Homer’s Daughter (2 page)

Some seven generations later, another element, the Phocaean, was added to the Elyman nation thus formed; and by then the proud Achaean cities of the Peloponnese, in which the destruction of Troy had been planned, lay ruined. Barbarous Dorians, the so-called Sons of Hercules, wielding iron weapons, and with iron hearts, had swept through the Isthmus of Corinth, burned citadel after citadel, and driven the Achaeans from their rich pastures and cornfields into the mountainous regions of the North; there they still survive, dwindled and inglorious. The elder inhabitants of Greece, however—Pelasgians, Ionians and Aeolians—as many as loved liberty and possessed ships, hastily gathered together their treasures and set sail to find new homes overseas, especially on the coast of Asia Minor, where they had often before gone trading. Among these emigrants were Phocians from Mount Parnassus, descendants of Philoctetes the archer, whose arrows accounted for Prince Paris at Troy; but two Athenian noblemen led them. Their new city of Phocaea, built on the mainland behind Chios, became famous for its fifty-oared merchant-galleys which ventured across the length and breadth of the Mediterranean: as far westward as the Pillars of Hercules, and as far northward as the mouth of the Po. Geryon, King of Tartessus in Southern Spain, having taken a liking to certain honest Phocaean traders, invited these to settle in
his country, and promised to build them a city. They agreed with joy, and sailed home to fetch their wives, children, household goods and sacred images; expecting to find the city walls already raised to receive them when they landed in the following summer.

Yet the Blessed Gods disposed otherwise. The colonists sailing in convoy, their prows wreathed in myrtle, were blown off course by a north-easterly gale and cast ashore among the lotus-eating Nasamonians of Libya. Though they saved five of their seven ships, these proved so unseaworthy that, taking advantage of a brisk south wind, they steered for Sicily, the nearest land where it would be possible to refit. Mount Eryx was reached in safety, with every hold deep in water, and they beached the flotilla at Rheithrum, not having lost a man, though their provisions were spoilt. Believing that the God Poseidon had designed them to settle hereabouts rather than in Tartessus—the myrtle on their prows forbade their return—they came as suppliants to the King of Hypereia, who magnanimously forgave them the wrongs which their ancestors had done to the Trojans. It is said, nevertheless, that the captain and crew of one ship attempted to sail back to Asia Minor, but they had gone no farther than a mile and a half before Poseidon transformed the ship into a rock; and there she still rides for all the world to see. They call her the “Rock of Evil Counsel”, and also add that Poseidon threatened to topple down the summit of Eryx on the heads of any other would-be deserters.

Now, the Hypereians had built a hamlet on the northern foothills of Eryx and named it Aegesta, after their ancestress; as they also named its two streams Simoïs and Scamander,
after the Trojan rivers mentioned by Homer. Here, with the permission of the King of Eryx, they had set up a hero shrine for the ghost of Anchises the Dardanian, Aeneas's father, who was said to have died during the building of Hypereia. The Phocaeans using Sican labour and adopting the Sican style, soon enlarged this village to a city, over which a prince of Hypereia was appointed to rule. But the wild Sicans, resentful of this new encroachment on their grazing and hunting grounds, did not hesitate to ambush and kill the newcomers; and Eurymedon, the Sican King of Eryx, refused to intervene, declaring that he had never consented to the Phocaean occupation of Aegesta. He even lent his compatriots secret help; and this naturally precipitated a quarrel between the cities of Eryx and Hypereia. Armed clashes led to a full-scale war, in which Eurymedon was soundly defeated. The Hypereians seized Eryx, proclaiming their own King “Father of the Elyman League”—Eryx, Hypereia, and Aegesta—and ordered the city councils to foster intermarriage between the three races. Our blood is therefore mixed, yet our ruling tongue is Ionian Greek, touched a little with Aeolian; and though remotely placed, we are far better people in every way than the Dorians of the Peloponnese, who camp sluttishly among the blackened ruins of the beautiful cities celebrated in Homer's songs.

