Demodocus replied: “King Alpheides, since you despise my tale of Paris’s visit to the Spartan court, and his subsequent exploits in Phoenicia, I beg leave to omit this fytte tonight, and pass on to the less vexed account of Odysseus’s departure for Troy.”
“No, no! Pray do not omit a line of the cycle,” cried my father, “merely on my account. I hold, of course, that the tale of Paris’s behaviour at Sparta is neither particularly instructive nor particularly elevating: how he courted her with loud sighs and amorous glances, frequently setting his lips to that part of the goblet’s rim from which she had drunk. Men and women should never dine together except on family occasions, do you not agree? And how he scrawled ‘I love Helen!’ in wine spilled on the table top; and how Aphrodite blinded Menelaus’s eyes to this shameless performance. What a tale to sing in the hearing of impressionable young women! It is not even as though Paris’s crimes were punished. He enjoyed Helen for ten years—until, in fact, her beauty had faded, as it must when a woman reaches the forties—then gained deathless fame by killing Achilles, the greatest champion alive; and, dying gloriously in battle, was buried with heroic honours. No, no! Use your reason, my lords and gentlemen. Let me record my studied opinion that Helen never went to Troy at all.”
My father is a simple-minded, practical man, and my mother has always found it impossible to argue with him in one of his provocative moods. I should have liked to walk into the banqueting court and say: “Father, this is not the time to use the word ‘reason’. Please understand that a Homeric song is sung to the lyre, and therefore intended for entertainment, no more and no less. Moral or historical instruction is quite another matter, given by priests and old councillors to young men who gather around them in the evening after the day’s sport. On such occasions the lyre is left unstrung; no religious hush is observed; the young men rationally question and are rationally answered. Surely the Sons of Homer know what is required of them? They have been professional minstrels for a couple of hundred years at least, and few indeed of their stories are unconcerned with the mischief caused by love. That is what their hearers expect: songs of love and songs of battle. A fine entertainment a trade-war epic would make!”
Sing, ye countinghouse Muses, of so many talents of copper,
So many horsehide bales, and so many measures of broadcloth:
How the monopoly-mad King Priam defied the Achaeans,
Charging them fifty per cent on goods from the shores of the Euxine.
But shame held me back, and in any case my reproach would have fallen on deaf ears. An awkward silence ensued, and after a while Demodocus, somewhat crossly, skipped about fifteen hundred lines and began to declaim the Summons of Odysseus.
This is what he told us:
King Odysseus of Ithaca married Icarius’s daughter Penelope, after winning a suitors’ race along the Spartan street called Apheta. Icarius had called out: “One, two, three!” and then clapped his hands sharply, instead of shouting “Go!”—at which all the suitors but Odysseus started, and were at once disqualified. For Odysseus, warned beforehand, held his ground until the word “Go!”, whereupon, being the only competitor left, he won the prize without exertion, despite the crookedness of his legs. It is said that Icarius begged Odysseus, in reward for this favour, to stay with him at Sparta and, when he declined, pursued the chariot in which the bridal pair were driving away, entreating them to come back. Odysseus, who had hitherto kept his patience, turned and told Penelope: “Either come to Ithaca of your own free will; or, if you prefer your father, dismount and let me drive on alone!” Penelope’s reply was to draw down her veil. Icarius, realizing that Odysseus was within his rights, let her go, and raised an image to Modesty, which is still shown some four miles from the city of Sparta, at the place where this incident happened.
Now, Odysseus had been warned by an oracle: “If you sail to Troy, you will not come home again until the twentieth year, and then alone and destitute.” He therefore exchanged his royal robes for filthy rags, and Agamemnon, Menelaus and Palamedes found him wearing a felt cap shaped like a half egg, ploughing with an ass and an ox yoked together, and flinging salt over his shoulder as he went. When he pretended not to recognize his distinguished guests, Palamedes snatched the infant Telemachus from Penelope’s arms and set him on the ground before the advancing team, which were about to plough the tenth furrow. Odysseus hastily reined them in to avoid killing his only son and, being then reminded of the oath he had sworn on the bloody pieces of the horse, was obliged to join the expedition.
