Trojan War

The Wandering Queen by Claire Heywood

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This is subtitled “A Novel of Dido”, and I wanted to read it because we “did” Book IV of the Aeneid, the “Dido and Aeneas” book, for GCSE Latin.  Many moons ago!  I can’t remember much of the Aeneid in Latin, other than “forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit”, but I remember the general story.   Book IV’s very annoying, because the great Dido, founder of Carthage, burns herself alive when stupid “pius Aeneas” dumps her.  You were too good for him, love! I’m pleased to say that Claire Heywood’s changed that ending.

And it’s also relevant at the moment, in a way, because Dido’s home city of Tyre, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, is currently under an evacuation order because of the war between Hezbollah and Israel.   Yet again, Lebanon is suffering because of other people’s conflicts.  Will someone please, please sort this out?

Anyway, to get back to the book, writing a book set around a story which may be true, may be a legend or may be a bit of both can’t be easy!    And the original Dido story shows her as determined to remain true to her late husband, burning herself alive rather than marry the neighbouring king Iarbas.  I’ve always thought of Iarbas as a bully, but he’s actually very nice in this book: he wants to marry Dido but doesn’t pressurise her, and is genuinely hurt when she turns him down and then takes up with Aeneas.  And there’s the Virgil version, in which Venus turns Dido into a sappy lovesick weakling who just moons over Aeneas – who is really not worth mooning over! – and then burns herself alive with grief when he leaves.

Claire Heywood’s said that she wanted to use the Aeneas story because it’s so well-known, but that she’d put the time at which Dido lived, if she did, in the 9th century BC, and the Trojan War, if it happened, in the 12th century BC – so she’s moved Dido back three centuries to make it work.

And, given that the characters have different names in different versions of the story – and, in the case of the Aeneid, sometimes in the same version of the story! – decisions had to be made on names.  Dido is referred to as Elissa in the chapters set in Tyre and Dido in the chapters set in Carthage. The book jumps backwards and forwards between the past in Tyre and the present day in Carthage – which may be a bit confusing for people who aren’t familiar with the story.  Her husband, whom I know as Sychaeus, is called Zakarbaal here.  The goddess whom I know as Astarte is Ashtart … which is correct, because Astarte is the Greek version of the name, but still confused me!   The people ruled by Iarbas, whom I know as the Gaetuli, are the Auseans.  And the Tyrians are referred to as Canaanites rather than Phoenicians, which sounds very Biblical!

It’s sensibly suggested that there might have been an international language of diplomacy, Akkadian being the one chosen.  Both Homer and Virgil have everyone apparently just understanding each other, with no explanation as to how!

The one major character who doesn’t feature is Venus.  The name of the mother of Aeneas is never mentioned.  It’s a human story – starting with Elissa’s love for her father and her brother, her despair when her father’s will, naming her as co-heir, is overturned, her love for her husband, and her grief at his murder.   The problem is that, without Venus getting involved, it’s hard to see why a woman like Dido would be attracted to a wuss like Aeneas, and Aeneas then looks like a baddie for dumping Dido without being made to do so by divine forces.   The author does her best to give reasons for it all, to be fair, including showing Dido becoming close to little Ascanius but the parts of the story before the Trojans arrive work better.   There are some wonderful scenes set at the Tyrian court.

The famous oxhide scene – which isn’t in the Aeneid, as it happens before the Trojans arrive is there.  Oh. and so is the scene with Dido and Aeneas in the cave, which caused a lot of sniggering amongst GCSE students!  But there’s more emphasis on Dido’s female friendships, with her maid, and with Anna.  I know Anna as Dido’s sister, but, here, they meet in Cyprus, where Anna is a Cyprian (in all senses of the word), and bond when Anna saves Dido from a would-be attacker.  The women are definitely to the forefront here, continuing the trend of the many other “retellings” of myths and legends which have been published in the last few years.

It’s not a long or particularly detailed book, but I thoroughly enjoyed it – although purists will be put out that the ending’s been changed.   Recommended!.