This land of ours is good and its seas full of fish—especially tunny, the firm flesh of which has always been our staple food; but if we are entitled to one complaint, it is that the greater part of the Sican nation has obstinately refused to join our Elyman League. The Sicans are wild, tall, sturdy, uncouth, tattooed, unhospitable, prolific folk, who respect
neither travellers nor suppliants, and live like beasts in mountain caves, each family apart, with its flocks. They acknowledge no king, and no deity except the Goddess Elyme, worshipped as a fertile, prescient sow, and no law but their own inclination; moreover, they brew no liquor, use neither iron nor bronze weapons, never venture out to sea, keep no markets, and will not even shrink at certain seasons from the taste of human flesh. With these abominable savages—I am ashamed to call them our cousins—we are neither at peace nor at war; wise travellers, however, pass through their land only in well-armed companies, sending hounds ahead to raise the alarm should an ambush have been laid in any forest or narrow defile.

At least we had the good fortune to live out of the way of the Sicel invasion, which took place shortly before the arrival of the Phocaeans. The Sicels are Illyrians, of an entirely different stock from the Sicans, who crossed the Strait of Messina on rafts and, being busy and numerous, soon possessed themselves of Central and Southern Sicily, swallowing up the settlements planted there by Cretans and Achaeans. But all war bands exploring in our direction were driven off with heavy loss—they are not so sturdily built as the Sicans, nor such formidable fighters—and ever since, by tacit agreement, the Sicels have kept within their own boundaries, leaving us alone. Their commerce is mainly with the Greeks of Euboea and Corinth. A few small Phoenician trading posts on promontories or small islands off the north coast have caused us no trouble so far; for, as my father says, “Trade begets trade.” And now Greek colonies are being planted to the east of us, and on the toe of Italy; which pleases us well.

To come down to more recent times: my great-grandfather, King Nausithous, son of Eurymedon's daughter, called a council of all the Elymans to deliberate on a vision which had been granted him in a dream. He saw an eagle swoop from the top of Eryx and skim the sea, in company with a flock of white-winged sea mews, some of them on his right hand, some on his left. This vision the soothsayers interpreted as a divine command to quit Hypereia and henceforth make his living from the sea, on a spit of land between two harbours. Leaving behind a strong force to guard his cattlemen, shepherds and swineherds against the depredations of Sican bandits, Nausithous led down the greater part of the Hypereians to a sickle-shaped peninsula two miles south of Rheithrum, where he built the town of Drepanum. According to a local tradition it was here that the ancient God Cronus threw into the sea the adamantine sickle with which he had castrated his father Uranus; and old men sometimes whisper darkly: “One day it will be fetched up in a net; Apollo is fated to use it against his father Zeus.”

Drepanum was a splendid site for Nausithous's new town. The neck of the peninsula could be protected by a wall from Sican raids, and of the two harbours specified by the oracle, one sheltered ships against north-westerly gales, the other against south-easterly ones. Since, therefore, the Phocaeans of Aegesta, whom Nausithous invited to join him in this enterprise, had not forgotten their sea skill, he was soon sending fifty-oared ships on long voyages in every direction. The chief Elyman exports, then as now, were wine, cheeses, honey, fleeces, sun-dried tunny and swordfish, and other food products; as well as folding bedsteads of cypress wood, in the
manufacture of which we excel, embroidered clothes of the finest wool, and salt from our salt pans. These goods were exchanged for Cyprian copper, Spanish tin, Chalybean iron, Cretan wine, Corinthian painted ware, African sponges and ivory, and many other luxuries. Our two sandy harbours proved of great advantage, since if ever the weather shows signs of changing, ships can be rowed from one to the other, and hauled up beyond reach of the waves. In short, we have grown rich and prosperous, and are welcomed by all nations with whom we trade as honest men and no pirates. Rheithrum, however, is now rarely used as a harbour, not being defensible against raids, and has of late been silting up; but we sacrifice there annually to Aphrodite and Poseidon, and graze our cattle on the neighbouring plain.

