‘Tell me.’
‘She was so willing to die,’ he said. ‘She did nothing to resist. She offered me her throat to cut. Why wasn’t she afraid?’
‘She was afraid,’ Andromache replied. ‘But she was more afraid of slavery. More afraid to be torn from her homeland. More afraid to belong to a man she did not know or choose. Death was not frightening to her because she preferred it to a worse fate.’
There was silence as he considered what she had said. ‘Would you have been afraid to die then?’ he asked.
Andromache winced as though he had slapped her. ‘No.’
‘Coming to Epirus was worse for you than dying?’
‘I thought so.’
There was a further silence. ‘Do you still think so?’ he asked. She heard the unmistakeable note of hope in his voice and almost laughed at the absurdity of it. Her captor, the murderer of her son, craving her approval. And yet, she found she could not withhold it. ‘No. I have Molossus now.’
‘When I die,’ he began, and then broke off. She did not interrupt, knowing that he sometimes needed to think his way into his words and would become annoyed if she distracted him. ‘When I die, you will marry that Trojan prince.’
‘Helenus?’ she asked. Cassandra’s brother was one of the few Trojan men whom the Greeks had allowed to live. He had performed some service for them, betrayed the Trojans in some way – that much was clear to Andromache, but she knew no more than that.
‘The brother of the mad girl,’ he agreed. Cassandra’s reputation had extended to every part of the Greek army, even before she was slaughtered by Agamemnon’s wife.
‘Very well. But why would you think about this now?’ Neoptolemus was silent. ‘Has someone threatened us?’ Andromache asked. She felt his arm reach over and his hand came to rest on her cheek.
‘They will,’ he said. ‘They will.’
*
When they came for Neoptolemus, he was not in Epirus, but in Delphi, several days’ ride away. He was killed in front of the temple of Apollo by men from Mycenae. He was heavily outnumbered. Orestes, the prince of Mycenae – Agamemnon’s son – demanded Neoptolemus’ wife Hermione as his bride. He claimed to be avenging some impiety Neoptolemus had committed, but Andromache knew this was a flimsy pretext. If someone was going around Greece righting every impiety shown towards Apollo during the Trojan War, there would be no Greek left alive. Had Apollo not visited a plague upon them all for their crimes? So why would Neoptolemus deserve a greater punishment than the rest? The worst excesses against Apollo had been committed by the former king of Mycenae, Agamemnon himself. What right did his son have to take vengeance on any other man? He should have been making offerings and prayers himself, in penance for his own wrongdoing, his and his sister’s. Hadn’t they killed their mother to avenge their impious father? How did the Furies let him go unpunished?
When Andromache heard that Neoptolemus was dead, she did not grieve. She could not weep for him. She wept instead for herself, cast once again into the world with no one to protect her, and she wept for her son, though her love for Molossus was tainted. Love had come so easily to her when she was young: she had adored her parents and her brothers. And then Thebe had fallen to Achilles, and her father Eetion and her seven brothers were slaughtered in a single day. This tragedy – the shock of which killed her mother shortly afterwards – had not broken her of the habit of loving. She had opened her heart to Hector and his family, delighting in their numbers, all those new brothers and sisters. She had been as dutiful to Priam and Hecabe as she had been to her own parents. She had found it a pleasure, had never understood the sly remarks other women made about their husbands’ mothers. Losing her own family had made her all the readier to love another. Then when Hector died she had grieved as a widow should and she had found consolation in his family: her loss was also theirs.
