Customer Reviews

Homer's Daughter

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Robert Graves, poet, novelist and scholar of things Greek, here explores the possibility that The Odyssey, successor to Homer's Illiad, was written by a princess of mixed Greek and other ancestry in a Greek-Trojan settlement in ancient Sicily some time after the Trojan War. Using internal evidence which suggests female authorship and a relationship of the terrain described to areas in the western Mediterranean, Graves speculates that the true author told her own story, possibly a true one, buried within the Homeric epic which has been handed down to us via the ancient Greeks. To get it included among the Homeric canon this young, energetic and extremely intelligent woman manages to get the tale incorporated into the body of Homeric songs through the auspices of a member of the Homeric guild. But, scholarly speculation aside, this is basically a tale of adventure and intrigue as it recounts the events surrounding the siege of a king's household by rebellious nobles using a suit for his young daughter's hand as an excuse to undermine and destroy her father's rule. The princess, clever and indomitable by turns, first investigates the mystery of her elder brother's disappearance and then organizes a shrewd counterplot, reminiscent of Odysseus' triumphal and bloody return to Ithaca, to reclaim her father's holdings and the honor of his house. A bit slow and ponderous in the beginning, and somewhat too scholarly, it nevertheless comes sharply to life in the second half of the book as the plot to undo the suitors' predations hurtles toward its bloody resolution. A good tale and worth the read, though it's not quite as compelling or erudite as Graves' other work in this vein: Hercules, My Shipmate -- a tale of Jason and his Argonauts on the quest for the Golden Fleece. -- Stuart W. Mirsky author of The King of Vinland's Saga

Robert Graves had a great idea: he wanted to elaborate on the idea that "The Odyssey" was written by a woman and that the woman-author was one of the characters in the epic poem. Since the only virtuous human women in the poem are Penelope and Nausicaa, Robert Graves concluded that Nausicaa is a good candidate to be the poet.

The idea itself is quite brilliant. "The Odyssey" has always been called a "women's" epic because except for Odysseus, all other important leading characters are women and the story focuses more on domestic life than on war-like exploits. Thus, imagining Nausicaa as the epic's author is not so outlandish.

That said, "Homer's Daughter" the novel is hugely disappointing. One of the major reasons why it failed to impress me is that the tone of the novel was very impersonal. I was always aware that Robert Graves was telling the story instead of the proper narrator -- Nausicaa. Speaking of Nausicaa, she is extremely unappealing. She seems to be very intelligent and clear-headed but so cold and closed-off that I could not care less about her. All the personal stories failed to impress me because either they were almost cartoonish, like Laodamas and Ctlimene, or plain boring, like Nausicaa and Aethon. The meeting between Odysseus and Nausicaa in "The Odyssey" is one of the best parts in the epic. Especially, when Odysseus says to Nausicaa that best of all, he wishes that she would know harmony in marriage. The meeting between Nausicaa and Aethon in "Homer's Daughter", patterned after Odysseus' and Nausicaa's in "The Odyssey, cannot compare. Also, Aethon pops up in the novel but I do not learn anything about his character except that almost everyone who meets him has an immediate trust and affinity for him. Instead of telling us that, Graves could have shown better why Aethon inspires such trust.

Robert Graves is extremely good at telling myths and whenever characters do that in the novel, the stories come alive. This is why it is such a disappointment that he cannot reproduce the same magic when the action is between the characters in the novel. He also writes good speeches and the confrontations in the Council and between Aethon and the suitors are also well-realized. But when the characters try to related to each other, the result is unremarkable.

Robert Graves should have tried harder to expand on his idea but he seemed to be so enthralled with the premise that he pays little attention to anything else. All in all, this is not a bad book but not as interesting as it could have been or as other books that are historical novels based on mythology, such as Graves' own "Hercules, My Shipmate" and Mary Renault's "The King Must Die".

"Homer's Daughter" does not compare favorably to "I, Claudius"--Graves does not write a woman's voice convicingly. Still, the idea behind this novel is an interesting one. I can well believe after reading it that the "Odyssey" could have been written by a woman. The main character, Nausicaa, is likeable and spirited.
As an "Odyssey" fan, it was a lot of fun seeing how Graves set up the story as parallel to "The Odyssey"--the sort of situation that could have inspired it. The setting, in actual historic Greece/Mediteranean, not a mythical setting, was well-drawn and interesting. I would recommend this novel as a thought-provoking read for someone who is well-familiar with "The Odyssey".

In his relatively short novel author presents very interesting approach to the ''Homeric problem''. But in my opinion Homer was an author of both greatest works in the literature.

I suppose I 'enjoyed' this book in the same weary way I 'enjoyed' the same author's Wife To Mr Milton, which is also narrated in a female persona. The ever-so-clever wheeze here is to suppose that the Odyssey was indited not by Homer, nor even by another Greek of the same name, but by the Princess Nausicaa, a memorable character in it, largely for her peculiar-looking name. The Princess is not on such firm ground as Mrs Milton, whose husband definitely was one person who definitely wrote Paradise Lost and other noble works. When I was last up-to-date with Homeric scholarship (thirty-odd years ago), the English-speaking scholars had at last been converted to the view that the Homeric epics were a cumulative effort of a whole tradition of illiterate bards. This view found a shrill but entertaining and very readable proponent in Denys Page, Professor of Greek at Cambridge, whose The Homeric Odyssey is in fact a far better read than this book, even if you don't know Greek. Page even has no great opinion of the Odyssey as a poem, a very tenable view I would say.

So Graves's princess is a fraud of the worst order, a pale shadow of the 'dim phantom' who visits Penelope in Book IV. She is not purporting to be anybody in particular, but a whole lot of people. Her/their poem sucks anyway. And -- wait for this -- she does not even know what her own name means! She thinks it is something to do with BURNING ships! Can you imagine a people as superstitious as the ancient Greeks having the princess of an island that got its living from the sea called 'Burner of Ships'? The derivation of the name is from the root 'kas' with the 's' lost between vowels in the usual Greek way, and that root signifies 'excellence', which you must admit makes a lot more sense.

I still enjoyed the book as make-believe, insofar as I ever enjoy 'drag-artist' narratives. I enjoyed Wife To Mr Milton a bit more, partly because much as I detest her husband as a human being his big poem is my outright #1 in any language I can read.