HOMER'S DAUGHTER

A re-weaving of Homeric myth reveals the true story of The Return of Odysseus for Nausicaa, Princess of the Elymans, explains how she perpetrated the hoax of this successor to The . Beset with the problems of one brother who has been banished, another who has vanished, her father's absence and the necessity for her to take a husband, Nausicaa makes use of the shipwrecked Cretan, Aethon, to outwit her greedy suitors, insolent after their murder of her uncle and spoiling for trouble as they humiliate the Palace. Blood vengeance is exacted in the massacre that follows and a victory of few against many greets her father's return so that Nausicaa can blackmail their Sicilian poet to spread her composition through the known world. A string of tales (at some variance with historical recognition) combines a period pastiche which is im — and also — pertinent. For the followers of his tart transgressions into the past.