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 10-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “Briseis and Chryseis”
This chapter is set in the Greek camp before the fall of Troy. Briseis is captured by Greek warriors after Achilles leads a raid on her city and kills her family. Chryseis is the daughter of Chryses, a priest of Apollo in Troy. Chryseis’s mother died in childbirth, and she was neglected by her father, who was more concerned with serving the god than taking care of his daughter. Adventurous, fearless, and left to fend for herself, Chryseis often got herself into trouble.
Sneaking out of the city to meet a shepherd boy, Chryseis is snatched by Greek scouts, and her lover is killed. She makes no effort to escape the scouts because her father’s inevitable disappointment is worse, she believes, than anything the Greeks can do to her. The scouts bring Chryseis back to a tent full of captured women whose husbands, fathers, and sons raiding Greeks have killed. There, she meets Briseis, a young woman who has lost everyone she loves at the hands of Achilles. She proclaims that she will never let the “taunting” Greeks, “these enemies of Troy,” see her grieve (77).
The following day, the women are lined up to be distributed among the men. Chryseis hopes she will not be given to Achilles but then realizes that it hardly matters since “they were all equally bad” (78). Agamemnon chooses Chryseis, while Briseis is claimed by the one man she did not want, Achilles. Before the women are separated, Briseis gives Chryseis a pouch with an herb that will render Agamemnon impotent, instructing her to put it in his drink. If he becomes angry at his impotence, Chryseis should ask him about his daughter, since her memory makes him “melancholy” (82).
Briseis listens to Achilles and Patroclus converse as they lead her back to their tents. They discuss Agamemnon’s jealousy over Achilles, who complains that no matter how many people he kills, the leader never “gives me my due” (83). Achilles reveals that he rigged the distribution to trick Agamemnon, who is not a leader but a follower. Meanwhile, in Agamemnon’s filthy tent, Chryseis notices that the other Greek leaders mock Agamemnon when his back is turned. Her father, Chryses, comes to Agamemnon to demand his daughter back on behalf of Apollo, but Agamemnon refuses and has Chryses thrown out of his tent. Chryses warns him of Apollo’s disfavor. Chryseis wonders if she has misjudged her father, who has come to demand her back.
In Achilles’s camp, Patroclus is entranced watching Briseis comb her hair. He asks if she always looks sad, and she patiently asks how he would feel if he had watched the person closest to him be murdered before his eyes. He acknowledges that he would be sad but tells her that the “gods favor Achilles,” while her city will be half a line in a song about the Greeks (93). She retorts that the bards will perhaps sing about Achilles’s “senseless cruelty and lack of honour” and asks if killing “so many that you have lost count” is “the only measure of greatness” (93). Patroclus replies that she “argues well for a woman” (94).
A plague descends on the Greek camp the next day. A Greek priest, Calchas, informs Agamemnon that the plague is Apollo’s punishment. It will only end when Agamemnon returns Chryseis to her father. Enraged, Agamemnon refuses to be without a prize and sends Odysseus to confiscate Briseis from Achilles. She spends 18 days with Agamemnon; Achilles and his Myrmidons refuse to fight until Agamemnon returns Briseis. Shortly after he does so, Patroclus dies in battle, and Achilles kills Hector in vengeance and defiles his corpse. Priam comes to Achilles’s tent to beg for his son’s body, and Briseis is surprised when he relents. When Achilles himself dies in battle, Briseis weeps “for everyone but him” (104).
Chapter 11 Summary: “Thetis”
Thetis is a sea nymph and mother of Achilles. Her chapter tells the story of her marriage and motherhood. Zeus forced her to marry mortal king Peleus after a prophecy declared that her son would be more powerful than his father. Thetis and Peleus’s son is Achilles, who Thetis tries to keep safe from war. She bathes him in the Styx, tries to hide him when Odysseus comes to collect him for the expedition to Troy, and has the god Hephaestus craft Achilles’s armor. Despite her efforts to protect him, she does not wish Achilles to choose “life over fame” (106). She is ashamed and angry when Achilles tells Odysseus from the Underworld that he would rather be “a living peasant than a dead hero” (107).
Chapter 12 Summary: “Calliope”
Calliope complains that the poet keeps asking her to sing but does not understand what epic is. She says he must learn that “the casualties of war aren’t just the ones who die” (109). He must learn this, she says, or “have no poem” (109).
Chapter 13 Summary: “Trojan Women”
Hecabe seethes in her memories, recalling her aged husband supplicating Achilles on his knees. Achilles “lives to kill, to torment and to torture,” Hecabe says. Polyxena points out that this makes it seem that Achilles “had no choice” and therefore does not deserve their hatred. Hecabe insists he had a choice, “[b]ut slaughter was all he was good for” (111). Cassandra whispers that he has not finished.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Laodamia”
Laodamia is the wife of Protesilaus, the first Greek warrior to die at Troy, killed as he leaps off his ship. She recalls the moment they said goodbye as he left for the war. Having a strong presentiment of his death, she had begged him not to be the first off the ship, but he told her not to worry. Later, she hears stories told about Protesilaus’s bravery and wishes only that he was safe at home with her.