 

 

The Voyage Home by Pat Barker

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  Dame Pat Barker, as she is now.   I read this book because it’s the third in a trilogy and I’ve read the other two; but, with all due respect to the good dame, I really don’t quite get her style of writing.  Saying “fart” or “piss” in every other sentence probably seems hilarious in a book aimed at ten-year-old boys, but it just seems silly in a book for adults.  And why do the Greek slaves all seem to be Geordies?   Yes, OK, Ancient Greeks and Trojans wouldn’t have been speaking English in the first place, but what’s the idea of the Greek slaves calling things “canny” and saying “why aye man”?!

The series was originally supposed to be about Briseis, but she’s completely vanished off the scene in this book, with the focus on Cassandra and one of Barker’s original characters, the slave woman Ritsa.   We see Agamemnon return to Troy with Cassandra as his concubine, and we see the wrath of Clytemnestra over the killing of Iphigenia.  It’s all interesting enough, but the idea of this series was to give a voice to the unheard women of the Trojan War.   There are countless Ancient Greek writings about Cassandra and Clytemnestra.  (And Cassandra’s even got an Abba song about her!)

In this version of events, Electra’s present when Agamemnon & co return, and she’s a troubled teenager who seems to be anorexic and also suffers from some sort of skin affliction.   But the focus is on Cassandra and her conviction that both she and Agamemnon are about to die.  Which, of course, they do, at the hands of Clytemnestra.  Ritsa gets to live happily ever after with one of the Greeks.

The idea of the series was a good one, and even this third book’s interesting, because of the focus on the viewpoints of the women.  But it was a shame that Briseis disappeared and that the emphasis was on two women whose stories are already well known.  And the constant fart/piss etc might be very funny in something like Thunderpants, but it’s just plain silly in something like this.

Ithaca by Claire North

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Another re-telling of a Greek myth, but not one of the better ones; although I did like the author’s portrayal of Penelope.   This tells the story of part of the period during which Odysseus was taking a ridiculously long time to get home from Troy, and Penelope was being pursued by umpteen suitors … but it’s told from the viewpoint of Hera, which makes very little sense given that Hera had no particular link to Penelope.  It’s written in the present tense, with a lot of swearing in the narrative, which isn’t the best of styles.

It also shows Clytemnestra turning up on Ithaca, and then Orestes and Elektra turning up in pursuit of her.  I’m not sure what that was about!   However, I liked the portrayal of Penelope, and the women of Ithaca in general – keeping everything together whilst all the men of fighting age were away and all the island’s money was being used to help fund the war effort.  Penelope was also shown as warding the suitors off because of the political risks of choosing one of another.   She certainly wasn’t just hanging around waiting for Odysseus to get his backside back home.

I wasn’t keen on the style of writing, though, and I thought Hera was an odd choice of narrator.  This is the first of a trilogy, but I won’t be getting the other two unless they come up as 99p offers.

Daughters of Sparta by Claire Heywood

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  There are a whole load of books around at the moment which retell ancient Greek myths/legends/epics from the viewpoint of one or more of the women involved.   This one, as the title suggests, is about Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra, and it’s very readable: I enjoyed it.

The language is quite simplistic, to the extent that it sometimes feels more like a book for older children than a book for adults.  Also, the author’s decided to use spellings which she feels more accurately reflect Greek – I take her point, but everyone’s used to the names Clytemnestra, Aeneas, Menelaus, etc, and it’s a bit confusing to see them spelt differently.   And it’s quite a short book: it leaves long gaps in the story and then starts again with “X years later ….”.

OK, moaning over!   As I said, I enjoyed it.

There are umpteen different versions of many parts of the sisters’ story.  In this book, Clytemnestra, Castor and Pollux are all the children of Tyndareus and Leda, but Helen’s the daughter of Zeus.  Other than that, the gods don’t really feature – the bit with Paris judging the goddesses’ beauty isn’t mentioned at all.   Both sisters are young and unmarried when Agamemnon’s first mentioned.   And Helen chooses to go off with Paris.   There are a couple of sub-plots which I assume are the author’s own invention – one involves Agamemnon forcing the sister of Calchas to become his concubine, and the other involves Helen not wanting to have any more children after a difficult birth with Hermione.   Both sisters come across as being very human, and we don’t really blame Helen for leaving a marriage that hasn’t really worked out, or even blame Clytemnestra for killing a cruel husband who sacrificed their daughter and forced young women into concubinage.

