A Thousand Ships

“The Greeks were being punished for their impiety, for their senseless refusal to accept that Troy would not fall, could not fall to mortal men. Not to men like these, these arrogant Greeks with their tall ships and their bronze armour, glinting in the sun because not one of them could tolerate the notion that he should labor in obscurity, unseen and unadmired.”

Creusa describes the jubilant mood in Troy after the Greek forces had seemed to depart. The passage sets the tone for the contempt with which the Greek warriors will be treated across the novel, by both Trojan and Greek women. The idea that these warriors do not want to “labor in obscurity, unseen and unadmired” seems to be mocking the concept of kleos, meaning achieving fame by having an epic sung about you (8). In the Homeric epics, warriors fight on behalf of their friends and families. The Muse records their deeds, and bards sing about them. Their songs are mediums for cultural memory. 

“No one believed their pretext: that they had come to claim back some woman who had run off with one of Priam’s boys. The idea was laughable. Countless ships, as many as a thousand, sailing across oceans to besiege one city for the sake of a woman?”

Creusa introduces the idea that Helen was merely an excuse for the violent Greeks to wage war against the Trojans. The Greeks’ motive is portrayed as more complex in ancient texts. Paris violates the divine law of hospitality: After being welcomed generously by Menelaus, Paris absconds with his host’s wife and treasure. Menelaus leads an embassy to Troy to recover both and is not only rejected but also almost murdered. In the Iliad, two attempts are made to end the war via one-on-one combat, first by Menelaus and Paris and then by Ajax and Hector, but the gods foil both attempts, as the war is part of Zeus’s plan to light the burden of Gaia. Haynes includes the plan of Zeus but strips the Greeks’ motive down to violence.

“Horrifyingly, they had done so by conducting a human sacrifice. What Trojan did not know of this terrible, typical cruelty?”

Creusa refers to the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Agamemnon’s daughter. This element of Trojan war myth does not feature in Homer’s narratives and is known primarily through two plays by Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia Among the Taurians, the sources Haynes draws on for A Thousand Ships. The inclusion of this in her plot helps further her emphasis on Greek warrior’s cruelty and barbarity.

“And all because of a woman. All because of that conniving Spartan whore. She spit the blood out, onto the sand. Her desire for revenge was totally, and futile.”

Creusa expresses her violent hatred for Helen, who she blames for the war that has destroyed her city and killed her sons and husband. This view of Helen is treated with greater ambivalence in ancient Greek texts. In Homer’s Iliad, Trojan elders are portrayed acknowledging that Helen is like a goddess and rightly fought over, but also dangerous and better off returned to the Greeks, though Paris refuses to return her. Broader epic tradition in ancient Greek depicts Helen an instrument of Zeus, who conceives Helen with Nemesis, goddess of revenge. Haynes portrays Helen as the daughter of Zeus and Leda, a mortal woman, a version popularized in the poetry of Roman poet Ovid.

“Idiot poet. It’s not her story, or Creusa’s story. It’s their story. At least it will be, if he stops complaining and starts composing.”

Calliope’s chapters focus on the idea that the poet is an “old fool” who does not understand what an epic poem is or should be. He repeatedly wants to focus the story around one character (Theano, in the excerpt above) while Calliope wants him to tell all their stories. This may be poking fun at the way the Homeric epics focus their narratives around one central figure, Achilles and Odysseus in the Iliad and Odyssey, respectively.

“Where were the heroes she had heard about in the bard’s song? Hector was dead, of course, but where was Paris, or Glaucus, or Aeneas? She frowned as she scanned the men, and saw none of the towering height or obvious strength. Their biceps were no match for her own. The heroes must be among them, but they were not such men as she had expected to find.”

The Amazon warrior Penthesilea surveys the Trojan warriors and is disappointed by them. Their failure to measure up to the stories Penthesilea has heard about them develops Haynes’s idea that the warriors of epic are overrated. The bards celebrate them, but their reality does not measure up.

“I would not have let them see I was not mad, and I would not have hurt my child, my beautiful boy. I would have swung the ploughing into my own feet, and cut them into ribbons before I hurt our son or let the Argives take me away from here.”

Penelope demonstrates that her cunning is superior to Odysseus’s. He panicked when his infant son’s life was threatened and gave up his ruse of mental illness. Penelope would not have panicked and would have found a way to save both the ruse and baby, even if it meant harming herself. Her willingness to sacrifice herself develops the recurring motif of women’s superior bravery over men’s.

“They’re never happy unless they’re taking what doesn’t belong to them, and burning everything they can’t carry with them.”

This excerpt is from a scene in which a captive woman explains to Chryseis the nature of the Greeks. They exist to raid and loot, leaving nothing but destruction and misery behind them, a central theme of Haynes’s novel. Though she incorporates other motives that ancient texts describe, Haynes’s narrative returns repeatedly to the barbarity of the Greeks as the true motive that makes the war happen.