Grief consumes Laodamia, until a blacksmith, who lost his wife to grief over their infant’s death, takes pity on her and crafts a bronze statue of Protesilaus. Laodamia refuses to leave its side. Her family’s servants grow to scorn her, but her parents become alarmed and spirit the statue out of Laodamia’s quarters while she is sleeping. They build a funeral pyre and set the statue atop it, causing Laodamia to fall into despair. Hades grants Hermes’s request to give Laodamia and Protesilaus one day together on earth. After Protesilaus returns to the Underworld, Laodamia hangs herself with her bedsheets. The citizens of her city dedicate a shrine to the couple, and even the gods admire her devotion.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Iphigenia”
Iphigenia is the daughter of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, the queen and king of Mycenae. Receiving word that Iphigenia is to marry Achilles, the vain and imperious Clytemnestra travels with her daughter to Aulis where the Greek warriors have amassed to sail to Troy. Iphigenia is focused on her appearance, carefully making up her face to appear the “perfect bride” (127).
On her wedding day, Iphigenia is almost at the altar notices that something is wrong. The warriors are too somber for a wedding. Artemis has been offended and demanded Iphigenia as a sacrifice before she allows the winds the carry Agamemnon’s ships. At the altar, her father Agamemnon stands before Iphigenia with a knife; she realizes that she will never marry. She kneels before her father, who weeps as he slits her throat. All the warriors turn away at the crucial moment, though one claims Iphigenia is transformed into a deer at her death. Immediately, a breeze picks up.
Chapters 10-15 Analysis
In this section, the terrible toll of war on women is explored through the stories of Chryseis, Briseis, Laodamia, and Iphigenia, each of whom is portrayed suffering violence and/or death. The narrative of Thetis, Achilles’s mother, portrays the Olympian gods as ultimately unconcerned with mortal suffering, which will echo in later characterizations of Athene, Aphrodite, and Hera. Calliope’s contempt grows for her misguided bard, who fails to understand the cost of war.
Laodamia’s narrative shows how even those left behind in relatively safe conditions can suffer violence because of war, as her extreme devotion to her husband, who has died at Troy, eventually leads her to hang herself. Women are also victims of violence in more immediate ways. Chryseis and Briseis both suffer sexual violence at the hands of their captors, and Iphigenia is killed in exchange for favorable winds to sail to Troy. Haynes portrays the dignity of these women in even the worst circumstances. Laodamia’s death is admired by the gods as a sign of her deep devotion to her husband. Despite the devastating suffering she has endured, Briseis generously shares her limited resources with Chryseis, providing her with an herb to protect against pregnancy and advice for keeping Agamemnon from becoming more violent. Iphigenia faces her death head on, provoking even the barbarous Greeks to be momentarily cowed. Across their different experiences of war, these women confront disaster resourcefully and bravely. Their selflessness and concern for others stands in stark contrast to the self-absorption and barbarity of the men.
Haynes’s primary sources for this section are Homer’s Iliad and Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis. The latter, an Athenian tragedy, provides the narrative of Iphigenia’s sacrifice, which is not mentioned in Homer. (Agamemnon’s daughters are all alive in the Iliad, and none is named Iphigenia.) Chryseis is mentioned only briefly at the beginning of the Iliad. Agamemnon’s refusal to return Chryseis to her father, against the wishes of the other Achaean leaders, causes the plague that leads to the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles. When the Achaeans finally return Chryseis, her father welcomes her warmly into his arms. Her backstory is an invention of Haynes’s that portrays a young, exuberant girl almost destroyed by patriarchal society. Largely ignored by her father and fearful of his disapproval, Chryseis ends up captured and enslaved by the cruel Greeks. The narrative shows how men’s indifference can lead to victimization of women. If Chryseis’s father had protected her properly, she would never have been left alone to fall into the Greeks’ hands.
The narrative of Briseis is also an invention of Haynes. In the Iliad, Briseis speaks once to lament Patroclus. Her refusal to grieve in front of the Greeks acts as a critique of her limited speech in Homer as well as a larger critique of the prevalence of women’s laments in the Iliad, which portrays Hecabe, Andromache, Briseis, and Helen lamenting at various points. Haynes’s conception of lament as a form of grief offered for the dead differs from how lament functions in the Iliad, in which it is as a social and communal act, not a private one.
For example, Andromache’s lament for Hector in the Iliad describes not his achievements but the devastation that awaits her and their infant son in a future without him to guard their city. Further, her lament invites a response from her community of women, each of whom experiences and expresses a different loss. Though the Iliad portrays women’s losses as different from men’s (men lose their lives; women their protectors and possibly their freedom), the poem itself can be understood as a lament for the human condition, the inevitability of war, and the total devastation it exacts. Each warrior who dies in the poem is given a name and genealogy, and often a short biography that focuses on the family—wives, parents, and children—he has left behind who will suffer without him.
Briseis’s lament for Patroclus in the Iliad focuses on the kind regard he showed her, promising that he would ensure she became Achilles’s lawful wife after the war. His death would then seem to cast her future status in doubt, which is incorporated into her lament. In Haynes’s rendering, Patroclus, not Achilles, has romantic feelings toward Briseis. In an argument with Patroclus, she voices censure towards Achilles (referring to “his senseless cruelty and lack of honour”) that, in the Iliad, Patroclus himself expresses in Book 16 (Lines 30-35) before his death (93). Patroclus’s reply in A Thousand Ships that Briseis argues “well for a woman” is not evidenced in Homer (94). However, Homer’s Andromache, whose name means “she who fights with men” and potentially codes her as an Amazon, provides relevant strategic advice to Hector that he rejects owing to fear of appearing cowardly, and in the Odyssey, Penelope is consistently shown retorting to her suitors and outshining them rhetorically.
