69 pages • 2 hours read
Natalie HaynesA Thousand Ships
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 25-34Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 25 Summary: “Eris”
Eris is the goddess of discord. Her chapter is set just before the wedding of Thetis and Peleus. Halfway up to Olympus, she broods alone in her cave. Though she dislikes being alone, she typically finds herself that way. She recalls Hephaestus catching Aphrodite and Eris’s brother Ares in bed together. Tipped off by Helios, he trapped his wife and her lover in a golden net. Eris’s presence makes everyone annoyed and belligerent, though she does not understand why. Winging her way to Olympus and finding it deserted, she concludes that the gods must all be at Thetis and Peleus’s wedding. Catching sight of a small golden apple, Eris picks it up and comes up with a plan.
Chapter 26 Summary: “The Trojan Women”
After the women have buried Polydorus, Odysseus tells Hecabe that the women will be distributed, and she will be coming with him. Helen will return to Menelaus, who she expects “to fall prostrate before me” (209). When Odysseus seems to mock her, Helen puts her fingers to his chin, as if performing a ritual supplication, but instead warns him not to mock her, lest he regret it. His evident discomfort tempts Hecabe to gloat, but Helen’s “simmering menace” stops her (210). Odysseus informs the former queen that they will be stopping in Thrace on their return home, to king Polymestor who betrayed Polydorus.
Chapter 27 Summary: “Calliope”
Calliope says the poet wants to follow Helen back to Menelaus’s camp, where he will fall at her feet, but she will not allow it. She will instead have him see Cassandra’s vision of Hecabe’s future.
Chapter 28 Summary: “Hecabe”
Hecabe’s immediate future unfurls through Cassandra’s vision. Hecabe sails with Odysseus to Thrace, where he greets Polymestor as a friend and ally. Odysseus tells the king that he has brought an old friend to visit him: the queen of Troy, who would like to see her son. Polymestor makes up an excuse that the boy is off hunting. He brings his two sons to meet Odysseus. Brought before Hecabe, Polymestor greets her warmly, but she reveals that she knows he killed her son. She and her women slit the throats of Polymestor’s sons then gouge out his eyes. She tells him that she has wiped out his line as he wiped out hers. As he prepares to depart with his men, Odysseus feels only contempt for the king who would have kept a prince of Troy safe to avenge his city on the Greeks in future.
Back in the present, Cassandra notices all the women in her family are accounted for except Polyxena, and a wave of sickness overwhelms her.
Chapter 29 Summary: “Penelope”
Penelope confesses herself angry in her next letter. She recounts Odysseus’s trip to the Underworld to speak with the seer Tiresias, noting that Odysseus did not notice one of his comrades had fallen to his death and warning him that his “reputation may leave you short of volunteers” if he needs to “muster another force” (229). His trip “to hell and back,” which he probably treasured for the audacity of it, has revealed nothing that Penelope has not already told him: That his journey “is more difficult and treacherous than that of any other Greek” because he offended a god. She is annoyed, too, that he asked his mother about Penelope last of all.
Chapter 30 Summary: “The Trojan Women”
Menelaus comes to collect a daughter of Priam and chooses Polyxena. Hecuba taunts him about Helen, saying she “will have charmed you back into bed before you return to Sparta” (233). Menelaus does not argue. Cassandra begins screaming when her sister tries to hug her as she is led away.
Chapter 31 Summary: “Polyxena”
Going to her unknown fate, Polyxena recalls the bravery of the men of Troy going out to fight each day, some who sacrificed themselves in suicide missions to support the war effort, and longs for “their certainty” (237). She hopes that she will not be enslaved to Helen, the cause, along with Paris, of her city’s ruin. Menelaus tells her that he is bringing her to Neoptolemus, Achilles’s “unpredictable and sulky” son, who bears the burden of knowing he can only ever be inferior to his father (240). When Polyxena shudders, Menelaus confirms that her fear is well-founded and reveals that she will be “a gift for his father” (240).
Understanding this means she is going to her death, Polyxena sends a prayer of thanks to Artemis since she prefers death to enslavement. She hopes that her mother will not find out, unless it would be a source of comfort to her. Neoptolemus orders her to bathe, after which she dresses in a ceremonial gown. Her last sight is of “a glinting blade” (245).
Chapter 32 Summary: “Themis”
Themis is the goddess of divine order and former wife of Zeus. Aware that Gaia is suffering from the weight of too many mortals, Zeus approaches Themis for advice. They discuss disasters that lend themselves to mass casualties and decide on war. Themis suggests he send “a Trojan prince” to steal his daughter from her “red-headed fool” of a husband (251). Giving Zeus the golden apple, she tells him Aphrodite will initiate the conflict without realizing that she is serving Zeus’s intentions. He is pleased that he will not owe her a favor, and Themis reminds him that he will owe her one.
