A Thousand Ships

by Natalie Haynes

He wondered if anyone else had ever died saying the words, ‘Thank you.’

‘Of course he’s desperate,’ the smaller man said. His tone was soothing, as though he were calming an anxious horse. ‘He knows what they all know: that you are the greatest of the Greeks. It sickens him, the envy. It bites at him from within.’

The pestilent Odysseus was too clever to fall for her tricks. It was a grudge which she would nurture in her breast for as long as Odysseus lived. The sea would never be safe for the king of Ithaca, not while she dwelt in its murky depths.

One day, Odysseus would find him in the Underworld and he would ask him what death was like, and her son would reply that he would rather be a living peasant than a dead hero.

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.

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.

You are further from me now than when you were in the land of the dead. Your wife/widow, Penelope

One of the suitors – drunk, of course, on my wine – slurred his disbelief. No mortal man would give up the chance of eternal life, he said. It doesn’t happen in any story I’ve ever heard. And – drunk as he was – he was quite correct. There is no other story where a mortal man is offered the gift of immortality and turns it down. But you did. Come home, Odysseus. I can wait no longer. Penelope

The dog waits a lifetime for his master’s return and then dies when his wish is fulfilled. Even the bards would think it too sentimental to include in their songs.