“I was driven thence by foul winds for a space of 9 days upon the sea, but on the tenth day we reached the land of the Lotus-eaters, who live on a food that comes from a kind of flower.
Here we landed to take in fresh water, and our crews got their mid-day meal on the shore near the ships.
When they had eaten and drunk I sent two of my company to see what manner of men the people of the place might be, and they had a third man under them.
They started at once, and went about among the Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches.
Then I told the rest to go on board at once, lest any of them should taste of the lotus and leave off wanting to get home, so they took their places and smote the grey sea with their oars.”
The exciting sequel to the Iliad, this one’s about a journey, a lengthy series of failed attempts by Odysseus to get home. In English, “odyssey” means “journey”, but originally it just meant “thing about Odysseus”.
He’s the guy with the Trojan Horse, right?
In an episode famously absent from the Iliad, the Wooden Horse of Troy was indeed Odysseus’s idea.
I’ve started it, but where’s Odysseus?
He’s not in the first four books, which concentrate on the efforts of his son, Telemachus, to control the royal household over the ten years Odysseus has been gone. Although if you’ve read Game of Thrones and you can’t handle a narrative that changes character focus, you should present yourself to the relevant authorities at first light.
The many suitors for the dowager queen are ruining the tiny kingdom and food supplies are running low.
Why doesn’t he just kick them out?
Firstly, they’re armed. Secondly, they’re entitled to ask his mother to marry. Thirdly, there is a strong cultural expectation that if anyone shows up at your place, you have to feed them. It’s just a thing. It’s never questioned.
What should I say to make people think I’ve read it?
“I want to go home. By the shortest route possible.”
What should I avoid saying when trying to convince people I’ve read it?
“The bit about the Wooden Horse is my favourite part of this book too!”
Should I actually read it?
Yes. There are lots of fun adventures with gods and monsters and using your brain to get out of sticky situations and it’s got a proper, old-school, slaughterhouse happy ending, which doesn’t happen a lot in Greek literature.
Artemis: Yeah, dad, these are all just my friends. All of use decided that we hate men and are just going to hang out. Forever. Doing, you know, friend stuff. Hunting. Definitely no sex here. You need men for that.
So I was editing a new banner for my social media platforms with some of my works and I came with this idea that, while it isn’t the final result at all, it ended being more lesbian than I thought… If anyone ships Kassandra/ Persephone, you’re welcome
being an absolutely obnoxious little turd is a love language
my absolutely unfounded hot take of the day is
What if Penelope’s “final test” of Odysseus isn’t (just) testing whether he knows the bed is built into the floor, but it’s also his least favorite bit that she does? I’m imagining something like this:
“Ah, Penelope, how can you be so cold to me after this many years away?”
“Sir, I hardly know you, but at least I can give you the best bed in the house–Eurycleia, can you pull it out into the hall?”
“oh my GOD PENELOPE that bed is literally BUILT into the FLOOR! I built this house and bed with my own two hands out of that olive tree that was growing in the middle of the hall, if you got rid of that bed I swear–”
*Penelope, tears streaming down her face, beaming with joy to be able to do this bit again* “I missed you so much”
My parents don’t know anything about my spiritual practices. It’s not out of fear, I just prefer to keep that private from them. They’re very open minded and well educated, I just don’t feel the need to talk about my spirituality with them. ♀️
So I called them earlier today to wish them a merry Christmas and I asked my dad what he was reading lately. He said he’s re-reading the Odyssey, then went on to describe the part where Athena disguises herself as a beggar to visit Telemachus, and how great Athena is and how much my dad loves Athena…
My dad’s a non-religious Jew and, while he’s pretty well read on history, including Ancient Greece, he has no spiritual connections to the religion that I’m aware of. So this was totally unprompted.