The Olympian gods were so delighted by “the prospect of a drawn-out conflict” that they never asked where the golden apple came from (246).
Chapter 33 Summary: “Penelope”
Penelope writes to Odysseus of her growing impatience, describing the stories she has heard bards singing about him. It seems he seeks adventures and danger when he could have returned home, where his wife and growing son are in danger. He returned to Circe’s island and insisted on being the only man to hear the Sirens’ deadly song by having his men tie him to the ship’s mast and stuff their ears with wax. He chose a dangerous route home through Scylla (a six-headed monster) and Charybdis (a whirlpool). He put his men in danger while claiming to have warned them continually. Now she hears that he is on Ogygia, farther away from her than he has yet been. She signs the letter his “wife/widow” (261).
Chapter 34 Summary: “The Trojan Women”
At the command of the Greeks, former Trojan herald Talthybius comes to demand Andromache turn over Astyanax, her and Hector’s infant son. The Greeks cannot allow him to live since he would grow up with “the murder of Greeks in his heart” (264). Andromache insists she will change his name, change her name, never mention Troy, but Talthybius tells her that it is not in her power to prevent Astyanax from learning who his father is. “The bards sing his name already,” and her name “makes you a trophy” (265). As Andromache screams and Cassandra keens, Astyanax is taken from her to be thrown from the city walls.
Chapters 25-34 Analysis
A Thousand Ships does not follow a chronological timeline; vignettes move backwards and forwards in time, narrating events before, during, and after the Trojan War. In this section, it stretches back to the war’s origins: Zeus planned it with Themis after learning from Gaia (Earth) that she was overburdened by the large population. Incorporating Themis and Eris, as well as the Olympian goddesses mentioned earlier and Gaia later, fills out the women’s voices represented in the novel, all of whom affect and are affected by the war. Haynes also shows the central role that goddesses played in shaping the divine order. Zeus is the figurehead at the head of the pantheon, but decision-making does not rest with him alone. He must negotiate the needs of the other gods as well as seek advice from those who overseen relevant domains. In this instance, Themis is the one who ensures that proper order is maintained, thus he seeks and values her input.
The chapters from Penelope’s point of view are primarily summaries of Odysseus’s wanderings narrated by an increasingly annoyed and impatient Penelope. This subverts her characterization in other texts as famously patient and steadfast, though as a reading of her character in the Odyssey this has been recognized in more recent scholarship as an oversimplification. Penelope’s epithet in the Greek text (periphron), often translated as “circumspect,” more literally means “having a good understanding,” and attributes to her an abundance of emotional and mental intelligence. While patience is one of these, it is not the sum of her character. Rather, patience is a skill that enables her to control the narrative through the schemes she spins. In other words, a type of craftiness like Odysseus’s own.
In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus’s wanderings occupy eight books of 24. Fourteen of the books take place on Ithaca and two follow Odysseus and Penelope’s son as he travels to learn news about his father, as referenced by Haynes’s Penelope. In A Thousand Ships, Penelope narrates seven chapters, and all but the last are Penelope’s increasingly angry complaints about the stories she hears about Odysseus travels from bards. That Penelope knows what is happening to Odysseus from bards is Haynes’s invention. In Homer’s Odyssey, the bard in Ithaca sings of the completed returns of warriors. Since Odysseus’s is still in progress, there is not yet a song about it. The lack of information about Odysseus contributes to the tension on Ithaca, leading the suitors to press their case and Telemachus to leave home in search of news about his father.
Hecabe and Polyxena’s narratives in this section are inspired by Euripides’s tragedy Hecuba. Like Iphigenia earlier in the novel, Polyxena submits to death with composure. Polyxena’s preference for death over a life of enslavement contrasts with Briseis, who finds meaning in her traumatic experiences. Incorporating relatively short vignettes about a large cast of characters rather than an in-depth look at just a few enables Haynes to portray the broadest possible range of traumas and responses that women experience because of war. Consistent with Haynes’s portrait of Greek warriors as self-serving, Odysseus exploits Hecabe’s rage and sense of justice to achieve his own ends, in this case revenge against Polymestor. This version of Odysseus supports Penelope’s complaints that he is fundamentally self-centered. Within the novel, his decisions never derive from concern for others or a sense of justice that exists outside himself.