But the death of Astyanax had changed her and she had known she would never love anyone in the same way thereafter. When her child lay smashed beneath the city walls, she knew that something inside her was broken and could not be repaired. Like any mother, she had found that her love for Astyanax was bound up in fear. When he was born, she worried with every fever: even a slight illness had her scurrying to the altars to placate the gods and beg their assistance. She cared equally for Molossus: she would have sworn it before the statue of Zeus with no fear of retribution. But she did not spend her days or nights worrying that her Greek-born son would fall ill or injure himself. She had nothing left to give to the quotidian business of motherhood. She could only trust that the gods would protect him (as they had not protected Astyanax) because she now knew that if the worst should happen, there was nothing she could do to save him. She had failed her first son, and she had no more resources now than she had had then. Instead, she had an intimate knowledge of the depths of her powerlessness: there was no possibility of self-deception. She had loved Astyanax as though she could swaddle him in blankets and keep him safe from the world. She loved Molossus as though they both lived on a cliff edge from which either or both of them might fall at any moment.
So when the message came to her from a slave, that Neoptolemus was dead and Orestes sought to make Hermione his wife, she felt the customary shudder of alarm, but it did not occur to her to flee. Where could she go, friendless as they were in Greece? And who would give her shelter from Orestes? Neoptolemus’ grandfather might be of some assistance, she supposed, since he had lost his son Achilles and now his grandson, too. Molossus was all that remained of the noble house of Peleus. Andromache found herself sending the slave on to Peleus, in the hope that he could do what she could not and protect her boy. But she did it with little expectation, and was astonished when the old man appeared, brandishing his walking-stick like a cudgel and demanding that she and Molossus accompany him home.
*
As Neoptolemus had once promised, she married Helenus. The Trojan prince had a knack for making friends rather than enemies, and they were soon able to found a small settlement of their own. At Andromache’s request, they began to build a city which resembled their lost home: a new Troy, less grand and imposing, but with a high citadel nestling beneath a mountain. Sometimes, when the mist took a while to clear in the mornings, she could imagine herself home again. Helenus bore a slight resemblance to his long-dead brother, Hector. Sometimes she found herself looking at his profile and seeing the features of her first husband leap from the face of her second. She never knew if Molossus resembled Astyanax as he grew up. But as she grew older, she found the two boys merging in her mind and when she saw the silhouette of Molossus returning from a day’s hunting in the forest, she also saw Astyanax treading in his footsteps. Her later life was lived amid a set of shadows and reflections of all that she had lost in the catastrophes of her early life. And if the shadow of happiness fell short of happiness itself, it was more than she had ever expected to find when she lay prostrate on the shores of Troy, weeping for her beloved child.
43
Calliope
Sing, Muse, he said, and I have sung.
I have sung of armies and I have sung of men.
I have sung of gods and monsters, I have sung of stories and lies.
I have sung of death and of life, of joy and of pain.
I have sung of life after death.
And I have sung of the women, the women in the shadows. I have sung of the forgotten, the ignored, the untold. I have picked up the old stories and I have shaken them until the hidden women appear in plain sight. I have celebrated them in song because they have waited long enough. Just as I promised him: this was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of all of them. A war does not ignore half the people whose lives it touches. So why do we?
They have waited to have their story told, and I will make them wait no longer. If the poet refuses the song I have offered him, I will take it away and leave him silent. He has sung before: he may not want it and does not need it. But the story will be told. Their story wi
ll be told, no matter how long it takes. I am ageless, undying: time does not matter to me. All that matters is the telling.
Sing, Muse, he said.
Well, do you hear me? I have sung.
Afterword
The inspiration for this novel comes from across the ancient world, in both time and place. Some of it was literary, some was archaeological. Some chapters are entirely my own invention, and some borrow from source material which you might already know. The texts which I returned to throughout this book were Euripides’ Trojan Women (also his Hecabe) for the Trojan Women chapters; and Homer’s Odyssey, for the Penelope chapters. In addition, I turned to Virgil’s Aeneid for Creusa’s chapter (though it gave me a lot more on the burning city and the sibilant Sinon than it did on Creusa. Which isn’t to say that Virgil doesn’t write amazing women: I couldn’t fit Dido into this novel, which was a real blow. But when something doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit); Ovid’s remarkable Heroides gave me the first insight into Laodamia, and also persuaded me that I could write Penelope’s story as letters to her absent husband; Clytemnestra’s chapter owes everything to Aeschylus’ Oresteia, of course. There’s not much about Briseis in Homer’s Iliad, but the plague incurred by Agamemnon’s refusal to return Chryseis is taken from there (the plague symptoms themselves are borrowed from a later author, Thucydides, who contracted plague at the start of the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century BCE, but recovered to tell the tale); Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis and Iphigenia Among the Taurians informed her chapter; Andromache takes her later story from Euripides’ play of the same name.
