Homer’s Daughter

HISTORICAL NOTE

PROLOGUE

ONE: The Amber Necklace

TWO: The Palace

THREE: The Departure of Odysseus

FOUR: My Father's Daughter

FIVE: Washing Day

SIX: The Naked Cretan

SEVEN: The Greedy Suitors

EIGHT: The Council Meeting

NINE: Clytoneus Sails

TEN: The Old White Sow

ELEVEN: Arrows from Halius

TWELVE: The Funeral Feast

THIRTEEN: Aethon Goes Begging

FOURTEEN: Without Flowers or Flutes

FIFTEEN: The Day of Vengeance

SIXTEEN: Homer's Daughter

The sons of homer, a guild of travelling minstrels who claimed descent from the famous blind poet and owned a large repertory of heroic sagas, were in classical times based on the sacred island of Delos. They went from city to city throughout Greece, Asia Minor, Sicily, Italy and North Africa, enjoying protection and hospitality everywhere. Their sagas were ascribed to Homer himself, though it was an open secret that many of them were of recent composition. Since the most ancient and famous of the whole collection was the
Iliad
, which concerned the Siege of Troy, the Sons of Homer enlarged the Trojan cycle with new sagas explaining what had happened before and afterwards. For instance, they composed a number of tragic “Returns,” telling
how the Greek survivors of the ten-year war sailed home, but were either wrecked on the voyage or driven far out of their course, and returned only to find their wives unfaithful and their thrones usurped.

The
Odyssey
, though invariably ascribed to Homer, was composed at least a hundred and fifty years later than the
Iliad
and the atmosphere is altogether different: sweeter, more humorous, more civilized. The
Iliad
is a poem about and for men, the
Odyssey
(despite its male hero) is a poem about and for women. Whoever wrote it had read the greater part of the Homeric sagas which are still extant in whole or part, except the very latest, and seems to have worked from an original
Return of Odysseus
. But the saga has been recast, only the prologue and a few score lines being preserved more or less as they stood. The original Odysseus, it seems, found his wife Penelope living riotously with fifty lovers, all of whom he killed on his return to Ithaca, and after sending her home to her father in disgrace, was himself accidentally transfixed with a sting-ray spear by his long-lost son Telemachus, who had landed unannounced and did not recognize him. Odysseus's “many cities,” mentioned in the prologue, have been reduced to two and the rest replaced by ungeographical islands borrowed from an entirely different story—an allegorical myth of one Ulysses, famous for his frequent cunning evasions of death. But once the saga element and the allegorical element have been isolated, what remains of the
Odyssey
is intimate domestic description of Greek provincial life in the far west about the year 750 B.C. The central character is Princess Nausicaa, daughter of King
Alcinous and Queen Arete of Phaeacia—another ungeographical place.

Apollodorus, the leading classical authority on Greek myths, records a tradition that the real scene of the poem was the Sicilian seaboard, and in 1896 Samuel Butler, the author of
Erewhon
, came independently to the same conclusion. He suggested that the poem, as we now have it, was composed at Drepanum, the modern Trapani, in Western Sicily, and that the authoress was the girl self-portrayed as Nausicaa. None of his classical contemporaries, for whom Homer was necessarily both blind and bearded, deigned to pay Butler's theory the least attention; and since he had, as we now know, dated the poem some three hundred years too early and not explained how a Sicilian princess could have passed off her saga as Homer's, his two books on the subject are generally dismissed as a good-humoured joke.

Nevertheless, while working on an explanatory dictionary of Greek myths, I found Butler's arguments for a Western Sicilian setting and for a female authorship irrefutable. I could not rest until I had written this novel. It re-creates, from internal and external evidence, the circumstances which induced Nausicaa to write the
Odyssey
, and suggest how, as an honorary Daughter of Homer, she managed to get it included in the official canon. Here is the story of a high-spirited and religious-minded Sicilian girl who saves her father's throne from usurpation, herself from a distasteful marriage, and her two younger brothers from butchery by boldly making things happen, instead of sitting still and hoping for the best.

When my childhood had slipped by, and the days no longer seemed eternal but had shrunk to twelve hours or less, I began to think seriously about death. It was my grandmother's funeral procession, in which half the women of Drepanum marched, lamenting like curlews, that made me conscious of my own mortality. Soon I should marry, bear children, grow stout, old and ugly—or thin, old and ugly—and presently die. Leaving what behind? Nothing. Expecting what? Worse than nothing: everlasting half darkness, where the ghosts of my ancestors and ancestresses wander about an unfeatured plain, gibbering like bats; skilled in all the lore of past and future, yet forbidden to profit from it; still endowed with such human passions as jealousy, lust,
hatred and greed, but powerless to consummate them. How long is a day when one is dead?

A few nights later my grandmother appeared to me in a vision. Three times I sprang towards her and tried to hug her, but each time she stepped aside. I was deeply hurt and asked: “Grandmother, why will you not stay still when I try to kiss you?”

“Darling,” she answered, “all mortals are like this when they are dead. Sinews no longer constrain their flesh and bones, which perish in the cruel flame of the pyre; and the soul flits away like a dream. Do not think I love you less; but I have no substance.”

