A Thousand Ships

When a war was ended, the men lost their lives. But the women lost everything else.

But this is a women's war, just as much as it is the men's, and the poet will look upon their pain - the pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges of the story, victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men - and he will tell it, or he will tell nothing at all. They have waited long enough for their turn.

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 memorialised as much as any other person.

Men's deaths are epic, women's deaths are tragic: is that it? He has misunderstood the very nature of conflict. Epic is countless tragedies, woven together. Heroes don't become heroes without carnage, and carnage has both causes and consequences. And those don't begin and end on a battlefield.

He loses his wife so he stirs up an army to bring her back to him, costing countless lives and creating countless widows, orphans and slaves. Oenone loses her husband and she raises their son. Which of those is the more heroic act?

A war does not ignore half the people whose lives it touches. So why do we?

Who could love a coward?' She had once heard a woman say. Laodamia knew the answer. Someone for whom the alternative is loving a corpse.

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.

Waiting is the cruellest thing I have ever endured. Like bereavement, but with no certainty.

She had already learned that the worst dreams were not the ones where the flaming walls were crashing down on you, or where armed men were chasing you, or where your beloved menfolk were dying before your eyes. They were the ones when your husband lived again, when your son still smiled, when your daughter looked forward to her wedding.

Because the Spartan king had lost his queen, a hundred queens lost their kings.

He is learning that in any war, the victors may be destroyed as completely as the vanquished. They still have their lives, but they have given up everything else in order to keep them. They sacrifice what they do not realize they have until they have lost it. And so the man who can win the war can only rarely survive the peace.

Mankind was just so impossibly heavy. There were so many of them and they showed no sign of halting their endless reproduction. Stop, she wanted to cry out, please stop. You cannot all fit on the space between the oceans, you cannot grow enough food on the land beneath the mountains. You cannot graze enough livestock on the grasses around your cities, you cannot build enough homes on the peaks of your hills. You must stop, so that I can rest beneath your ever-increasing weight. She wept fat tears as she heard the cries of newborn children. No more, she said to herself. No more.

Because really, how many cannibalistic giants can one Greek plausibly meet as he sails the open seas?

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.

If he tells me to sing one more time, I think I might bite him.

Not every story leaves the teller unharmed.

The bards all sing of the bravery of heroes and the greatness of your deeds; it is one of the few elements of your story on which they all agree. But no one sings of the courage required by those of us who were left behind.

But when a city was sacked, everything within it was destroyed, right down to its words.

Why should the past be any guarantee of the future?

That is what mortals do: first they ask, then they beg, finally they bargain.

She isn’t a footnote, she’s a person. And she – all the Trojan women – should be memorialized as much as any other person. Their Greek counterparts too. War is not a sport, to be decided in a quick bout on a strip of contested land. It is a web which stretches out to the furthest parts of the world, drawing everyone into itself.

She could see her own future as clearly as she saw everything else. Its brevity was her one consolation.

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?

How much epic poetry does the world really need? Every conflict joined, every war fought, every city besieged, every town sacked, every village destroyed. Every impossible journey, every shipwreck, every homecoming: these stories have all been told, and countless times. Can he really believe he has something new to say? And does he think he might need me to help him keep track of all his characters, or to fill those empty moments where the metre doesn’t fit the tale?

The moral of the story? Beware of intellectuals who make a monotheism out of their theories of motivation.

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.

There is no evidence that the importance of friendship declines in any manner with age.

When you are tightly boxed in or cornered—all too often by your own stubborn and fixed adherence to some unconsciously worshipped assumptions—all there is to help you is what you have not yet learned.

Kings are often arrogant men.' Clytemnestra said. 'It is what reminds the rest of us that they are kings.