قراءة كتاب The Authoress of the Odyssey Where and when she wrote, who she was, the use she made of the Iliad, and how the poem grew under her hands
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The Authoress of the Odyssey Where and when she wrote, who she was, the use she made of the Iliad, and how the poem grew under her hands
TIMES
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Frontispiece, Nausicaa.
The house of Ulysses
The cave of Polyphemus
Signor Sugameli and the author in the cave of Polyphemus
Map of Trapani and Mt. Eryx
The harbour Rheithron, now salt works of S. Cusumano
Mouth of the harbour Rheithron, now silted up
Map of the Ionian Islands
Map of the Ægadean Islands
Trapani from Mt. Eryx, showing Marettimo (Ithaca)
"all highest up in the sea"
Map of the voyage of Ulysses
Wall at Cefalù, rising from the sea
Megalithic remains on the mountain behind Cefalù
H. Festing Jones, Esq., in flute of column at Selinunte
Remains of megalithic wall on Mt. Eryx
Wall at Hissarlik, showing the effects of weathering
The Iliadic wall
A coin bearing the legend Iakin, and also showing
the brooch of Ulysses.
THE AUTHORESS OF THE ODYSSEY.
CHAPTER I.
IMPORTANCE OF THE ENQUIRY—THE STEPS WHEREBY I WAS LED TO MY CONCLUSIONS—THE MULTITUDE OF EARLY GREEK POETESSES REMOVES ANY À PRIORI DIFFICULTY—THE MUSES AND MINERVA AS HEADS OF LITERATURE—MAN, RATHER THAN WOMAN, THE INTERLOPER.
If the questions whether the Odyssey was written by a man or a woman, and whether or no it is of exclusively Sicilian origin, were pregnant with no larger issues than the determination of the sex and abode of the writer, it might be enough merely to suggest the answers and refer the reader to the work itself. Obviously, however, they have an important bearing on the whole Homeric controversy; for if we find a woman's hand omnipresent throughout the Odyssey, and if we also find so large a number of local details, taken so exclusively and so faithfully from a single Sicilian town as to warrant the belief that the writer must have lived and written there, the presumption seems irresistible that the poem was written by a single person. For there can hardly have been more than one woman in the same place able to write such—and such homogeneous—poetry as we find throughout the Odyssey.
Many questions will become thus simplified. Among others we can limit the date of the poem to the lifetime of a single person, and if we find, as I believe we