects on tides.


MAPS

*Metonic Cycle: A period of 19 years, after which the phases of the Moon will recur on the same calendar date and within two hours of the same time, discovered by Meton of Athens in 433 B.C. It arises from the fact that 235 lunations equal 19 tropical years almost exactly, about 6939.5 days. Norton’s Star Atlas, 1973.