To Selwyn Jepson, of course
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.