“I hope that this tale pleases you, my lord King,” said Demodocus in peevish tones, when he had been roundly applauded.
“Your voice is delightful,” my father answered, “but I cannot refrain from pointing out that this part of the cycle also carries little conviction. If Odysseus wished to feign madness, as an excuse for breaking his promise, which is the only sense that I can make of your story, why did he not act even more irresponsibly? After all, an ox and an ass are often yoked together by impoverished farmers—indeed, I have myself watched a needy Sican ploughing with an ox yoked to his own wife—and felt caps are a very reasonable wear for ploughmen, when the north-easter blows. Now, had I been Odysseus, I should have chosen a pig and a goat as my team, and dressed myself fantastically in owl feathers, a golden tiara, and snake-skin leggings—ha, ha!”
I trembled for shame to hear the venerable Demodocus addressed in this petulant and condescending style.
“And to plough ten straight furrows is hardly a sign of insanity—why did he not drive the team furiously in an ever-widening spiral? That would have been far more convincing, and would have greatly improved your story, which is not so laughable as one would expect from a Son of Homer.”
“My lord King,” said Demodocus, with a smile that came as close to a sneer as he dared, “have you not taken the wrong pig by the tail? My glorious ancestor, who composed this song, nowhere suggests that Odysseus feigned madness. Odysseus wore the felt hat of a mystagogue to show that he was prophesying, and all his actions were therefore symbolic. Ox and ass stand for Zeus and Cronus, or summer and winter, if you prefer; and each furrow sown with salt for a wasted year. He was demonstrating the futility of the war to which he had been summoned; but Palamedes, having superior prophetic powers, seized the infant Telemachus and halted the plough at the tenth furrow, thus showing that the decisive battle, which is the meaning of ‘Telemachus’, would be fought in the tenth year; as indeed it was.”
Applause and laughter greeted my father’s discomfiture. He blushed red to the ears, and showed his good sense by cutting Demodocus a large piece of roast pork, with plenty of crackling, which a page carried over in his fingers; and promised him a new gold-headed staff of cornel wood, to guide his steps and add to his distinction. But though he accepted the pork, Demodocus would never again play or sing in our Palace; honour forbade it. Some of the townsfolk even attributed our subsequent misfortunes to his ill will, because Apollo has granted all Sons of Homer the power to curse; yet I cannot think that Demodocus would have cursed us after accepting a gift offered in token of apology. We were left with Phemius, Demodocus’s assistant, who had come from Delos a few years before and was still perfecting his repertory at the old man’s knees; it was he who taught me to read and write in Chalcidian characters. So far Phemius’s eyes remain unclouded; the family affliction overtakes a Son of Homer only when his hair begins to turn grey and when, as they say, the sap has ceased to rise. As for the Hyrian, my father insisted that each of the twelve clans should present him with some object of value—a cauldron, a tripod, a rich robe, or the like; and undertook, when these were collected, to supply a cedarwood chest to stow them in, and a gold goblet to mark his personal gratitude. Being King of the Elymans, he had every right to make these demands from the clan leaders, in payment for the protection he afforded them, and the justice he dispensed; while grudging him his power, they always obeyed, and he encouraged them to recoup their expenses by a general l
evy on the common people.
The Hyrian sailed away three days later, well content with his visit (though my father somehow forgot the goblet). He had disposed of his vases and Daedalic jewellery in the market place at a substantial profit, and made all the merchants laugh by his farewell speech: “May the Queen of Heaven shower blessings on you, and may you continue to give satisfaction to your wives and daughters!” We never saw him again. My mother and I, it should be said, were the only two people in Drepanum who disbelieved his story, but we said nothing to discourage Ctimene, who soon recovered her appetite and good spirits and went singing about the house. “I wonder how long my necklace will be,” she said to my brother Clytoneus. “As long, do you think, as the one which Eurymachus’s mother wears?”
“Honoured Sister-in-law,” Clytoneus answered angrily, “though he finds one three ells long, the grief and anxiety caused by your demand for such a necklace will rob it of all beauty for me! If I were you, I should vow it to Apollo, who consented to guard the hateful necklace of Eriphyle and keep it from making further mischief among vain women.”