There are plenty more women in this book whose stories barely exist in the surviving literature of the ancient world: Theano and Oenone, for example. Female characters are usually in the shadows or on the margins of stories even when they do appear (Euripides and Ovid are exceptional in this regard, in producing work where women are the focus and often the sole focus). Sometimes we have collectively decided a particular woman is intended even when she is not named. The Iliad famously begins with a line which is usually translated as ‘Sing, Muse, of the wrath of Achilles’. It seems reasonable to assume he’s addressing Calliope, muse of epic poetry (he would probably have hoped to find her less capricious than I have rendered her. Although if Euripides had written her, she might have been more capricious still). But Homer doesn’t name her. He doesn’t even use the word ‘muse’. He says ‘thea’, ‘goddess’.
Penthesilea has suffered badly at the hands of history, unless you wish to hunt through fragments of the obscure Quintus Smyrnaeus or Pseudo-Apollodorus (which I did, but wouldn’t necessarily recommend). She was a mighty warrior and had a major role in a lost epic poem, from perhaps the eighth century BCE, called Aethiopis. Only a few lines of this poem survive. Like many Amazons, Penthesilea was a huge inspiration to visual artists in the ancient world: Amazons feature on more surviving pots than any other mythical figure except Heracles. Also, extraordinarily, there are vases which show Greek warriors bearing fallen Amazons from the battlefield. On one beautiful pot, Penthesilea is carried from the scene of their duel by Achilles. Ancient warriors did not usually treat their dead foes with anything like this respect or affection. Sadly, when Robert Graves was writing in the twentieth century, he turned this incredible female hero into a corpse on which Achilles masturbated. This must be an example of that progress we’re always reading about.
You can see a more ornate version (more monkeys, for a start) of Thetis’ earrings in the British Museum. They were found on the island where she was married to Peleus in my version. If you’re visiting the museum anyway, you could also track down Protesilaus, balanced on the prow of his boat, just as Laodamia imagines him in her chapter. He really does have beautiful feet. You’ll have to go to Greece to see the stone lions of Mycenae, and while you’re there, you could always take a boat trip and go hunting for Troy on the Turkish coast, to see if you agree with the controversial nineteenth-century archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, who placed it at Hisarlik in modern-day Turkey. The coastal features and plants which give Troy its detail in this book are those of Hisarlik. Apologies to those who feel strongly that Troy was somewhere else. Ithaca, home of Odysseus, has proved harder to name in the modern world (and Odysseus’ route home is the source of much-wrangled discussion). I can live with the uncertainty: I hope you can too. Truthfully, I sometimes prefer not knowing things for the imaginative space it offers. I can only apologize to all my scientist friends for this despicable choice.
Euripides’ version of Aphrodite and Artemis in Hippolytus was the starting point for the petulance of the gods in this novel. They have the emotional maturity of toddlers, mingled with immortality and horrifying power. As I moved back to the pre-Olympian gods (Themis, Gaia etc.) the petulance gets somewhat reduced and a certain loftiness is present instead. I had the most fun writing the scene where the goddesses vie with one another for the golden apple. If this book has a motif, it is that apple. Or possibly the owl which Athene refuses to hand over. I would never give up my owl to win a beauty contest, in case you were in any doubt.
