Homer’s Daughter by Robert Graves Read Free Book Online Page B

tour Greece, taking my son Eros as your guide. Once you reach Sparta, he will oblige Helen to fall head over heels in love with you.”
    â€œWould you swear to that?” Paris asked excitedly.
    Aphrodite took a solemn oath by the River Styx, and Paris, without a second thought, awarded her the golden apple.
    By this judgement he incurred the unappeasable resentment of both Hera and Athene, who went off arm-in-arm to plot the destruction of Troy; while Aphrodite, a naughty smile on her matchless face, stood wondering how best to keep her promise.
    â€œElymans of Mount Eryx,” cried Demodocus, “no goddess in the universe is so powerful as our Aphrodite!”
    I disliked this extremely partial statement. The competition was only for the fairest, not for the wisest or the strongest; and Homer relates that when once Aphrodite presumed to fight on the Trojan plain she had to flee, wounded, from a mere mortal.
    Demodocus replaced his lyre on the peg and began mumbling bread and sipping wine. My father coughed consequentially. “A very pretty story,” he said, “and beautifullytold, revered Demodocus. The Gods, who deprived you of both your eyes and all thirty-two of your teeth, have given you instead a splendid voice and an inexhaustible memory. But, confess, is this the whole truth? I cannot easily believe that the elopement of Priam’s forty-eighth or forty-ninth son with a Spartan queen occasioned the Trojan War, which involved nearly every city in Greece and Asia Minor, and must have caused at least a hundred thousand casualties, one way or another. It was not even as if Paris attempted to seize the throne of Sparta. Tell me: what value in cattle or metal would you put on a wife who, after nine years of wedlock, had failed to bear Menelaus a son, and belonged to a notoriously adulterous family? His loss of conjugal rights could have been settled for ten or twenty pounds of gold at the outside.”
    â€œI repeat the story as it has come down to us from our ancestor, the divine Homer,” said Demodocus shortly.
    â€œWomen, of course,” my father persisted, “can cause serious local feuds, especially when they are heiresses, marriage to whom involves a transfer of property; but I cannot believe, either, that Helen’s suitors would have committed themselves to an overseas war on behalf of Menelaus, whose choice as a bridegroom seemed a foregone conclusion, or that Paris’s father and brothers would have agreed to defend Troy for ten years against them, rather than hand her back.”
    â€œAll civil wars are dynastic wars, my lord King; all overseas wars are trade wars,” agreed the portly Hyrian. “And Troy, which had been jointly founded by our Cretan ancestors, certain local Phrygians, and a force of Aeacids from Eastern Greece, was in its time the most important city of Asia.Troy commanded the Hellespont, and therefore controlled the rich trade of the Black Sea and beyond; gold, silver, iron, cinnabar, ship’s timber, linen, hemp, dried fish, oil and Chinese jade. A great annual fair was held on the plain of the Scamander, to which the merchants of the world resorted; they all brought gifts to the King of Troy, who, in return, protected them while the fair was in progress, and supplied food and drinking water. The Trojan kings, however, being of Phrygian stock, would allow neither Greeks nor Cretans to trade directly with the Black Sea nations. A generation previously, Priam’s father Laomedon had tried to prevent the Minyan ship
Argo
from sailing to fetch the Golden Fleece laid up in a temple at Colchis, but she slipped through; and the Sons of Homer themselves tell how Hercules, who was a member of her crew, afterwards disembarked in Phrygia and, gathering a few allies, took Troy by storm and punished Laomedon for his greed and obstinacy.”
    â€œExactly,” cried my father. “The story is as plain as the polished knob on that door! Those