—Act I, scene ii, lines 115-16

No city named Tharsus is to be found in the gazetteers.

The name is very similar to Tarsus, an important city on the southern coast of Asia Minor, best known to us as the place where Antony and Cleopatra first met (see page I-343) a century and a half after the time of Pericles, and where St. Paul was born a few decades later still.

Tarsus, however, is only about 170 miles west of Antioch and was as firmly in the Seleucid grip as was Tyre itself. It is interesting to wonder if perhaps Tharsus is a distortion of Thasos, a small island in the northern Aegean Sea. There are places in the play where Thasos would fit well.- However, it is most likely that Tharsus is a completely fictitious place, no more to be located on the map than the Bohemia of The Winter's Tale (see page I-156).

Pericles leaves Tyre just in time to escape Antiochus' poisoning emissary, but he finds matters in Tharsus not well. Its governor, Cleon, and his wife, Dionyza, bewail the fact that the prosperous city has been reduced by a two-year famine to a point of near cannibalism. Even as they are wailing, a fleet of ships appears on the horizon. At first they suspect it is an enemy come to take advantage of their weakness, but it is the noble Pericles. He enters with his attendants and says:

—Act I, scene iv, lines 91-94

The Trojan horse was the final stratagem of the Greeks, who after ten years' siege of Troy (see page I-89) had abandoned hope of conquest by direct attack. The climactic scene of the war is not described in Homer's Iliad or in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. It is, however, described in Vergil's Aeneid.

The Greeks built a giant hollow horse, filled it with their best warriors, then pretended to abandon the siege and sail away. The Trojans were easily convinced that the horse was an offering to Minerva (Athena) and that it was a good luck token which, if accepted, would forever protect the city against conquest. It was accordingly taken into the city and that night the Greek warriors emerged and opened the gates to the remainder of the army (which had secretly returned). Then began the bloody task of sacking the city.

Pericles' ships, however, were not filled with warriors, but with food.

Gower emerges at the beginning of the Second Act to explain that Pericles is treated with great honor at Tharsus but that word comes to him from Tyre that Antiochus is indeed anxious to have him killed and that even Tharsus will not be safe.

Pericles therefore takes to the sea again and this time is wrecked. He is washed on shore all alone, all his companions and goods gone.

The Second Act opens, then, on the shore of the Pentapolis, which apparently is where Pericles has been washed up. He approaches some fishermen, asking their help for pity, pointing out that he has never had to beg before. The First Fisherman replies sardonically:

—Act II, scene i, lines 67-69

The Pentapolis ("five cities") is a district on the north African shore about 550 miles west of Alexandria and 950 miles southwest of Antioch. The chief of the five cities was Cyrene, and the region is still called Cy-renaica today. It is the northeasternmost section of the modern nation of Libya and was much in the news in 1941 and 1942, when the British and Germans were fighting back and forth across it in the Desert War.

Obviously, the Pentapolis is not in Greece in the modern sense, where that is specifically the land occupying the southernmost portion of the Balkan peninsula. Yet Shakespeare, or whoever wrote this scene, was (perhaps unknowingly) not really incorrect in the wider sense of Greece as including any area where Greek language and culture was dominant (see page I-172).

The ruler of Pentapolis is Simonides, and his daughter, Thaisa, is having a birthday the next day. Various knights are to fight at a tournament in her honor (a queer intermingling of medieval custom with the ancient background).

Pericles no sooner hears this than fishermen come in dragging a suit of armor which has entangled their nets in the sea. It is Pericles' own armor, lost in the shipwreck. Now he too can join the tournament and engage in a second type of contest for the beautiful daughter of a king.

Simonides and Thaisa appear in the next scene, seated in a pavilion in the fashion of medieval sponsors of a tournament. The competing knights pass by, presenting their shields with the identifying device on each.

—Act II, scene ii, lines 18-21

Sparta was at one time the leading military city of Greece, but in 371 b.c., nearly two centuries before the apparent time of the play, it had been catastrophically defeated by Thebes at the Battle of Leuctra. From that time on, Sparta sat paralyzed, refusing to change with the times, and never admitted it was no longer the leader of Greece. In 200 b.c. it was in its last stages of independence and still produced good fighters.

There is nothing impossible, then, in the appearance of a Spartan in the competition, although he could scarcely be a "knight" in the medieval sense. Nor is it at all likely that he would have a Latin motto ("Thy light is life to me") on his shield, since in the time of Antiochus the Great, Latin was, to the cultivated Greeks, a barbarous and uncouth native Italian dialect, nothing more.

The second knight is described by Thaisa as:

—Act II, scene ii, lines 24-27

Macedon was a kingdom on the northwest shore of the Aegean Sea, Greek in language and culture, but backward in the time of Athens' Golden Age, and playing little part in Greek history at the time.