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 16-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary: “The Trojan Women”
Hecabe rebukes Helen, Menelaus’s wife, for leaving Sparta with Paris. Helen reminds her that Paris also was married, and he came to her. Helen’s crime, according to Hecabe, was allowing herself to be seduced. Helen describes the “madness” Aphrodite slowly inflicted on her when she tried to refuse, telling Hecabe, “Your grudge is with the goddess” (138).
Chapter 17 Summary: “Aphrodite, Hera, Athene”
This chapter tells the story of the Judgment of Paris. The wedding of Thetis and Peleus bring together the gods, including Aphrodite (goddess of sex and love), Hera (wife of Zeus and goddess of marriage), and Athene (daughter of Zeus and goddess of strategic warfare), none of whom is particularly pleased to be at the wedding. Thetis does not wish to be marrying Peleus, but Zeus forced the marriage on her. After a prophecy stipulated that she would bear a son more powerful than his father, Zeus would not permit her to marry a god and potentially destabilize the balance of power that has him at the top.
During the wedding, a small golden apple rolls at the goddesses’ feet. Aphrodite is about to pick it up when Athene grabs it. Seeing them arguing, Hera investigates and, noticing the inscription “Te kalliste” (“for the most beautiful”), declares it could be for her (146). After more arguing among the goddesses, Hera decides someone must determine who the apple is meant for, and Zeus transports them to Mount Ida, where Paris, son of Priam, will judge them. The goddesses vie for his favor. Hera promises power and a kingdom, Athene strategy and tactics to defend his kingdom against its enemies, and Aphrodite the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Sparta. Paris cannot resist Aphrodite’s offer and grants her the apple. Later, Hera points out to Aphrodite that she failed to mention Helen is already married, but Aphrodite does not think it important, since Paris is also.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Penelope”
A year after the Trojan war has ended, Penelope is worried that Odysseus has not yet returned. She struggles to believe what the bards have been singing about him, then recounts the story of his blinding the Cyclops in whose cave Odysseus and his men have become trapped. Realizing that killing the Cyclops would make it impossible to escape the cave, since only he could move the giant stone that serves as its door, Odysseus blinds him. When the Cyclops opens the door to let out his flocks, Odysseus and his men strap themselves to the underside of his livestock and escape, but Odysseus, who Penelope’s says could never “resist gloating,” reveals his name as he and his men sail away, not realizing that the Cyclops’s father is Poseidon, god of the sea (162).
Chapter 19 Summary: “The Trojan Women”
Cassandra experiences a fit of hysteria, screaming that her brother is dead. Hecabe orders her to be silent, worried that the Greeks will hear her and realize that Polydorus has escaped. Two Greeks carrying something heavy on a litter drawn near, depositing the bundle in front of the women. Polydorus’s body has washed ashore, and they have brought it to the women to mourn. As Hecabe and Polyxena grieve, they forget that Cassandra had warned them, convincing themselves that “she had claimed something completely different” that “had been proven false” (166).
Chapter 20 Summary: “Oenone”
Oenone, whose chapter is narrated in third person, is a mountain nymph who falls in love with and marries Paris before Zeus spirits him away to judge the beauty contest between Athene, Hera, and Aphrodite. Paris’s parents, Priam and Hecabe, had abandoned him as an infant because a prophecy had decreed he would bring about the fall of his city, but a herdsman saved and raised him. After the judgment, Paris leaves for Greece, and Oenone, with her gifts for prophecy, understands where he has gone and why. She sees “vainglorious” Achilles, “preening on the battlefield” as he kills the undeserving Hector, “parading [his body] around the city walls,” an act of such “viciousness” as she will never see again (171). Giving birth to a son, Oenone raises him alone. When Paris is eventually mortally wounded, he crawls back to Oenone asking her to heal him, but she refuses. Later, she wonders if his visit was a dream, though she knows it was not.
Chapter 21 Summary: “Calliope”
Calliope declares her fondness for Oenone, again complains that the bard must learn that war affects women and wonders why poets “tell and retell tales of men” (177). She announces that she will ask the poet who is more “heroic”: Menelaus, who created widows and orphans because he raised an army to recover his wife, or Oenone, who lost her husband and raised their son (177).
Chapter 22 Summary: “The Trojan Women”
After Hecabe, her daughters, and Andromache spend the night lamenting Polydorus, Helen comes to warn them that the Greeks are approaching. Polyxena lashes out at her, but Hecabe blames herself for Polydorus’s death. She recounts the prophecy about Paris and confesses her and Priam’s inability to suffocate the infant. Both knew that the herdsman would be too soft to kill the baby. They resolve to bathe Polydorus’s body and throw dust over it so that he can proceed to the Underworld, even if the Greeks forbid them from burying him.
