It has been debated, but apparently without any conclusive result, what was the site of the Dodona so famous in the after-times of Greece[132]. It seems clear, however, that it was a Dodona to the westward of Pindus, and belonging to Thesprotia or Molossia. But this plainly was not the position of the Dodona we have now before us. For in a passage of the Catalogue Homer distinctly places this Dodona in Thessaly, giving it the same epithet, δυσχείμερος, as Achilles applies to it in Il. xvi. Gouneus, he says, was followed by the Enienes and Perrhæbi,
οἱ περὶ Δωδώνην δυσχείμερον οἴκι’ ἔθεντο, οἵ τ’ ἀμφ’ ἱμερτὸν Τιταρήσιον ἔργ’ ἐνέμοντο[133].
Both the name of the Perrhæbi and that of the river Titaresius fix the Dodona of Homer in the north of Thessaly. And the character assigned to this Titaresius, so near Dodona, as a branch of Styx, ‘the mighty adjuration of the gods,’ well illustrates the close connection between that river, by which the other deities were to swear, and Jupiter, who was their chief, and was in a certain sense the administrator of justice among them. In the Odyssey, indeed, Ulysses, in his fictitious narrations to Eumæus and Penelope, represents himself as having travelled from Thesprotia to consult the oracle of Jupiter, that was delivered from a lofty oak[134]. But no presumption of nearness can be founded on this passage such as to justify our assuming the existence of a separate Dodona westward of the mountains in the Homeric age: and there was no reason why Ulysses should not represent himself as travelling through the passes of Mount Pindus[135] from the Ambracian gulf into Thessaly to learn his fate. Nor upon the other hand is there any vast difficulty in adopting the supposition which the evidence in the case suggests, that the oracle of Dodonæan Jupiter may have changed its seat before the historic age. The evidence of Homer places it in Thessaly, and Homer is, as we shall see, corroborated by Hesiod. After them, we hear nothing of a Dodona having its seat in Thessaly, but much of one on the western side of the peninsula. As in later times we find Perrhæbi and Dolopes to the westward of Pindus, whom Homer shows us only on the east, even so in the course of time the oracle may have travelled in the same direction[136]. It is highly improbable, from the manner in which the name is used, that there should have been two Greek Dodonas in the Homeric age.