My Odyssey started after a major battle had been won. I left school with my diploma as proof of my victory in my hands and the ghosts of past friendships trailing behind me. Blood and sweat still covering my sore body, exhausted from the fights in and outside of me, the losses I had to witness and ashamed of the deceit I had to employ to reach this point I struggled to no longer look back. I was on a mission. My great task of finding my home. Unfortunately, I was unaware of the route and how many obstacles I would have to conquer. And more devastatingly, the knowledge that I would eventually reach it had not been granted for me. However, likewise to my enduring battle I had no choice but to attempt it with all my might. Saying failure was never an option would be a lie. It solely was an option I tried my best to avoid, driven by my longing for my home after all my battles had been fought. So I sailed on the wide sea of billions of options, struggling to recognize the one suited for me. Soon enough I saw land and after a tiring journey of seeking wasn’t this exactly what I was looking for?
In retrospect, no. It wasn’t. But I made that choice, confident in the fact that settling down would soon bring me the expected joy of a home. This feeling didn’t come and gradually I decided that something was missing. Therefore, I prepared my boat to explore the different options the world might present to me. Too naive to consider the dangers lurking in a sea of strangers I failed to recognize the monsters before they started to drain me. Scylla and Charybdis appeared as friendly companions before one used up all my energy and passion for their own good and the other picked apart what I had left and took it for herself, only to disappear not once repaying me for all my struggles.
After my misfortunes I looked for a better alternative, when the promise of a lovely home popped up in form of brilliant letters with catchy tunes. Enchanted by enticing advertisement, singing of the best offers I attempted my luck with these options. Only for me to realize that these beautiful marketing sirens had been a disguise for abusive companies luring in unsuspecting sailors like me. Withstanding seeds of doubts, I managed to rip myself away from this toxic environment to continue my journey. Despite hard times plagued with losses of friends, certainty and partly sanity, I carried on through numerous obstacles. Those of true love remained by my side as I stayed by theirs. And together we found our home, at least temporarily.
Review:The Silence of the Girls Author: Pat Barker Genre: Fiction, revisionism, mythology
Revisionist fiction or retellings still fill bookshelves to the brim these days—old fables pop up with shocking twists, we see fairytales shed their Disney-fied formula to give newer nods to their darker roots, and we even come to know stories of antiquity thrown in with “cyber” sensibilities. With the unremitting creativity of writers today, the possibilities are endless. Readers may clamor for something “original”, of course, but I find that there is charm in revisiting familiar narratives refashioned for the modern eyes.
Personally, I enjoy reading reimaginings of classic myths. I was rapt, for instance, while leafing through the story of the tragic Greek hero Achilles and his bosom companion Patroclus in Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles. I devoured Circe, a feminist take on a classic character from Homer’s The Odyssey by the same author, with equal fascination. There is also Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, spun from the decades-long wait of Penelope for her husband Odysseus from the Trojan War. None of these felt old to me. In fact, they gave substantial and refreshing heft to the original materials. Since then, I’ve been on the prowl for modern narrations of old legends.
That’s why when I heard about Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls—events of The Iliad, but told from the perspective of a significant female character—I just know I have to grab a copy.
The Silence of the Girls gives a #MeToo voice to the women of Homer’s epic poem, particularly to Briseis, who becomes the “war prize” of Achilles after the Greeks sacked their kingdom. Hark back to your high school required reading days and you may remember that in the story, as a prize of honour, Briseis is the linchpin of the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon. The feud resulted to the former withdrawing from the battle against the Trojans, almost bringing defeat to their side. No more than a “status symbol,” Briseis is virtually voiceless there; we are deaf to what she feels, or what any woman in the story (who isn’t a goddess, for the immortals have a lot to say regardless of gender) has to convey other than grief and sorrow.
In this book, she introduces the readers to the margins of the largely masculine framework of the Homeric poem, swinging the spotlight from swift-footed, angry halfgods and bouts for glory to the harrowing truths that the war’s “collateral damages” must suffer. Barker’s pen made their lives palpable on the pages: we get to take a peek at the “rape camp,” we meet bed-slaves, former queens made to scrub dirt, young girls who get their throats slit to appease the dead or some wrathful deity, mothers who’ve helplessly watched their husbands and children get butchered. There’s blood and spit and sweat and tears, and not just in the battlefield. Barker truly doesn’t pull any punches here.