Our priests assure us that certain heroes and heroines, children of the Gods, enjoy an enviable immortality in the Islands of the Blessed; a fancy which the tellers themselves do not believe. Of this I am certain: that no true life exists beyond the life we know, namely the life beneath the sun, moon and stars. The dead are dead, even though we pour libations of blood for their ghosts to drink, hoping to give them an illusion of temporary rebirth. And yet—

And yet there are the songs of Homer. Homer died two hundred years ago, or more, and we still speak of him as though he were living. We say that Homer records, not that he recorded, such and such an event. He lives far more truly even than do Agamemnon and Achilles, Ajax and Cassandra, Helen and Clytaemnestra, and the others of whom he wrote in his epic of the Trojan War. They are mere shadows, given substance by his songs; which alone retain the force of life, the power to soothe or stir or draw tears. Homer is now, and will be when all my contemporaries are dead and forgotten: I have
even heard it prophesied, impiously, that he will outlast Father Zeus himself, though not the Fates.

Brooding on these things at the age of fifteen, I grew melancholy and reproached the Gods for not making me immortal; and envied Homer. This was odd, certainly, in a girl, and our housekeeper Eurycleia often shook her head at me when I mooned about the Palace with a set, downcast face, instead of enjoying myself like others of my age. I never answered her, but thought: “And you, dear Eurycleia, have nothing left in store for you but ten or twenty years at the most, during which your strength will gradually decline and your rheumatic pains increase, and then what? How long is a day when you are dead?”

This preoccupation of mine with death excuses, or at least explains, the most unusual decision I have recently taken: of securing for myself a posthumous life under the mantle of Homer. May the Blessed Gods, who see all, and whom I never neglected to honour, grant me success in this endeavour, and conceal the fraud. Phemius the bard has sworn an unbreakable oath to put my epic poem in circulation: thus paying the debt he incurred on that bloody afternoon when, at the risk of my own life, I saved him from the two-edged sword.

As for my condition and lineage: I am a princess of the Elymans, a mixed race living on and about Eryx, the great, bee-haunted mountain which dominates the westernmost corner of three-sided Sicily and takes its name from the heather upon which countless bees pasture. We Elymans pride ourselves on being the remotest nation of the civilized world; though this is, indeed, to disregard certain flourishing Greek colonies planted in Spain, and Mauretania since we first
made the boast—not to mention the Phoenicians, who, though non-Greek and addicted to barbarous human sacrifice, have some claim to be called civilized, and are established at Carthage, Utica and elsewhere on the African coast. I must now give a brief account of our origins. My father claims direct male descent from the hero Aegestus. Aegestus was born in Sicily, a son of the River God Crimissus and the exiled Trojan noblewoman Aegesta, but is said to have sailed to Troy at King Priam's request when King Agamemnon of Mycenae besieged the city. Troy, however, was fated to fall, and Aegestus had been fortunate to escape death among the Achaean spears. Roused from sleep by his kinsman Aeneas the Dardanian, as soon as the enemy, breaking into Troy, began to massacre the drowsy inhabitants, he led a party of Trojans out through the Scaean Gate and away to Abydus; Abydus being a fortress on the Hellespont where (so they say), mindful of a prophetic warning given by his mother, he kept three well-provisioned ships moored in readiness. Aeneas also escaped. Cutting his way through the Achaean forces to Mount Ida, he made preparations there for embarking his Dardanian subjects in a fleet beached at Percote, and presently followed in Aegestus's wake.

A fresh gale carried Aegestus south-westward across the Aegean Sea, past Cythera, Aphrodite's island; and westward across the Sicanian Sea, until he sighted Etna, the ever-burning mountain, which rises on the opposite side of Sicily from us. Here he landed and drew water for his fleet before steering south to round Cape Pelorus. Five days later, the Aegadean Islands rose into view, and he thankfully beached his ships in the landlocked bay of Rheithrum, under the shadow of
Mount Eryx, where he had been born. A blue halcyon bird skimmed past the ships' sterns, and at this sign of favour from the Goddess Thetis, who calms the sea, Aegestus burned them in her honour; but first he prudently unloaded all the cargo, cordage, sails, metal, and other objects which might be of use to him ashore. It was to commemorate this sacrifice, offered some four hundred years ago, that my parents named me Nausicaa, which means “Burning of Ships”.

No other Greek-speaking colonists had as yet settled in Western Sicily. The entire island, except for a few Cretan colonies, was then inhabited by Sicans, an Iberian race, many of whom had befriended Aegestus and his mother in their strong city of Eryx, which nestles on the mountain's knees. Aegestus approached their King, his foster-father, with noble gifts of cauldrons, tripods, and bronze weapons fetched from Troy, interceding for the Trojan refugees; and though, being a naturally morose and self-sufficient race, the Sicans of Eryx did not disguise their suspicions, the King at last persuaded his council to let Aegestus build himself a city nearly at the top of the mountain. Aegestus named it Hypereia, or “Upper Town”; and bought from the Sicans a large stock of sheep, goats, cattle and hogs. Soon Aeneas arrived with six more ships, on his way to Latium, and proved his friendship by helping Aegestus to complete the city walls. He also founded the Temple of Aphrodite on the summit—an erotic institution in favour of which I have little to say; though Aeneas's act was a pious one, Aphrodite being his mother. At first the people of Hypereia lived on neighbourly terms with those of Eryx, who showed them all the riches of the mountain and, in return, were taught the finer mysteries of smithcraft and
carpentry, besides the art of harpooning tunny and swordfish from a platform set halfway up the ship's mast. The two nations being united in their devotion to the Sican Mountain Goddess Elyme—whom our people identified with Aphrodite, though she bore a far closer resemblance to the Goddess Alphito of Arcadia—we are now known as Elymans.