Cyclops
—O, Christ M’Keown, says Joe, reading one of the letters. Listen to this, will you?

And he starts reading out one.

7 Hunter Street,

Liverpool.

To the High Sheriff of Dublin,

Dublin.

Honoured sir i beg to offer my services in the abovementioned painful case i hanged Joe Gann in Bootle jail on the 12 of February 1900 and I hanged…

—Show us, Joe, says I.

—… private Arthur Chace for fowl murder of Jessie Tilsit in Pentonville prison and i was assistant when…

—Jesus, says I.

—… Billington executed the awful murderer Toad Smith…

The citizen made a grab at the letter.

—Hold hard, says Joe, i have a special nack of putting the noose once in he can’t get out hoping to be favoured i remain, honoured sir, my terms is five ginnees.

H. Rumbold,

Master Barber.

Professor Leah Culligan Flack, author of Modernism and Homer, remarks that most of the names quoted in the hangman’s letter can be traced back to members of the British consulate in Zurich (Rumbold, Joe Gann, Toad Smith) who managed to offend Joyce over a lawsuit with Zurich’s ‘English Players’. However, ‘Arthur Chace and Jessie Tilsit remain untraced.’6

The mark in the Sandycove Atlas suggests that fictional Jessie could have been named by Joyce after the Treaties of Tilsit, a major milestone of the Napoleonic Wars. The first of them, on 7 July 1809, created an alliance between France and the Russia of Tsar Alexander I. The second, on 9 July, with King Frederick William III, stripped Prussia of almost half its territories.7

One of the many provisions of the Tilsit treaties was Russia’s cession of the Septinsular Republic to France.8 Ithaca was one of the seven islands which formed the Republic, also known as the Ionian Islands. Five other islands were strung along the west coast of mainland Greece; (Kerkyra or Corfu, little Paxoi, Lefkada, Kephalonia, and Lakynthos), with Kythira way off to the south-east, by the southern tip of the Peloponnese.

France did not hold on to the Republic for long. The British, still at war with France, gradually took over the islands, finally controlling Corfu with the abdication of Napoleon in 1814.

The United Kingdom’s control of the islands was ratified in 1815, when the Treaty of Paris brought the Napoleonic wars to an end. The Septinsular Republic was reconstituted as the United States of the Ionian Islands, continuing to include Ithaca. The home and kingdom of Odysseus, where his queen Penelope stayed working and waiting for so many years, became part of the British Empire,

Mainland Greece had yet to win its independence from Ottoman Turkey, but that came in the 1820s. Eventually, in 1864, Britain restored the Ionian Islands to Greece.

Joyce would not have wanted to celebrate the years when the British Empire included the home of Odysseus or deride the murder victim, Jessie Tilsit. Arthur Chace, on the other hand, if he was a real person at all, could have been a politician, soldier or diplomat who expedited or besmirched the British possession of Ithaca.