‘When the child of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared, we admired the island and wandered all over it’
From the ‘Odyssey’, Homer, 750BC–650BC
HOMER, of course. The Odyssey. Few, if any, stand before me in my admiration of the Ancient Greek poet, not only for the epic verse, but the devotion to small-scale agriculture. It’s there in the Iliad and the Odyssey, if you read them closely. Homeric heroes reckoned their riches in cattle and pigs rather than glittering gold. Better still, they farmed the family plot themselves. Odysseus was as skilled with ploughshare as with sword.
Yet, personifying the sunrise as dawn, soothing the day into being? Perhaps in the Ithaca of old. I vouchsafe that I, a yeoman farmer, have seen more break of days in Britain than most…
