Among the post-homeric traditions of Odysseus' wanderings the most persistent and circumstantial group is that which places such decisive adventures as the visits to Circe and the underworld in Italy. His wanderings were indeed located at various times in many other parts of the Mediterranean and even beyond it, but none of these locations was felt in antiquity to have so much authority as those which connected him with Campania and sometimes with Etruria. How the two main branches of the Italian tradition are related is a further problem. The Italian location might appear as from the first the obvious and natural result of Greek colonisation within the historic period beginning with the eighth century; certainly many of the later developments must be derived from this source. There is also the likelihood that the Greeks in Italy and Sicily brought with them not merely theIliadand theOdysseyand the cyclic epics in some form, but also other traditions of Odysseus from western and southern Greece which were independent of the Ionian epic. Scholars have often regarded the historic colonists as the originators of all the Italian lore of Odysseus, and have connected with them, in their earliest generations, those passages of theOdysseywhich suggest real acquaintance with Italy or Sicily, assuming them to be later than the rest. This is not the place for a critical discussion of late books or interpolations in theOdyssey; it will simply be assumed that not all the material of Homer, as material, was of the same date, and that there was much other matter, not used in Homer, which was as old as any that was included. Some of this matter, since Odysseus' home was near the limits of the Greek world, may also have been imperfectly Greek from the first, and not all of its carriers need have been Greeks.