Homer's Daughter QUOTES

1 " 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. "

― Robert Graves , Homer's Daughter

2 " All civil wars are dynastic wars, my lord King; all overseas wars are trade wars,” agreed the portly Hyrian "

― Robert Graves , Homer's Daughter

3 " 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. "

― Robert Graves , Homer's Daughter

4 " 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. "

― Robert Graves , Homer's Daughter

5 " Two are needed to make a comradeship, but only one to dissolve it. "

― Robert Graves , Homer's Daughter

6 " 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. "

― Robert Graves , Homer's Daughter

7 " 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. "

― Robert Graves , Homer's Daughter

8 " 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. "

― Robert Graves , Homer's Daughter

9 " Dwóch trzeba do kompanii, lecz jednego do jej rozwiązania. "

― Robert Graves , Homer's Daughter

10 " 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. "

― Robert Graves , Homer's Daughter

11 " 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. "

― Robert Graves , Homer's Daughter

12 " Dostluk kurmak için iki kişi gerekir, ama onu bozmaya bir kişi yeter. "

― Robert Graves , Homer's Daughter