Homer’s Iliad is (rightly) regarded as one of the great foundational texts on war and warriors, men and masculinity. But it is fascinating how we have received that text and interpreted the story it tells us. I gave an early draft of A Thousand Ships to a brainy friend for his comments and feedback. He was funny and helpful and kind and only occasionally cross with me for not being more like H. Rider Haggard. But he questioned the book’s basic premise: that the women who survive (or don’t survive) a war are equally heroic as their menfolk. The men go and fight, the women don’t, was his essential argument. Except that women do fight (not least Penthesilea and her Amazons), even if the poems heralding their great deeds have been lost. And men don’t always: Achilles doesn’t fight until book eighteen of the twenty-four-book Iliad. He spends the first seventeen books arguing, sulking, asking his mother for help, sulking some more, letting his friend fight in his stead, offering advice and refusing apologies. But not fighting. In other words, he spends almost three-quarters of the poem in a quasi-domestic setting, away from the battlefield. Yet we never question that he is a hero. Even when he isn’t fighting, his status as a warrior is never in doubt. I hope that at the end of this book, my attempt to write an epic, readers might feel that heroism is something that can reside in all of us, particularly if circumstances push it to the fore. It doesn’t belong to men, any more than the tragic consequences of war belong to women. Survivors, victims, perpetrators: these roles are not always separate. People can be wounded and wounding at the same time, or at different times in the same life. Perhaps Hecabe is the most brutal example of that.
Cassandra is the only role from all these women which I have ever performed (in a reading of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon at school). Although her story was sometimes hard to tell, I have missed her the most since I finished writing.
Acknowledgements
This book was a man-eater and there were times I thought it would swallow me whole. So thanks go out to everyone who kept me afloat. Peter Straus is both my brilliant agent and the most thoughtful and sophisticated reader you could hope to find. I know how lucky I am. My editor at Pan Mac, Maria Rejt, is a marvel. She and Josie Humber kept me honest and rarely allowed, ‘because it’s in a fragment of Quintus Smyrnaeus,’ as an answer. Impossible not to agree with them. Sam Sharman shepherded the book through its latter stages with a calm which I think I probably used to have before I torched it in the ruins of Troy. Tons of other wonderful people at Pan Mac contributed to this: not least Kate Green, who tricks me into doing talks and shows by asking me how my running is going. Don’t be fooled by her innocent face.
Book-writing could easily be at war with my broadcasting work. It isn’t, because my colleagues at the BBC are amazing. Mary Ward-Lowery, James Cook: thank you for making Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics with me during this book. I couldn’t have done the radio series without you, and the book would be less if I w
eren’t performing. I guess I might sleep better, but that can wait. Huge thanks also to James Runcie and Gwyneth Williams for letting us keep making the shows.
Early readers are one of the most precious things writers can have. Thank you to Sarah Churchwell, as always, for being an impossibly acute reader, and for making time when she has none. And thanks to Robert Douglas-Fairhurst who is the person on my mind when people ask who my ideal reader is. What am I saying? He’s always on my mind. Digby Lidstone read the first half and told me to take out 90 per cent of the commas, so you can thank him for that. Elena Richards went through the final draft with a fine-tooth comb, and Matilda McMorrow did the same at proof stage. If either of them decides on a publishing career, please take this as the short-form of a glowing reference and apply to me for the longer version.
Huge numbers of people kept me on track while I was writing. You all have my thanks and love, especially: Helen Bagnall, for being a miracle of positive energy in my life; I’m so lucky to know her. Damian Barr for always knowing the right time to call and the right thing to say. David Benedict for taking me out when I needed it. Philippa Perry and her friend Julianne for their continued perceptiveness and kindness. Kara Manley for being here since the beginning. Michelle Flower for moral support in animal and human form. Julian Barnes for offering the best advice (in the most patient voice) when I was climbing the walls. Marcus Bell for sending me Hamilton videos every day for a month to keep my spirits up. Adam Rutherford for offering unrivalled advice on the flora and fauna of the Troad Peninsula in the Bronze Age. Christian Hill for (always and still) being the voice of reason in my shifting world.
Most of all I want to thank Dan Mersh for everything, always. And, of course, my family: my mum, my dad, Chris, Gem and Kez. You can all have my owl.
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