Homer’s Daughter by Robert Graves

Cretans and Greek Aeacids as co-builders of Troy, which was designed to safeguard their trading interests in the Black Sea, found the entrance to the Hellespont barred: King Priam had erected strong forts at Sestus and Abydus to control the narrows. After protesting to him without success, they asked their Achaean allies to help them take sanctions, and promised, if the expedition proved successful, to share the spoils of the city with them. Agamemnon, High King of Mycenae, agreed to lead the expedition and persuaded Odysseus to join it, because Odysseus was King of the Ionian Islands, the home of my ancestor Zacynthus, one of the Cretan founders of Troy. So, at a conferenceheld in the temple of the Spartan Goddess Helle, they sacrificed a horse to her and took oaths on the jointed pieces. They swore to free the straits honoured with her name—I refer to the Hellespont—for Greek navigation. I cannot think that any man of experience will challenge my argument. Pray now, Demodocus, continue your song, when you have well rinsed your gums and throat.”
    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.”
    â€œNo, 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, skippedabout fifteen hundred lines and