The Trojan women do blame Helen, but we sympathise with them too.   The person who comes across as being the big baddie is Agamemnon – the author really doesn’t like him.  He’s shown as being actually rather pleased that Helen’s run off with Paris, because it gives him an excuse to start a war and try to extend his control over both the other Greek kingdoms and the city and hinterland of Troy.   Paris is portrayed as being a fop and a coward, and Helen ends up wondering what she ever saw in him.  The bit about Helen pleading with Oenone to help heal Paris’s wounds is omitted, and Deiphobus is shown as trying to rape Helen but being stopped by Menelaus.

All in all, it’s a very enjoyable book, despite the rather simplistic language.  Worth a go.  I’m reading another of the current plethora of books about Ancient Greece at the moment, and it’s not a patch on this one!  Oh, and does anyone fancy writing an alternative version of Book IV of the Aeneid which shows Dido realising that Aeneas is actually a total wuss and not worthy of her love, and gets on with ruling Carthage instead of killing herself?  Just a thought!

 

The Women of Troy by Pat Barker

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This is the sequel to The Silence of the Girls.   There’s been an explosion in the number of books written about Greek myths and legends from a female viewpoint, and Pat Barker’s really the one who kicked it all off.  (I do wish that Amazon would reduce the price of Jennifer Saint’s Atalanta, which I really want to read because it fascinates me that the Atalanta is the only woman from Greek myth/legend to have a football club named after her!)  The treatment of the Trojan women in the Iliad is appalling: they’re sexually abused and treated like prizes of war.   So full marks to her for drawing attention to the point.  However, her style of writing isn’t that wonderful; and this book’s a bit odd because Briseis, the main character, disappears from Greek writings after the end of the Trojan War, so this is all made up.  Yes, OK, I appreciate that all of it’s pretty much made up, but the stories of Achilles, Odysseus et al are so well known that they *seem* real!

This book covers the period between the end of the war and the Greeks’ return home, when they and their Trojan captives were stranded outside Troy, waiting for a favourable wind.  We’re told that Briseis, who was famously – in Homeric epic – taken as a prize of war by Achilles, then stolen by Agamemnon, then given back, is carrying Achilles’ child, and has been married off to Alcimus, another of the Greek leaders.   Also featuring prominently are Hecuba, who eventually kills herself by jumping off Odysseus’ ship, Cassandra, forced to marry Agamemnon, Andromache, taken as a concubine by Achilles’ son Pyrrhus (usually called Neoptolemus), and an invented character called Amina.   Amina, AFAIK, is an Arabic name, so I’ve got no idea why Pat Barker’s used it here!   Sections told by Briseis are in the past tense.   Sections in which the main character is Pyrrhus are in the present tense, and use a lot of swear words.

The story goes that Amina decides to bury Priam’s body, and is killed by Pyrrhus as a result.  Pyrrhus is then blamed, due to his treatment of Priam, for the lack of a favourable wind to take the Greeks home – although mention’s also made of Ajax the Lesser’s rape of Cassandra.   However, much of the focus is on the general horror faced by the ordinary Trojan women and the women of the Trojan royal house, who saw their men, including baby boys, killed and are now enslaved by the Greeks.   It’s not a brilliantly well-written book, and, unlike The Silence of the Girls,  it doesn’t follow a story that’s been established for centuries, but it’s an interesting idea.   The treatment of the Trojan women was horrific, and Homer just didn’t even comment on that, just took it for granted that that was the lot of women in war.   I think that a bit less focus on the invented character of Amina and a bit more on Andromache and Cassandra would have worked better, though.  It seems a bit odd to re-tell a legend but then make a new story up.

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

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*Marking International Women’s Day* – This is a re-telling of part of the Iliad  from (mostly) the viewpoint of Briseis, the princess given to Achilles as a prize of war and then claimed by King Agamemnon, leading Achilles to refuse to fight.  The treatment of all the Trojan women in the Iliad is horrific – handed out to the men as trophies, enslaved, raped, even sacrificed –  and it’s just accepted that this is the lot of women in wartime. In some cases, even today, that hasn’t changed – look at the treatment of Yazidi women by IS.