“Nothing of the kind,” cried Ctimene. “Laodamas would think me ungrateful.”
Pondering on Aphrodite’s victory, I decided that hers is a blind and mischievous power which makes its victims ridiculous and deprives them of all shame. I composed a story for my own amusement, basing it on a scandalous event in the early married life of Eurymachus’s mother: how one day the Goddess told her husband, the Smith God Hephaestus, that she was off to visit her temple at Cyprian Paphos. “Do so, Wife; and I will take advantage of your absence to visit my temple at Lemnos,” replied Hephaestus. But, knowing that she was an inveterate liar, he hurried back that same night and found her in bed with the Thracian War God Ares. Limping to his smithy, he forged two adamantine nets, thinner than gossamer and quite invisible. One of these he fastened underneath the bed, the other he hung from the beam above, afterwards silently gathering and uniting the edges to make an unbreakable cage around the drowsy pair. Then in a loud voice he called his fellow deities to witness this disgraceful act of adultery, and pressed Zeus for a divorce. Aphrodite, though she hid her blushes, was secretly pleased that Hermes and Poseidon had seen how beautiful she looked without even a shift, and how ready she was to deceive her husband. Hera and Athene turned away in disgust on hearing the news, and refused to attend this obscene peep show; but Aphrodite, putting a bold face on the matter, explained that making people fall in love, and doing so herself, was the divine task which she had been allotted by the Fates—who, then, could blame her? Presently Aphrodite’s friends, the Graces, bathed and anointed her with fragrant oil, dressed her in soft, semi-transparent linen robes and set a wreath of roses on her head. She was now so irresistibly charming that not only did Hephaestus forgive her on the spot, but Hermes and Poseidon thereafter came calling on alternate days, whenever he was busy at the forge. Meeting Aphrodite in the corridors of Olympus, Athene called her an idle slut; whereupon Aphrodite flounced away in a temper, sat down at Athene’s loom and tried her hand at weaving. Athene caught her in the act and, since weaving was the divine task allotted to her by the Fates, asked in exasperation: “What would you think if I worked on the sly at your shameful trade? Very well, then, dear colleague, go on weaving! I shall never do another hand’s turn at the loom myself. And I hope that it will bore you to the point of misery!”
Then I wondered: “Are such jests against the Olympians permissible?” Only, I decided, when a god or goddess is worshipped in a manner offensive to public decency and good manners: when the adulteries of Aphrodite, the thefts and lies of Hermes, and the bloody-mindedness of Ares are perpetuated in the cults of these deities and quoted by foolish mortals to excuse their own depravity. Homer goes further than I would dare, in his disdain of the Olympians, whom he makes inflict punishments or bestow protection on mankind for mere caprice, rather than requiting them according to their moral deserts, and quarrel scandalously among themselves. Moreover, in the Iliad, Zeus sends a dream to gull Agamemnon, who has always behaved piously towards him; and, prompted by a divine conclave, Athene persuades Pandarus to commit an act of treachery; and Hera uses an erotic charm to distract Zeus’s attention from the battle before Troy; and the Olympians laugh cruelly at the Smith God’s lameness, caused by a devoted championship of his mother Hera against the indecent brutality of his stepfather.
Finding such anecdotes frankly irreligious, I close my ears and mind when they are declaimed in our Palace. My father once laughed at me for this and explained that Homer is far from being irreligious: in the Iliad, on the contrary, he has satirized the new theology of the Dorian barbarians. For these Sons of Hercules, having dethroned the Great Goddess Rhea—once acknowledged as the Sovereign of the World—had awarded her sceptre to the Sky God Zeus; and made him the head of a divine family composed of deities cultivated by their subject tribes, namely Hera of Argos, Poseidon of Euboea, Athene of Athens, Apollo of Phocis, Hermes of Arcadia, and so on. Homer, explained my father, secretly worshipped this earlier Goddess and deplored the moral confusion which the sack of her religious centres had caused, caricaturing the Dorian chieftains in the shameless, ruthless, treacherous, lecherous, boastful persons of the Greek leaders.
