A Thousand Ships

by Natalie Haynes

The fires across the city were so bright, they thought it was morning, and Creusa knew she would remember this oddity – the fire and the birds and the night made day – for as long as she lived. And she did, though it mattered little, because she was dead long before dawn.

as the women waited to find out who they now belonged to, they huddled around their queen as though her last embers might keep them warm.

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

Sons obliterated by the folly of another woman’s son.

It had also never occurred to her that being captured by the Greeks might be worse than being killed by them.

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.

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 longed for his touch, even when she had it.

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.

Many of them had been taken already, and now only the royal family – Hecabe, her daughters, her daughters-in-law – remained to be split among the men who regarded themselves as heroes.

They had to rest their eyes on her while they despised her.

All he has ever wanted is to have Helen as his wife. He had her, he lost her, and now he has her again. My presence is scarcely required at all, so long as it cannot be said that I am with someone else.’

But revenge, when it came, came from another quarter altogether, and it rolled out onto the ground, gleaming and golden.

But this is the 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.

Too many men telling the stories of men to each other.

To a god, a human life is nothing more than the blink of an eye.

But no one sings of the courage required by those of us who were left behind.

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

‘And yet, when he sees me, he will fall prostrate before me.’

‘Would you rather have the approval of your men outside your bright sunlit palace, or the approval of your wife, in the dark inner chambers?’

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.

It is manifestly absurd that in this whole horrific saga of war and tragedy, it is the death of his old dog which has upset me almost more than anything. But it has, and there is no denying it.

Andromache felt her mind begin to travel down the road she could not allow it to take.

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.