Homer’s Daughter (29 page)

“I had been wondering when I should have to answer that question,” he said. “The answer is: I accept the price you name, though I fear it will be a high one.”

“For so valuable a life it must be exceptionally high. Besides, I might have been killed myself in saving you. Come then, it is as follows. Since you are a Son of Homer and your guild alone is privileged to perform in the courts of Greece, I demand that you shall approve, sing and circulate an epic poem of my own composition on which I am already working and which, if Athene continues to inspire me, I shall finish within two or three years. It begins with the opening verses of
The Return of Odysseus
, as far as his visit to the Lotus-eaters. After that the story will be different. Probably it will include the adventures of Ulysses (whom some believe to have been Odysseus) and end with the massacre of Penelope's lovers. I have a fair notion now how Odysseus managed it singlehanded. The
Iliad
, which I admire, is devised by a man for men; this epic,
The Odyssey
, will be devised by a woman for women. Understand that I am Homer's latest born child, a daughter; and listen attentively. When I have finished the poem, and written it out in cuttlefish ink on sheepskin, you must memorize it, and (if necessary) improve the language where it halts or flags. One day I shall send you back to Delos and you will carry my poem to all the courts of Asia. When princes and princesses—but especially princesses—praise it and heap gifts on you, asking: ‘Phemius, golden-mouthed minstrel, where did you learn that glorious story?' you must answer: ‘My ancestor's songs are highly esteemed by the
Elymans, who live at the far western fringe of the civilized world; and it was at the Elyman court that I learned this
Odyssey
.' I shall be careful to include nothing that might betray the land of its origin, though immortalizing my own name and Aethon's and yours in the course of the story.”

“But if I refuse, Princess?”

“Then you may expect a worse fate than Melantheus. Be wise: take your oath by Athene and by Apollo.”

Eventually he swore: perhaps because he thought me incapable of completing the immense labour which I had set myself. As though I ever fail in any of my undertakings!

***

I must confess that Phemius behaved very well when, a couple of years later, I presented him with a manuscript of more than twelve thousand lines—not written on sheepskin but on scrolls of Egyptian papyrus which Aethon won in his glorious sack of Canopus. After all, Phemius is a professional bard and I am a mere interloper and a woman; and we had several serious tiffs while I was composing it. However, I let him have his way sometimes when he protested that this verse or that was faulty. But not always.

He hated me to borrow passages from the
Iliad
for what he considered improper contexts, and he grew furious to find that Homer's lines about the water being heated to wash Patroclus's dead body were now used to describe the warm bath prepared for Odysseus, and that I had put part of Hector's farewell speech to Andromache into Telemachus's mouth, when he forbids his mother to meddle in men's affairs. Phemius called me heartless to treat any passage so tragic as the first, or so moving as the second, with such disrespect.
“I am heartless, eh?” I countered, my eyes blazing. “In that case you had better behave a little more subserviently or you will find yourself sold to an upland farmer. Do you like gruel and skim milk and rags?” He drew in his horns, which are tender, and tears ran down his plump cheeks. It was a ridiculous threat, of course, and if I had made it to a man like Demodocus he would have laughed in my face.

Yet I admire Phemius, who helped me to smooth out incidents in which the Goddess Athene had not been particularly helpful.

For safety's sake, on his advice, I have consigned to oblivion all the names of my living characters, giving them pseudonyms—as I also do here, with only four exceptions. I retain my own as a personal signature; Phemius retains his as a reward for the collaboration; I allow Odysseus to call himself “Aethon son of Castor” and tell Aethon's life story in one of his many fictions; and (as I decided halfway through the poem) Eurycleia deserves to be immortalized for urging Aethon and me to marry. Our most heated argument concerned the preponderance of women in my epic and Athene's ubiquity, and the precedence given to famous women when Odysseus meets the ghosts of the departed. I had mentioned only Tyro, Antiope, Alcmene, Jocasta, Chloris, Leda, Iphimedeia, Phaedra, Procris, Ariadne, Maera, Clymene and, naturally, Eriphyle, and let Odysseus describe them to Alcinous. “My dear Princess,” said Phemius, “if you really think that you can pass off this poem as the work of a man, you deceive yourself. A man would give pride of place to the ghosts of Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax, Odysseus's old comrades, and other more ancient heroes such as Minos,
Orion, Tityus, Salmoneus, Tantalus, Sisyphus and Hercules; and mention their wives and mothers incidentally, if at all; and make at least one god help Odysseus at some stage or other.”

