But letting this pass, I can hardly doubt, for
reasons which I gave in yesterday's Athenaeum, and for others that I
cannot now insist upon, that the poem was written by a native of
Trapani on the coast of Sicily, near Marsala. Fancy what the
position of a young, ardent, brilliant woman must have been in a
small Sicilian sea-port, say some eight or nine hundred years before
the birth of Christ. It makes one shudder to think of it. Night
after night she hears the dreary blind old bard Demodocus drawl out
his interminable recitals taken from our present Iliad, or from some
other of the many poems now lost that dealt with the adventures of
the Greeks before Troy or on their homeward journey. Man and his
doings! always the same old story, and woman always to be treated
either as a toy or as a beast of burden, or at any rate as an
incubus. Why not sing of woman also as she is when she is
unattached and free from the trammels and persecutions of this
tiresome tyrant, this insufferably self-conceited bore and booby,
man?
"I wish, my dear," exclaims her mother Arete, after one of these
little outbreaks, "that you would do it yourself.
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