“Briseis glares at him but he was not trying to goad her. The Greeks were all the same: they saw no worth in any but their own.”

In this passage, Patroclus has told Briseis that her city should have surrendered to the Greeks, since “gods favor Achilles” (93). Briseis’s response repeats the refrain that the Greeks are brutal and violent and care only for themselves, using the gods’ favor as an excuse to justify their destructive acts. This characterization is an invention of Haynes’s. An important scene in the Iliad features a Greek warrior and a Trojan ally realizing that their families are connected by a guest-host friendship, refusing to fight, and exchanging armor.

“One day, Odysseus would find him in the Underworld and he would ask him what death was like, and her son would reply that he would rather be a living peasant than a dead hero. And this filled her with anger and shame. He truly was mortal, her son, if he valued his precious life more than anything else. How could he be so stupid, so ungrateful, when she had given him so much?”

Achilles’s response from the Underworld here summarizes events in the Odyssey Book 11, in Odysseus encounters and praises Achilles, and his response is identical to how Haynes depicts it in this passage. Thetis’s response in an invention of Haynes’s, perhaps to underscore Calliope’s message to the bard that war destroys the victors too. 

“War is not a sport, to be decided in a quick bout on a strip of contested land. It is a web which stretches out to the furthest parts of the world, drawing everyone into itself.”

This excerpt is part of Calliope’s reproach of the bard who does not understand who the true victims of war are. The idea of humans existing as threads in a larger web in which everyone is connected is a central concept in ancient Greek condition. Weaving provides the language for poetry, ship building, and even the creation of the cosmos. The Moirai, or Fates, are also portrayed as weavers measuring out their threads, as Haynes also includes in Chapter 41.

“Who could love a coward, she had once heard a woman say. Laodamia knew the answer. Someone for whom the alternative is loving a corpse.”

Before her husband Protesilaus leaves for Troy, Laodamia begs him not to be the first to leap off his ship. Caught up in a vision of what it means to be brave, he does not heed her advice and subsequently is the first Greek killed in the war. Laodamia’s response mirrors Andromache’s in the Iliad when she advises Hector to remain inside the city’s walls and station defenders at their most vulnerable spot. Hector refuses to heed her advise on the grounds that it would make him appear cowardly. 

“As you sailed away, you could not resist shouting back at the island, and telling the maimed giant that you, Odysseus, had bettered him. You could not help boasting of your victory. And if you had known that the blinded creature was the son of Poseidon, who would call down his father’s curse upon you, I’m not sure you would have done anything differently. You never have been able to resist gloating.”

This excerpt is from one of Penelope’s letters to Odysseus, each of which criticizes him for his behavior as reported by the bards. The notion that bards at Ithaca would have knowledge of Odysseus’s journey is an invention of Haynes’s, as is the idea that Odysseus cannot resist boasting. Generally, in the Odyssey, his excellence it his ability to endure suffering and control his passions. Haynes’s characterization of him amplifies his excesses and flaws, casting Penelope’s tolerance of him in sharper relief.

“If he complains to me again, I will ask him this: is Oenone less of a hero than Menelaus? He loses his wife, so he stirs up an army to bring her back to him, costing countless lives and creating countless widows, orphans and slaves. Oenone loses her husband and she raises their son. Which of those is the more heroic act?”

Calliope again reproaches the bard who does not understand what truly “heroic” behavior is (177). Haynes here is describing heroism in modern terms, as a certain standard of moral behavior. In the ancient Greek world, heroes were not mortally upstanding figures but superhuman forces, mortals descended directly from the gods. 

“The bards all sing of the bravery of heroes and the greatness of your deeds: it is one of the few elements of your story on which they all agree. But no one sings of the courage required by those of us who were left behind.”

Penelope is growing increasingly frustrated with Odysseus’s delays and mistakes. She reproaches him for the deaths of his companions on the journey home and for continually seeking new adventures while she is left at home, under siege by her suitors. Her complaint does not accord with Homer’s Odyssey, which devotes a significant portion of the epic to Penelope’s cunning and strategy dealing with the suitors and celebrates her for it.

“My weaving was nothing compared to that of these women, she said, turning her gaze from the sea to look him full in the face. She saw him take a shallow breath. ‘I have other skills.’”

Odysseus has been sent to the camp of the captive Trojan women to collect Helen and bring her to Menelaus. In a seeming reference to book three of the Iliad, in which Helen is depicted weaving into a cloth images of the warriors’ struggles, Odysseys asks Helen if she wove any “tapestries while [waiting] for your husband to bring you home,” adding that he expected her to “have created something quite ornate in all these years” (209). Helen’s response draws attention to her beauty and attraction, which provoked Paris and subsequently the Trojan war, though in ancient Greek poetry, Helen is depicted as an excellent weaver.