Chapter 23 Summary: “Penelope”
Penelope’s next letter to Odysseus follows another year after the last. She tells him that the bards now sing of him almost making it home via a gift from the wind god Aeolus, but his men disobeyed his orders, and the god refused to help a second time. Penelope has also heard that Odysseus encountered cannibal giants, called Lastrygonians, but she finds this far-fetched, asking “how many cannibalistic giants can one Greek plausibly meet as he sails the open seas” (185). The bards have also sung that Odysseus spent a year on Aeaea, where Circe turned his men into swine. With Hermes’s help, Odysseus escaped their fate and remained a year with Circe, living as her husband. Penelope hopes this is not true since he is already her husband and “such behavior would be beneath you” (192).
Chapter 24 Summary: “The Trojan Women”
Odysseus comes to question Hecabe to make sure she does not have any other sons in hiding, since they could avenge the fall of Troy in future. Studying his demeanor, Andromache decides he is enjoying arguing with the former queen. He offers his men’s help to bury Polydorus, but the women decline. He advises them where to bury him to protect his grave from the elements. Surprised that Hecabe entrusted her son to a Greek, he tells her he will think about how she may avenge her son’s murder.
Chapters 16-24 Analysis
The focal point of this group of chapters is the Judgment of Paris, one of the inciting events of the Trojan war. In both classical accounts and Haynes’s novel, Athene, Hera, and Aphrodite argue over who among them should claim the golden apple addressed to “the most beautiful.” Zeus chooses Paris to judge the contest, and he selects Aphrodite who promises him the most beautiful woman, Helen of Sparta, though she is already married to Menelaus. Haynes incorporates a later tradition (possibly Hellenistic) in which Paris is also married to a nymph called Oenone.
Haynes’s primary source for this narrative is Ovid’s Heroides, a collection of epistolary poems written from the points of view of various mythical women to the lovers and husbands who have in some way mistreated them. These letters also provide the inspiration for Penelope’s chapters. In A Thousand Ships, Oenone’s story functions as a complement to Penelope’s. Both women are left behind by their husbands to raise their sons alone. Both husbands eventually return, Paris to be healed and Odysseus to resume his role as prince of Ithaca. Recognizing that Paris’s return is self-serving, Oenone chooses not to heal him, and he dies. Penelope eventually chooses, in Chapter 40, to accept the man who claims to be Odysseus as her husband. Portraying the different choices women make, and their motives, creates a tapestry of women’s experiences.
The fondness Haynes’s Calliope feels for Oenone prompts her to complain that women like her have “waited long enough” for their stories to be told (176). The problem is, she notes: “Too many men telling the stories of men to each other” (176). Though she finds it “absurd” that “the fat belly of a feasted poet” would see himself reflected in “the hard muscles of Hector,” she accepts that there must be some reason men continue to tell these stories to each other, though she does not know what it is (177). She intends to ask the poet which act is more heroic: Menelaus raising an army to recover his wife or Oenone raising her son alone (177). The question is rhetorical; the muse already believes the correct answer is Oenone. Through Haynes’s characterization, the muse of epic poetry becomes the champion of the need for a new kind of epic that centers women.
Haynes depicts the Olympian goddesses as vain, petty, and insensitive to human suffering, similarly to how they are portrayed in some Hellenistic Greek and Roman poetry. Archaic and classical Greek sources tend to portray gods and goddesses as unable to relate to human experiences, possessing knowledge and understanding beyond mortals’, and/or beholden to Fate above their personal affections but still fond of humans. This fondness can cause them to fight among themselves over their favorites, some of whom are their children or grandchildren. In the Iliad, for example, the gods enter the battle on their chosen sides, Achaean and Trojan. Athene comes to blows with Ares (and wins). Hera boxes Artemis’s ears with her own bow and sends her running back to her father, Zeus. Both Ares and Zeus are portrayed as distraught over the deaths of their beloved sons in battle, especially Zeus, who weeps tears of blood onto the battlefield when he is forced to allow his son Sarpedon, who fights on the Trojan side, to die. The poem suggests that the gods care too much, rather than too little, for humans, and this brings them into conflict with each other, threatening the stability of the Olympiad. Haynes’s goddesses fight among themselves over their egos, rather than on behalf of beloved mortals.
