Every summer since I was in eighth grade, my mother and I would buddy-read a book for the summer. Even though Bruce family book clubs existed before then, this was the start of an almost five-year tradition for the two of us.
This year’s pick was "A Thousand Ships," a novel on a hot topic right now: the Trojan War. With the release of Christopher Nolan’s "The Odyssey" this July, many people have re-learned the story of the Iliad and Odyssey. This novel explores the forgotten history of that story: what role the female characters took in the event.
"A Thousand Ships" by Natalie Haynes, if it can be described visually, would be a woven blanket of different colors. The chapters change from one character’s point-of-view to another, showcasing different aspects of the war and how the select protagonist played a role in it. The story goes from the Iliad, parts of the Odyssey, to even a bit of the Oresteia trilogy. From goddess to titan to peasant, every woman gets a say in the story which has always been viewed as a “Men’s War.”
The novel starts at the very end of the Trojan War: Troy in flames, smoke all around, the townspeople running for their lives in hopes of avoiding Greek capture. From the start, the questions over whether the Greek “heroes” are actually as benevolent as they are told to be is straight in the reader’s face. Seeing the destruction of the guarded city and the upheaval of the townspeople's lives, people who were completely innocent in the war and its beginnings, we start to deconstruct the glorious Ten Year’s War for what it really was.
When the surviving women of Troy are rounded up and placed on the beach outside the city, their fate to be decided by the winning Greeks, we learn the survivors' perspectives of the war and how the ending of such war will change their lives. The royal family is specifically mentioned here and how their world shifts from feeling untouchable behind Troy’s walls to being homeless and awaiting their doom.
Hecabe, Queen of Troy, is a recuring character in this novel. Her steel personality and her peculiar attitudes towards her children are a new change when typically Priam and Paris are the most acclaimed people of the Troy royal family. In her chapters, we learn the story of Paris’s childhood, a story unknown to most, and other tales from inside the walls of Troy.
Another character we meet from the royal family of Troy is Cassandra, an oracle who is shunned because of her ability, the only one who could have foreseen the outcomes of the Trojan War. Her community ignores her due to her reactions to the future of those around her. When she is on the beach, apart from her usual isolation, her visions are useful to the parts of the story which the narrative would not follow.
We also get non-human characters who appear in "A Thousand Ships" as well. The view from multiple goddesses, a titan, and even a nymph is important to the Trojan War story, for their actions have greater impact than human ones. This story is not shy to the use of gods to influence the tides of the war.
Infamously, Apollo is a god whose hand has shifted the tides in the war. However, the goddesses also had a say in the war. One of the origin stories of the war is the famous story of Paris having to give a golden apple to one of three goddesses — Hera, Athena or Aphrodite — to claim them the most beautiful. We find out that this tale, something that would be laughed off as a joke in the grand scheme of the war, is a defining plot point which brought about the entire conflict.
Because of whom Paris chose, the war began in the first place. This leads to other questions such as: Where did the golden apple even come from? What would be the importance of a simple beauty contest in the complicated schemes of the Trojan War? Why would such a contest have such wild outcomes? The Greek goddesses' — as well as the Greek gods’ — greed and vengeance is not something to underestimate when writing the tale of the Trojan War.
Even though the Trojan War is a fictional story and a long-told tale every generation learns again either when they read The Iliad and/or The Odyssey in school or when a new movie relating to those stories comes out, it does not mean that the lessons we can learn about how this story is told is not relevant.
Stating that any war is simply a “Men’s War,” no matter the time period, will always diminish the roles that women played in them. For example, even though women were not typically fighting in World War II, they still helped on the front lines as nurses and at home joined the workforce to keep America moving economic-wise to keep the country afloat. Erasing the important female characters in this fictional war or even diminishing their importance when their actions have real impact on the story is simply the first in many tales where women’s roles were pushed to the side in order to tell a biased story.
We cannot change the past to rewrite the stories in order to have an unbiased perspective on battles and wars, but we can read spin-off novels such as Haynes’s "A Thousand Ships" which balances the way a story is told and can put stories in a new light for society.
Doing so is very important to media literacy and literacy in general. Ignoring one side of a story in favor of another, even unconsciously, means you will not see a side of it which could impact your vision of that event, a side which shows at times the backbone of certain events. Not being able to hear about the women who were nurses during World War I, the women at home who joined the workforce during WWII, and the women who played a vital role in the Trojan War creates a tainted portrait of the critical moments in history.
Thank you for reading!
“But it hurts, he said when Creusa died. He would rather her story had been snuffed out like a spark failing to catch damp kindling. It does hurt, I whispered. It should hurt. She isn’t a footnote, she’s a person. And she — all the Trojan women — should be memorialized as much as any other person.” - Calliope, "A Thousand Ships" by Natalie Haynes
Rating: 5/5
Genre: Greek mythology
Page count (paperback version): 345
