Homer’s Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

protected by a thorn hedge. The fruit are pear, mulberry, cherry, quince, sorb apple, arbutus, pomegranate, and several varieties of grape and fig, ripening at different times. Of course,there is no all-the-year-round vintage season, as I pretend in my poem, and as my uncle Mentor used to claim when he was in his cups. We also have a melon patch, a hazel grove, and a garden of potherbs and salads: cabbage, turnip, radish, carrot, beet, mallow, charlock, fennel, onion, leek, broccoli, arum, parsnip, celery, rocket, chicory, basil, marjoram, mint, endive, fennel and asparagus. (I see that I have mentioned fennel twice; but it is a very useful vegetable.) Two springs rise at the head of the orchard, one of which serves for irrigation. The other passes under the court of sacrifice and issues close to the main gateway; this is the chief source of drinking water for the townsfolk, who come in crowds all day long with pitchers and buckets. Behind the house stand stables and styes; and behind these an acre or so of olive yard.
    The island of Hiera is more or less ours, though nominally ruled by my mother’s clan; we raise horses there, and a fine breed of red cattle. We also graze large herds of hogs and oxen on Eryx, with numerous flocks of sheep; and countless bees from our apiaries use the same pastures. We bring the skips down to Drepanum in the winter to keep the bees warm. So what with the produce of earth and sea, our house slaves eat better than does many a king’s son in the barren islands of the Aegean Sea. (There the staple food is roast asphodel root and mallows, for lack of wheat or barley, and fish in season; and figs; and a modicum of olive oil; and goat flesh.) No wonder that enemies envy our good fortune; and no wonder that when misfortune visited us because of Ctimene’s untimely demand for an amber necklace, my father’s rebellious subjects proved to have little loyalty or love for our house, and came swarming like ants to eat us up.
    My father has the reputation of being close-fisted, which is unjust. Certainly the Gods cannot complain that he stints them of sacrifice; or his household that they go ill fed or underclad. He is industrious and energetic, condemns waste, regards poverty as the Gods’ punishment of improvidence; and scorns the man who presents splendid gifts to strangers for display, rather than in the hope of eventual return. It was he who first introduced the cultivation of flax into Western Sicily, and set up a small linen factory near the main gateway. We pride ourselves on the fineness of the web—if one pulls a piece of our linen sheeting tight and tilts it at an angle, one can roll drops of oil all the way down; they do not penetrate the linen. My father abhors idleness in man or woman, always finds plenty of work for the slaves, even when it rains, and believes that early marriages are an incentive to industry.
    This brings me to the subject of my suitors. No sooner was I sixteen years old than my father announced in the Elyman Council—which is organized on the twelve-clan system—that he would now accept offers for my hand, but that the honour of an alliance with the royal house could be bought only at a substantial price. In answer, Aegyptius, one of the Phocaean councillors, remarked that, as a general rule, an Elyman bride carries a dowry to the bridegroom’s family, which guarantees her respectful treatment, and that this dowry is of far greater value than any complimentary presents which a suitor might think fit to bestow, without prejudice, on the bride’s father. Doubtless, he said, the suggested innovation, reversing the rôles of bride and bridegroom, was justified in this case by the advantages at which my father hinted. But would it not, if popularly followed, tend to place young women of qualityon a level with common concubines, bought at so many head of cattle or the equivalent in stamped copper, and thus deprive them of any rights or