I admitted the force of his argument, which explains why, now, Odysseus first meets a comrade who has fallen off a roof at Circe's house—I call him Elpenor—and cracks a mild joke about Elpenor's having come more quickly to the Grove of Persephone by land than he by sea. I also allow Alcinous to ask after Agamemnon, Achilles and the rest, and Odysseus to satisfy his curiosity. For Phemius's sake I have even let Hermes supply the moly in passages adapted from my uncle Mentor's story of Ulysses. In my original version I had given all the credit to Athene.

While altering the saga of
Odysseus's Return
to make my Elyman suitors serve as Penelope's lovers, I had to protect myself against scandal. What if someone recognized the story and supposed that I, Nausicaa the irreproachable, had played the promiscuous harlot in my father's absence? So, according to my poem, Penelope must have remained faithful to Odysseus throughout those twenty years. And because this change meant that Aphrodite had failed to take her traditional revenge, I must make Poseidon, not her, the enemy who delayed him on his homeward voyage after the Fall of Troy. I should therefore have to omit the stories of Penelope's banishment and the oar mistaken for a flail, and Odysseus's death from Telemachus's sting-ray spear. When I told Phemius of these decisions, he pointed out, rather nastily, that since Poseidon had fought for the Greeks against the Trojans, and since Odysseus had never failed to honour him, I must
justify this enmity by some anecdote. “Very well,” I answered. “Odysseus blinded a Cyclops who, happening to be Poseidon's son, prayed to him for vengeance.”

“My dear Princess, every Cyclops in the smithies of Etna was born to Uranus, Poseidon's grandfather, by Mother Earth.”

“Mine was an exceptional Cyclops,” I snapped. “He claimed Poseidon as his father and kept sheep in a Sican cave, like Conturanus. I shall call him Polyphemus—that is, ‘famous'—to make my hearers think him a more important character than he really was.”

“Such deceptions tangle the web of poetry.”

“But if I offer Penelope as a shining example for wives to follow when their husbands are absent on long journeys, that will excuse the deception.”

Admittedly, I made several stupid mistakes which I wish could be amended: for instance, when I composed the story of Odysseus's escape from Polyphemus the Cyclops, I put a rudder at the prow of his ship as well as at the stern. This was because, misled by the equestrian metaphor “turning her head about,” frequently used by our sailors, I presumed a prow-rudder, which I had never noticed. And I have since discovered that one cannot cut seasoned timber from a growing tree as Odysseus does in Ogygia, and that hawks do not eat their prey on the wing, even in prodigies, and that it takes more than two or three men to hang a dozen women simultaneously from the same rope. Alas, a verse once sent on its travels can never be overtaken or recalled; nor can I fairly blame Phemius for not pointing out these mistakes to me. They all occur in passages which he criticized on other
grounds, and I had threatened him with a diet of bread and water if he changed a single word of them.

I also got into difficulties by first calling Eurycleia “Eurynome” and then forgetting and using her real name; so that later on I had to pretend that there were two of her. And I forgot, in my account of the massacre, that Penelope's lovers—whom I make her suitors because the legend, as Phemius used to tell it, disgusts any decent audience—could have armed themselves with the twelve long axes through which Odysseus shot, and used them as maces to hack him and his men in little pieces. But Homer, I am sure, went equally wrong at times, and I flatter myself that my story is interesting enough to blind Phemius's listeners to its faults, even if he has a cold, or the banquet is badly cooked, or the good dark wine runs short.