Phantasia
Φαντασία
(Φαντασία), one of those numerous personages (in this case evidently mythic), to whom Homer is said to have been indebted for his poems. She was an Egyptian, the daughter of Nicarchus, an inhabitant of Memphis. She wrote an account of the Trojan war, and the wanderings of Odysseus; and her poems were deposited in the temple of Hephaestus at Memphis. Homer procured a copy from one of the sacred scribes, named Phanites. From this tradition, Lipsius, while he discredits the story, infers the early establishment of libraries in Egypt. (Lipsius, Syntigm. Biblioth. 1; Fabric. Bibl. Graec. vol. i. p. 208.)
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.