Читать книгу The Return from Troy - Lindsay Clarke - Страница 8

Whoever finds these papyrus scrolls will see from the inscription on their urn that they are offered in prayer to Odysseus. They contain a reliable account of the ordeals and initiations he underwent on his journey home from Troy, along with the story of the fate of the House of Atreus and the other Argive heroes. By the end of the day I shall have concealed the whole collection of scrolls in the Cave of the Nymphs, hoping that they will be found in better times when men may be ready to listen to tales other than those sung in praise of war. Meanwhile, they must stand in fulfilment of the pledge I made one winter night in Ithaca when Odysseus sought to make peace with his own turbulent past.

‘You are an honest man, Phemius,’ he said to me that night, ‘if not always as wise as you believe yourself to be. You are also my bard and the time has come for me to share with you things that I have told to no-one else except my wife. I do so trusting that one day you will make a fine song of my story – a song by which the world will come to know what kind of man Odysseus truly was. And it will be a song unlike all the other songs because it will show that the ordeals he endured on his long voyage home from Troy were more marvellous, because more human, than all the extravagant inventions of the poets.’

When Odysseus asked me if I would do him this service, I vowed that I would. So now, remembering the solemnity of that moment, it is my earnest prayer that his revered shade will believe that, in the many words written in these scrolls, the pledge I gave to him that night has been faithfully redeemed.