My father, King Alpheides, married the daughter of an ally, the Lord of Hiera, largest of the Aegadean Islands. She bore him four sons and one daughter, myself. At the point where this story begins, Laodamas, my eldest brother, was already married to Ctimene of Bucinna, another island of the Aegadean group; Halius, the second, driven from home by my father's displeasure, had gone to live among the Sicels of Minoa; Clytoneus, the third, had shaved his first manly hair and taken arms. I was three years older than Clytoneus, and unmarried—but by choice, not from lack of suitors, though I may as well confess that I am neither tall nor particularly beautiful. My fourth brother, Telegonus, the child of our mother's middle age, still lived in the women's quarters, rolling nuts or riding a dappled hobbyhorse, and being threatened with King Echetus, the bogeyman, if he did not behave. In the poem which I have now completed my parents appear as King
Alcinous and Queen Arete of Drepane—the royal couple who welcomed Jason and Medea in the
Song of the Golden Fleece.
I chose these names partly because “Alcinous” means “Strong-minded”, and my father prides himself most on his strong-mindedness; partly because Arete (if you shorten the second
e
) means “Staunchness”, which is my mother's ruling virtue; and partly because, at the crisis of my drama, I was forced to play Medea's part. So much, then, for that.

One luckless evening, three years ago, when my brother Laodamas had been married for only a short time, the southern wind we call sirocco began to blow, and a great cloud brooded heavily on the shoulders of Mount Eryx. The effect was, as usual, to wither the plants in the garden, put my hair out of curl and make everyone touchy and quarrelsome: my sister-in-law Ctimene not the least That night, as soon as she found herself alone with Laodamas in their stifling bedroom, which was on the upper storey overlooking the banqueting court, she began to reproach him for his idleness and lack of enterprise. Ctimene enlarged on the great value of her dowry, and asked him whether he were not ashamed to spend his days hunting or fishing, instead of winning wealth by bold adventures overseas.

Laodamas laughed, and answered lightly that she had only herself to blame: it was her fresh beauty that kept him at home. “Once I tire of your delectable body, Wife, I shall certainly sail away—as far as any ship can take me, to the Land of Colchis and the Stables of the Sun, if need be—but that time is not come.”

Ctimene said crossly: “Yes, you do not seem destined to tire of my embraces for a long while yet, the way you pester me with your nightly attentions. But at the first streak of dawn, off you go, eager only for your hounds, your boar spear, and your bow. I never see you again until nightfall, when you eat like a wolf, drink like a porpoise, play a foxy game or two of chess, and lurch along to bed once more to smother me with your hot, bearish caresses.”

“You would not think much of me if I failed in my husbandly duty.”

“A husband's duty is not performed only between linen sheets.”

It was as when a long-armed boxer manages to keep his small, hard-hitting opponent at a distance with left-handed jabs, until at last he slips under the tall fellow's guard and pummels him below the heart. Laodamas grew rattled, but showed that he, too, was no novice at in-fighting. “Do you expect me to lounge around the house all day,” he asked, “telling you stories while you spin, skeining the wool, and running errands for you? I intend to remain at Drepanum until you have obliged me by becoming pregnant—if, indeed, you are not barren, like your aunt and your elder sister—but while I am still here it is certainly a manlier pastime to hunt wild goats or wild boars than to kill the hours between breakfast
and supper as most young men of my age and rank do: namely to drink, dice, dance, gossip in the market place, fish with line, hook and float from the quay, and play quoits in the courtyard. Or perhaps you would prefer me to spin and weave myself, as Hercules did in Lydia, when Queen Omphale bewitched him?”

“I want a necklace,” said Ctimene suddenly. “I want a beautiful necklace of Hyperborean amber, with nubbly gold beads between the lumps, and a golden clasp shaped like two serpents with interlocking tails.”

“Oh, you do? And where is such a treasure to be had?”

“Eurymachus's mother already owns one, and Captain Dymas has promised another to his daughter Procne, Nausicaa's friend, when he returns from his next voyage to Sandy Pylus.”

“Do you perhaps wish me to ambush his ship as she sails home past Motya and steal the necklace for you—in the Bucinnan style?”

“I refuse to understand your joke against my island—if it is supposed to be a joke. No, do not dare kiss me! The wind is cruel and I have a headache. Go away, and sleep elsewhere. Dawn, I hope, will find you in a more reasonable frame of mind.”

“I may not kiss my wife good night, is this what you mean? Take care that I do not send you back to your father, dowry and all!”

“Dowry and all? That will not be easy. Of the two hundred copper ingots and twenty bales of linen salvaged from the Sidonian ship which my father found drifting, crewless, off Bucinna…”

“Drifting, do you say? He murdered the entire crew in traditional Bucinnan style; as is well known in every market place of Sicily.”