Was the famous Greek poem written by a woman of Sicilian origin?
Was Ulysses’ trip actually a sail around Sicily?
On the footsteps of the British writer S. Butler, who visited Sicily in 1894, we try to guess who she was, where and when she wrote.
There were many poetesses in the earliest ages of Greek literature and there is no ground for refusing the possibility that one of them lived in Sicily around 1000 B.C.
The fact that the recognized heads of literature in the Homeric age where the nine Muses-for and both Iliad and Odyssey begin with an invocation addressed to a woman suggests female authorship the Odyssey there is a preponderance of female interest, a fuller knowledge of things generally a woman deals with. People always write by preference of what they know best, and they know best what they most are, and have most to do with.
Women in the Iliad are few and rarely occupy the stage. The writer of the Odyssey is fierce like a tigress at times, but it is sweetness rather than strength that fascinates us throughout the poem. “It is the charm of a woman not of a man” as P.B. Shelley says (in Selected letters – 1882).
In the Odyssey women are directing, counselling and protecting men in domestic life. There is Minerva, omnipresent at the elbows of Ulysses and Telemachus to keep them straight and she alternately scold and flatter them. In the Iliad she is the warrior, in the Odyssey she is a great woman but not a warrior. Helen is master in the house of Menelaus, Calypsos is the mastermind, not Ulysses and look at Nausicaa, delightful as she is, it would not be wise to contradict her, she knows what is good for Ulysses and all will go well with him so long as she obeys her, but she must be master and he a man.
No woman in the Odyssey is ever laughed at, men are. Woman, religion and money are the three dominant ideas in the mind of the writer of the Odyssey. In the Iliad the belli causa is a woman, in the Odyssey the belli causa is mainly money and women are most in evidence.
Penelope was most probably made more virtuous than she was to preserve female honour as scandalous versions of Penelope’s conduct were current among the ancients. The authoress was most probably a young, unmarried lady. A man would not have made the suitors a band of lovers at all, bringing them at her feet, spoil them and in the end destroy them to exalt her sex. Shall we go further wrong if we conclude that Penelope picked out her web, not so much in order to delay a hateful marriage, as to prolong a very nice courtship instead? After all she has the right to please herself or not?
The authoress chooses to pretend that Ulysses was dying to get back to her, she knew perfectly well that he was in no great hurry to do so, she was not, however, going to admit anything so derogatory to the sanctity of married life, or at any rate to the power which a wife has over her husband.
The poem is such a tour de force as none but a high-spirited, headstrong girl, who had been accustomed to have things done her own way and she had the Iliad in front of her while writing.
Scheria and Ithaca are drawn from Trapani and its surroundings including the Egadi Islands. The voyages of Ulysses practically resolve themselves into a voyage from Troy to the neighbourhood of Sicily and so into a sail round Sicily, beginning with Trapani and ending with the same place at the foot of Mount Eryx that Ulysses reaches in a dark night full of mist, where a cave with a supposed hidden treasure is known till today by locals.
There is the description of the wing in the harbour of Phorcys to the cave in which he hides his presents, up to mt. Neritum along its long top to the spring and the Haven Rock and finally the path passing the hill of Mercury down to Ithaca, as accurately presented to us by the road from the saline of S. Cusumano to the Grotta del Toro on M. Eryx, the fountain, the Raven Rock, and the road to Trapani, as though the Odyssey had been written yesterday.
The Egadi Islands and particularly Asinelli and Formiche could be the Cyclops, as Sican descendants of the people who built the megalithic walls of Eryx.
Favignana is the island where Ulysses hunted the goats and the cave of Poliphemus is on M.Eryx then.
So, who was the writer?
She had for sure the Iliad in front of her and knowledge of the lost Greek epic poems while writing. We have then to find a woman of Trapani, young, fearless, self-willed and jealous for the honour of her sex. She seems to have moved in the best society of her age and country, for we can imagine none more polished on the west coast of Sicily in the Odyssean times than the one with which the writer shows herself familiar.
She must have had leisure, or she could not have carried through so great a work. She puts up with men when they are necessary and illustrious, but she is never enthusiastic about them, and likes them best when she is laughing at them; but she is cordially interested in fair and famous women. We should look for her in the house of king Alcinous where she must have been an intimate member to be able to laugh at his head as much as she chose.
She knows the house and the gardens as much as she likes to describe them as her own. No one else is described wit livingness and enthusiasm like Nausicaa, a product of an early Ionian colony from Corfù (Drepane – sickle).
The poem must be earlier, set the fall of Troy at 1184 B.C by Thucydides, than 734 B.C., so before the foundation of Syracuse by Korinthos.
