The ‘two pink spots on her cheeks’ and her ‘great big wobbly fat tits’ serve only to reinforce her reputation as a ‘whore’. Her beauty, assumed but never detailed by Homer, continues to be viewed as a curse by the women around her. Formerly of Sparta, she resided with the Trojans during the war, but is now back with the Greeks. ‘We tend not to love those who murder our families.’ An empty cradle rocking in the draught of her room reminds her of what is to come when she delivers what feels less like a baby than ‘Achilles himself, miniaturized, reduced to the size of a homunculus, but still identifiably Achilles and fully armed’.Īnd then there is Helen. ‘We women are peculiar creatures,’ Briseis reflects. He, like most of the men Briseis encounters, assumes that she feels nothing but pride in having conceived a child with ‘the fastest, strongest, bravest, most beautiful man of his generation’. In Barker’s novel, she is pregnant with his baby, but has recently been married at his command to another Greek, Alcimus. While their menfolk sit around boozing, leering and shooting arrows at Trojan portraits, they must find their own way forward.īriseis became Achilles’s sex slave after he sacked her city, killed her family and selected her as his prize of honour. But many of the women who spent the war with the Greeks are also suffering. Hecuba, formerly queen of Troy, sips peasants’ wine and swings from sorrow to fury. The wives of the Trojans are gaunt, emaciated (‘a bag of bones’) and deeply haunted. Pat Barker follows the tragedian’s lead – only in her novel, a sequel to The Silence of the Girls, the women of the Greek camp are given equal prominence.įrom the beginning, Barker has the reader questioning how much difference it actually made to a woman to be married to a man on the winning or the losing side of the war.
Euripides was almost alone in making the fate of the Trojan women his central focus.
While Virgil dedicated the second book of the Aeneid to a virtuoso account of the Trojan horse gliding into the citadel and unleashing its terror, the now little-read Quintus Smyrnaeus captured the moment Achilles was struck fatally in the heel. It fell to other poets to describe the fall of Troy and its aftermath. She and the other surviving women will be led away on Greek ships.
‘I do not think he will reach his teenage years,’ says Andromache of the baby Hector left behind. In the closing scenes of Homer’s Iliad, the warrior’s widow, mother and sister-in-law pine over his battered corpse before it is consigned to the flames and envisage further miseries before them. O nce Hector was dead, there was no hope for the Trojans.
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