A Thousand Ships(85)

There are plenty more women in this book whose stories barely exist in the surviving literature of the ancient world: Theano and Oenone, for example. Female characters are usually in the shadows or on the margins of stories even when they do appear (Euripides and Ovid are exceptional in this regard, in producing work where women are the focus and often the sole focus). Sometimes we have collectively decided a particular woman is intended even when she is not named. The Iliad famously begins with a line which is usually translated as ‘Sing, Muse, of the wrath of Achilles’. It seems reasonable to assume he’s addressing Calliope, muse of epic poetry (he would probably have hoped to find her less capricious than I have rendered her. Although if Euripides had written her, she might have been more capricious still). But Homer doesn’t name her. He doesn’t even use the word ‘muse’. He says ‘thea’, ‘goddess’.

Penthesilea has suffered badly at the hands of history, unless you wish to hunt through fragments of the obscure Quintus Smyrnaeus or Pseudo-Apollodorus (which I did, but wouldn’t necessarily recommend). She was a mighty warrior and had a major role in a lost epic poem, from perhaps the eighth century BCE, called Aethiopis. Only a few lines of this poem survive. Like many Amazons, Penthesilea was a huge inspiration to visual artists in the ancient world: Amazons feature on more surviving pots than any other mythical figure except Heracles. Also, extraordinarily, there are vases which show Greek warriors bearing fallen Amazons from the battlefield. On one beautiful pot, Penthesilea is carried from the scene of their duel by Achilles. Ancient warriors did not usually treat their dead foes with anything like this respect or affection. Sadly, when Robert Graves was writing in the twentieth century, he turned this incredible female hero into a corpse on which Achilles masturbated. This must be an example of that progress we’re always reading about.

You can see a more ornate version (more monkeys, for a start) of Thetis’ earrings in the British Museum. They were found on the island where she was married to Peleus in my version. If you’re visiting the museum anyway, you could also track down Protesilaus, balanced on the prow of his boat, just as Laodamia imagines him in her chapter. He really does have beautiful feet. You’ll have to go to Greece to see the stone lions of Mycenae, and while you’re there, you could always take a boat trip and go hunting for Troy on the Turkish coast, to see if you agree with the controversial nineteenth-century archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, who placed it at Hisarlik in modern-day Turkey. The coastal features and plants which give Troy its detail in this book are those of Hisarlik. Apologies to those who feel strongly that Troy was somewhere else. Ithaca, home of Odysseus, has proved harder to name in the modern world (and Odysseus’ route home is the source of much-wrangled discussion). I can live with the uncertainty: I hope you can too. Truthfully, I sometimes prefer not knowing things for the imaginative space it offers. I can only apologize to all my scientist friends for this despicable choice.

Euripides’ version of Aphrodite and Artemis in Hippolytus was the starting point for the petulance of the gods in this novel. They have the emotional maturity of toddlers, mingled with immortality and horrifying power. As I moved back to the pre-Olympian gods (Themis, Gaia etc.) the petulance gets somewhat reduced and a certain loftiness is present instead. I had the most fun writing the scene where the goddesses vie with one another for the golden apple. If this book has a motif, it is that apple. Or possibly the owl which Athene refuses to hand over. I would never give up my owl to win a beauty contest, in case you were in any doubt.

Homer’s Iliad is (rightly) regarded as one of the great foundational texts on war and warriors, men and masculinity. But it is fascinating how we have received that text and interpreted the story it tells us. I gave an early draft of A Thousand Ships to a brainy friend for his comments and feedback. He was funny and helpful and kind and only occasionally cross with me for not being more like H. Rider Haggard. But he questioned the book’s basic premise: that the women who survive (or don’t survive) a war are equally heroic as their menfolk. The men go and fight, the women don’t, was his essential argument. Except that women do fight (not least Penthesilea and her Amazons), even if the poems heralding their great deeds have been lost. And men don’t always: Achilles doesn’t fight until book eighteen of the twenty-four-book Iliad. He spends the first seventeen books arguing, sulking, asking his mother for help, sulking some more, letting his friend fight in his stead, offering advice and refusing apologies. But not fighting. In other words, he spends almost three-quarters of the poem in a quasi-domestic setting, away from the battlefield. Yet we never question that he is a hero. Even when he isn’t fighting, his status as a warrior is never in doubt. I hope that at the end of this book, my attempt to write an epic, readers might feel that heroism is something that can reside in all of us, particularly if circumstances push it to the fore. It doesn’t belong to men, any more than the tragic consequences of war belong to women. Survivors, victims, perpetrators: these roles are not always separate. People can be wounded and wounding at the same time, or at different times in the same life. Perhaps Hecabe is the most brutal example of that.

Cassandra is the only role from all these women which I have ever performed (in a reading of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon at school). Although her story was sometimes hard to tell, I have missed her the most since I finished writing.





Acknowledgements