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21 " 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? "
― Natalie Haynes , A Thousand Ships
22 " 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. "
23 " Not every story leaves the teller unharmed. "
24 " 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. "
25 " But when a city was sacked, everything within it was destroyed, right down to its words. "
26 " That is what mortals do: first they ask, then they beg, finally they bargain. "
27 " In the small hours of the morning, when men and women whispered their secret prayers, they were to her. They begged not for health and long life, as they did during daylight hours. They begged for the blinding, deafening force of lust to be visited upon them, and they begged for reciprocation "
28 " 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? "
29 " Ten years, now, and still Menelaus can neither persuade his wife to come back home, nor accept that he is a red-faced bore and find himself a new wife, one less exacting than Helen. "
30 " 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. "
31 " She could see her own future as clearly as she saw everything else. Its brevity was her one consolation. "
32 " 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. "
33 " There was something displeasing about mortals, which the gods never spoke about, because they all knew it to be true. They had a strange smell - faint, when they were young, ripening to a stench as they grew old - but always present. It was the odour of death. Even the healthy ones, the uninjured, even children had it, this invisible, indelible mark. "
34 " Kings are often arrogant men.' Clytemnestra said. 'It is what reminds the rest of us that they are kings. "
35 " But it is surprising that he hasn’t considered how many other men there are like him, every day, all demanding my unwavering attention and support. How much epic poetry does the world really need? "
36 " She had spent ten years locked inside Troy and had walked its paths countless times. She knew every house, every corner, every twist and turn. "
37 " Their biceps were no match for her own. "
38 " Agamemnon, she could see, was not. He spent a great deal of time telling everyone about his unparalleled importance, but he rarely wished to make the choices that a king must. How such a weak and petty man had risen to such a position of authority, she had wondered more than once. She had concluded that the Greeks’ selfishness was the cause: every man looked out for himself first and his men second, and the other Greeks after that, if at all. Merit was decided by what a man had, not what he did. "
39 " Did you see how much he enjoyed the descriptions of the fire? I thought he might choke on his epithets. "
40 " The bards all sing of the bravery of the heroes and the greatness of your deeds: it is one of the few elements on which they all agree. But no one sings of the courage required by those of us who were left behind. "