Historically, my father may be right, as when he criticized the Homeric version of Helen’s flight to Troy. Yet the Zeus, the Hera, the Poseidon, the Athene and the Apollo whom I worship in my heart, and whom he honours at the altar of sacrifice, are noble-minded, just and trustworthy deities. For me, Hermes is a courteous messenger and conductor of souls, no thief; Ares fights in defence of good causes only; Aphrodite…
Yes, I confess that Aphrodite presents mankind with a difficult problem. I acknowledge her dreadful power, as I acknowledge the power of Hades, King of the Underworld; but ought I not to condemn Helen, Clytaemnestra, and Penelope for defiling their husbands’ nuptial couches and becoming a reproach to their sex, rather than smile and say: “They were loyal devotees of Aphrodite, scorning the ties of marriage and home the better to honour her”? The Nasamonians of Libya, the Moesynoechians of Pontus, the Gymnasiae of the Balearic Islands and similarly promiscuous peoples may worship her with moral consistence; no law-abiding Greek can do so.
Nevertheless, I sacrificed a young she-goat to Aphrodite on the following day, burning its thigh bones on juniper billets; and vowed to take an offering up to her temple when I had the opportunity. She resides there between the spring visit of the quails and the vintage season; but, because her mountain top is cold and cloudy during most of the winter, she afterwards flies off, they say, to Libya, riding in a chariot drawn by white doves. Her priestesses and eunuchs then seek their warm college on the plain, bringing with them the image enclosed in a cedarwood chest, the golden honeycomb said to have been Daedalus’s own votive offering to Elyme, and the sacred dovecotes; there to live as chastely for the next six months as the attendants of Artemis or Athene. The Goddess’s annual ascent of Eryx and her subsequent descent are marked by scenes of wild abandonment to her power, especially among the Sicans. My father has done his best to suppress these revels, which raise vexatious problems of paternity; but without success. Only if some national disaster occurs in winter does the Goddess reascend the mountain, calling back her priestesses, eunuchs, image honeycomb and doves; and is then propitiated with costly sacrifices, while the eunuchs whip one another until the blood flows, howling ecstatically. I hate the whole performance.
CHAPTER
FOUR
MY FATHER’S
DAUGHTER
Not long afterwards, my father took out a ten-oared galley to inspect our red cattle and the mares with their mule foals on the island of Hiera; but had gone only about half a mile when he sighted a large Rhodian vessel approaching from the west. The sea was calm, and her sailors were pulling a long, even stroke in time with the helmsman’s lugubrious chant. My father hailed the captain, and as soon as each of them had satisfied himself that the other was no pirate—one cannot
be too careful nowadays—they drew alongside and exchanged gifts and compliments. The Rhodian ship was bound for Sardinia with a mixed cargo, and at Sandy Pylus, her last port of call in Greece, two staid merchants had come aboard to join the trading venture. Overjoyed to meet these Pylians, my father enquired anxiously for news of Laodamas. They shook their heads. “If such an important person had visited our city,” they declared, “at any time since the autumn, we should certainly have heard of him.” When he quoted the Hyrian captain’s report, they admitted having met the fellow at Sandy Pylus and formed a very poor opinion of his character. “As slippery as a cuttlefish,” they said, “and as mendacious as a Lerian slave. His wine was watered; his vases were flawed; his silver ingots leaden-cored.”
This came as a great shock for my father, who abandoned his visit to Hiera and returning home more depressed in mind than I had ever known him, found Ctimene back in one of her old black moods, biting her nails and moaning the popular song: “Why does my darling delay? Has he no pity on my loneliness?” over and over again. He retired to his vaulted chamber, where he had built himself a curious bed, using a live olive tree as the bedpost, inlaid with gold, silver and ivory. In theory, the room is a tomb; and once a year at midwinter, when the customary Demise of the Crown occurs, he shaves his head, enters, eats the food of the departed, and pretends to have been killed. He lies in state under a scarlet coverlet; while the Boy King, chosen from our own clan, dances the Ballet of the Months, and assumes the sceptre for a day. My father now locked the door and, after pacing up and down, his hands tightened into fists, flung himself miserably on the bed, and closed his eyes. I asked one of my maids to peep in at the window occasionally, and report his movements; which I regarded as most ill-omened, though I did not tell her so.