“I have had enough of Helen. Enough of her beauty, enough of her power, enough of her. I despite the way they all melt at the merest mention of her. She is only a woman. And no one’s looks last forever, even daughters of Zeus.”

Calliope expresses her contempt for Helen, though the previous chapter specifically describes Helen “turning her full and terrifying attention towards” Odysseus and terrifying him (210). The description of Helen as “only a woman” accords with Roman more than Greek depictions of her. In Roman myths, she is portrayed as the daughter or Zeus and a mortal woman, Leda, while in Greek tradition, she is the daughter of Zeus and the goddess of retribution, Nemesis, which would render her divine rather than mortal. 

“You have offended Poseidon by blinding his son. Your journey home is more difficult and more treacherous than that of any other Greek, because you have earned the enmity of a god.”

This passage, from another letter of Penelope to Odysseus, is a characteristic example of Haynes’s use of hyperbole to contrast male weakness and cruelty with women’s dignity and strength. In epic tradition, many Greeks earn the enmity of the gods because of their bad behavior after the sack of Troy. Odysseus’s return is more difficult than some and far more successful than others, who died on their journeys.

“Everyone—Greek and Trojan—knew that Menelaus was a boor; a man who could not put down a wine jar until it was emptied of every last drop, who drank his wine till too late every night with too little water, and who wondered aloud why his wife had left him while his companions hid the answer behind their hands.”

This passage shows Polyxena’s point of view. Menelaus is bringing her to Neoptolemus, who will sacrifice her to his father, Achilles. To solicit information from him, Polyxena flatters him by claiming that Hector spoke highly of him, which her inner monologue contradicts. This characterization of Menelaus is contrary to how he is depicted in the Iliad. In the Greek epic, he is gentle, more inclined than his brother to ransom captives, and highly concerned for the Greek warriors who have come to Troy on his behalf.

“No one even thought to ask her how she had come by the apple, with its inner radiance and its beautiful inscription. It was certainly not man-made: everyone knew the Greeks could only scratch ugly, linear words onto their artifacts. The writing on the apple was fluid and sinuous, almost demanding to be traced over with reverent fingers.”

Themis and Zeus plot how to start a war that can bring about the end of the age of Heroes. The description of Greek writing as “ugly” and “linear” reflects Haynes’s consistent portrayal of Greeks as barbaric and primitive in every way. In both historical and mythical senses, the reference to writing here is anachronistic. The Greek alphabet was not developed until sometime during the eighth century, when Greek inscriptions first appear, and is not referenced in the Homeric epics.

“He is learning that in any war, the victors may be destroyed as completely as the vanquished. They still have their lives, but they have given up everything else in order to keep them. They sacrifice what they do not realize they have until they have lost it. And so the man who can win the war can only rarely survive the peace.

The poet may not want to learn this, but he must.”

Calliope voices central concerns of the Iliad and Odyssey. Through its genealogies and biographies of each warrior death, Achaean and Trojan, the Iliad explores the impact of war on family and community. Odysseus’s struggle not only to return to Ithaca but also to reintegrate into life in peacetime, exemplified by his excessive violence against the suitors and later their avenging families, demonstrates the former soldier’s struggle to “survive the peace” (267). Calliope’s scolding tone reflects Haynes’s goal to critique scholars who have failed to understand the true messages of the Homeric epics.

“Why could men not just be less greedy, she wondered. Her sorrow morphed into irritation.”

Gaia’s shift from sadness to annoyance exemplifies the tone Haynes infuses her vignettes with across the novel and reflects a feminist stance that anger is the appropriate response to men’s abuses. Empathy is reserved for women among themselves (e.g., Clytemnestra and Cassandra; Briseis and Chryseis) but withheld from men who not only have brought on their own suffering but also imposed it on others, as here with Gaia. If they had not been so greedy and selfish, Gaia would not have had to kill them off.

“He came back in disguise, of course. Typical Odysseus. Never approach a problem directly if you can come upon it sideways. And I’m sure we have you to thank for the efficacy of his disguise: his own mother would have struggled to recognize him. His own wife could not be certain it was him.”

This passage forms part of Penelope’s final letter addressed to Athene. Haynes both adopts and subverts Homer’s characterization of Odysseus. The Odyssey invites critique of its eponymous hero’s fondness for subterfuge. Spending so many years wandering and learning others’ ways, Odysseus runs the risk of losing himself. Further, as a Heroic age hero, Odysseus must learn proportion and balance to survive in the post-Heroic age, which he struggles to do until the last line of the poem. Where Haynes subverts Homer is in her suggestion that Penelope herself never knows if it is really Odysseus. The Odysseys leaves open whether Penelope is ever fooled by Odysseus’s disguise and is explicit that she does not accept him as her husband until he has passed her test.