Samuel Butler – Cat Among the Pigeons

 

   Samuel Butler – Cat Among the Pigeons

It took me a total of seventeen months to translate the Iliad and only seven months to complete the Odyssey. After being away from ancient Greek for almost 60 years, things got easier as I went along and additionally, the writing style of the second epic seemed simpler to me. Perhaps simpler is not the correct word, but I did find the Odyssey very different from the Iliad. In fact, by the time I had reached line 20, I had come to the conclusion that they were penned by different authors. I have often said that the Iliad was written by an artist and the Odyssey by a news reporter.

English writer Samuel Butler (1835-1902) decided that the world needed a very readable prose translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey that would appeal to a broad modern audience who could not read the original Greek, and he set about this task late in his life. As he translated Homer’s stories, as I did, Butler also came to the conclusion that the Iliad and the Odyssey were by different hands, but he went one step further, and a big step at that. Butler concluded that the Odyssey had been written, not by the singing bard who wrote the Iliad, but by a woman. In 1897 he published his theory in his book The Authoress of the Odyssey, and there he set the cat among the pigeons.

Butler went much farther than simply proclaiming female authorship of the epic. He even suggested that this female author was a young girl who lived in Sicily and who wrote herself into the story in the character of the Princess Nausicaa, daughter of King Alcinous and Queen Arete of Scheria in the land of the Phaeacians. He discounted entirely the notion that the journey of Odysseus was a pelagic voyage to the ends of the Aegean and the Mediterranean, and instead was just a circumnavigation of the island of Sicily. He postulated that Ithaca was not an island off the west coast of Greece, but rather was one of the Egadi Islands off of Trapani in Sicily. In fact, he positioned all of the stops that Odysseus made during his journey as taking place on the island itself or just off its shores.

It is not my intention to repeat Butler’s arguments in an attempt to either support or refute what he has suggested. Read his book if you are interested and make up your own mind, for it is a fascinating study and a real head-scratcher. What I do find very interesting are two intense arguments that he makes about the acceptance of his premise or, at the very least, the notion about keeping an open mind about scholarship. Butler makes the point that he has outlined his arguments about female authorship, author identification and locale, and has received no counter-arguments to refute his position. He proposes that if his position is so totally off the mark, then the classical scholars of his day would have said something to argue a different opinion. But Butler heard nothing from any scholars to critique his position. His conclusion was that since no one objected, there was no objection and that therefore his position was a correct one. The counter-argument of course was that everyone thought that he was a fool and that they just chose to ignore him, instead of giving him any credence by commenting on his work.

The second concluding point that Butler made was that his position was incapable of being considered by scholars, because doing so would call into doubt 2,000 years of classical scholarship that was based on the premise of a single authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey by a blind poet named Homer. Too many people would have to admit that they had been wrong and a world of prefaces and introductions to various Homeric translations would have to be rewritten. Butler concludes his book by saying that he does not care whether the Odyssey was written by a man or a woman or where it was written or where the story is centered. His only care is that scholars take a sensible approach in how they consider arguments and theories and how they come to their conclusions in a reasonable manner. As scholars we need to keep an open mind and approach any and all new information with care and reason. Sensible advice indeed!