But true to its title, Briseis’ thoughts remain either in her head only, with the readers as the only witness, or with their small circle of bed-girls. “Silence becomes a woman,” a character reminds her of an adage twinned with their fates for all their lives. The book, in effect, becomes a psychological journey of individuals “muted” by their male-dominated society. “They were men, and free,” Briseis says. “I was a woman, and a slave. And that’s a chasm no amount of sentimental chit-chat about shared imprisonment should be allowed to obscure.”
Surprisingly, the novel is not told from Briseis’ perspective alone. We get brief chapters of Achilles’ thoughts, too, starting in the second volume. The first shift of voices was jarring, and my initial thought is that this defeats the very purpose of the book, which is to give a platform to her experiences. But I think this change is understandable and necessary, as Briseis is absent at the turning point of The Iliad that made Achilles go back to war again: the death of Patroclus, Achilles’ beloved friend. The inserts also provide a helpful crutch to the portrayal of these men, where we see them get fleshed out past the observing eyes of the sidelined victims—they are characters, too, after all, and not just one-dimensional, violent caricatures. Scenes in the battlefield are a welcome change as well. Barker’s descriptive writing is magic, and the readers get treated with vivid images such as this:
“On the battlefield, the Greeks fighting to save Patroclus’s corpse recognize the cry and run towards it. What do they see? A tall man standing on a parapet with the golden light of early evening catching his hair? No, of course they don’t. They see the goddess Athena wrap her glittering aegis round [Achilles’s] shoulders: they see flames thirty feet high springing from the top of his head. What the Trojans saw isn’t recorded. The defeated go down in history and disappear, and their stories die with them.”
While most of the iconic scenes are recreated well (Achilles’ howling grief as he receives news of Patroclus’ demise at the hands of Hector, his berserker’s wrath while dragging Hector’s dead body around the gates of Troy, Priam’s visit to Achilles to retrieve his son’s dishonored corpse), I wished that Barker zeroed in more on the lives of the women at the camp. While reading the book, the Bechdel Test came to mind—will this even pass it? The lives of these girls maybe forever entwined with men, but they have their pasts to speak of, to make them rounder as characters. When Nestor tells Briseis to forget her past, I was hoping for a silent revolt. “Forget,” Briseis thinks of the order. “So there was my duty laid out in front of me, as simple and clear as a bowl of water: remember.” The rebellion seemed to have petered out early.
The writing style would have been impeccable if it weren’t for the anachronisms strewn across the whole thing, modern phrases that stick out. I’ve heard that Barker said this is deliberate on her part to emphasize the tale’s timelessness, but some of them just don’t fit, like pieces squeezed into the wrong puzzle. Still, for the most part, the narrative is a magnificent treat.
Unflinchingly honest, The Silence of the Girls is a significant work of fiction that would be best read right after The Iliad itself.
So he vowed and Athena set off uncontrollable laughter in the suitors, crazed them out of their minds–mad, hysterical laughter seemed to break from the jaws of strangers, not their own, and the meat they were eating oozed with blood– tears flooded their eyes, hearts possessed by grief. The inspired seer Theoclymenus wailed out in their midst, “Poor men, what terror is this that overwhelms you? Night shrouds your heads, your faces, down to your knees– cries of mourning are bursting into fire–cheeks rivering tears– the walls and the handsome crossbeams dripping dank with blood! Ghosts, look, thronging the entrance, thronging the court, go trooping down to the realm of death and darkness! The sun is blotted out of the sky–look there– a lethal mist spreads all across the earth!” At that they all broke into peals of laughter aimed at the seer.
Leukothea was a sea goddess who came to the aid of sailors in distress. She was once a mortal princess named Ino, a daughter of King Kadmos of Thebes. She and her husband Athamas incurred the wrath of Hera when they fostered the infant god Dionysos. As punishment the goddess drove Athamas into a murderous rage and he slew his eldest child. Ino then grapped the other, and in her flight leapt off a cliff into the sea. The pair were welcomed into the company of the sea-gods and renamed Leukothea and Palaimon. Leukothea later came to the aid of Odysseus when his raft had been destroyed by Poseidon, and wrapped him in the safety of her floating veil.