This isn’t a particularly well-written book, and some of it’s really rather silly, such as all the female slaves singing “Why was he born so beautiful?”.  But it tells an important story.  We don’t really know whether or not anything in the Iliad is based on truth, but it and the Odyssey play an important part in all Western cultures, and are indeed often described as the starting point of Western culture.  I’ve climbed up a very steep hill to Mycenae in the heat, and walked round the ruins of both Troy and Sparta, partly out of historical interest but also partly because of the influence of Homer’s writings., How horrific is it that these stories, which have had such an impact and lasted for so many centuries, depict the role of women as being this?

They’re barely even given a voice.  And that’s what Pat Barker’s tried to redress.

The story goes that Briseis, the young wife of Mynes, son of the King of Lyrnessus, is given as a prize to Achilles when the Greeks take Lyrnessus.  Another young woman, Chryseis (Cressida) is given to Agamemnon.  Apollo sends plague to the Greek camp and refuses to stop it unless Chryseis is returned to her family.  Agamemnon is forced to give in, but takes Briseis as a replacement.  Achilles is furious at the affront to his honour, and refuses to fight.  He’s their star man, and, without him, things go badly.  Patroclus, his best friend, probably also his lover, dresses in his armour and takes his place, but is killed by Hector.  Agamemnon sends Briseis back, but Achilles is ready to fight anyway, to avenge his friend’s death.  He kills Hector, but is then killed himself.  Troy falls, and the women are raped and enslaved, apart from the young princess Polyxena, of whom the Greeks make a human sacrifice.

At one point in the Iliad, Achilles claims to love Briseis.  That isn’t really shown in this book, and it doesn’t fit with what happens elsewhere, when both Achilles and, in a rare moment when Homer allows her to speak, Briseis make it clear that he sees her as a possession, a prize of war.  The book talks a lot about the dehumanising of the women – not only are they being forced to act as sex slaves, and to the men who killed their husbands, brothers, fathers, sons, other relatives and friends, but they’re not even seen as human beings any more, except by each other.

Patroclus shows Briseis some kindness.  Agamemnon is violent.  And there’s some weird fetish thing going on with Achilles, who likes her to smell of the sea because it reminds him of his sea-goddess mother – I’m not sure where Pat Barker got that from!   Interesting points are made, though, about Achilles having “issues” because his mother abandoned him.  Very 21st century, but fair points.

Some of the women, those who were from lower social ranks but are blessed with good looks, in some ways benefit from what’s happened, and some grow fond of their captors: it’s a way of coping.  Briseis, as the slave of one of the top men, is at least in a better position than some of the other women, who are more or less thrown to the men to do with as they will.  Pat Barker uses the term “rape camp”, associated with the Balkan wars of the 1990s.  It’s not inaccurate – but, as she says, it’s not what people associate with the Trojan War, the war of gods and heroes.

We also see quite a lot of the camp, and we see how Briseis is able to regain some dignity and sense of self by treating the sick and wounded.  Books about heroes never tell you much about hospitals.

The focus is very much on the women, but the men obviously play a big part in the story.  Apart from Patroclus, the one man who comes out of things well is elderly King Priam, who comes to the Greek camp alone and unarmed, to beg for the return of his son Hector’s body.  But, however courageous and dignified he is, he can’t do anything to help Briseis.  He recognises her, Pat Barker having fleshed out her back story to show her having a sister married to one of Priam’s sons, and having been friendly with Helen, but says that he can’t take her back to Troy with him, because the rules of war are that she belongs to Achilles.

The book ends with Briseis, expecting a baby by Achilles, being married off to Alcimus, a nice enough man, who’ll look after her. It’s a better fate than she might have met, but it’s not her choice – but, as she says, at least she’s no longer a part of someone else’s story.

It’s not a particularly well-written book, as I’ve said, but it’s a story that needs telling.  Very few schools still provide a “classical education”, but these stories are still crucial to our culture, and the names of Achilles, Hector, Helen and Cassandra are still known to most people.  Homer rarely allows the women to speak.  The way they’re treated is horrific.  Pat Barker’s tried to redress that, a little.  Don’t be expecting writing of the quality of Homer’s, but this is still worth a read.