II
My Birth
and
Background

My name means “many songs.” I was born with a vocal range even broader than I am tall. My mother says that from the time I was squeezed out of her womb, I was squalling like nothing she had ever heard. Later in my lonely youth, I kept this vocal ability, and I sang to myself, often because I had no other company. Oh, I could sing! I still do.

According to legend, I am the son of Poseidon by the nymph Thoosa. I laugh at this when I hear it. It gives me a certain nobility, I grant, but I am no more the son of a god than you are. My mother really is named Thoosa, but she is no nymph. She was an island girl here in Thrinacia.2 Just an island girl, and very fair in her youth, a raven-haired and dark-eyed beauty. A shepherdess, like most girls on this island. She’d tend her father’s sheep on the rugged hillsides during the day and spin the wool into thread at night. And when she had acquired the skill, she would weave the threads into clothes—shirts and cloaks for men and women. Women wove linen, too, but the linen was imported by trade from Egypt. We did not grow flaxseed here in Thrinacia.

My father appeared one day on a ship from Achaea. The Achaeans, like the Kena’ani,3 who came both before and after them, were always raiding along the coastlines of the Mediterranean. They traded, too, and founded towns and cities, but when they wanted to be, they were not traders but pirates. You think of them as the founders of civilization? So they are, though no more so than the Egyptians, who are far more ancient. The Achaeans built the best ships and were the best sailors, so they sailed about various parts of the Mediterranean, sometimes trading, sometimes on honest business, but just as often plundering. My father was the captain of one of those ships, a great sailing craft with twenty oars and a tall mast on which to raise a sail.

Like most raiders, he was ruthless. They landed to plunder our little coastal village about nine months before I was born. That was all. There was no trading, no bartering—just pitiless raiding. They didn’t care for what they did. They killed the men and took the boys and girls into captivity. When they took boys into captivity, they either sodomized them or castrated them right there on their ship’s deck, or both. Then they sold them to the Egyptians as eunuchs. The women they inevitably stole away into bondage, either to be used merciless