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Chapter 13
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Silence of the Girls, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Mythology and Oppressed Perspectives
The Effects of Misogyny
Honor and Violence
Slavery and Dehumanization
Grief and Revenge
Summary
Analysis
The next morning, Achilles sends out heralds—the Greek leaders are all sensitive to appropriate ceremonies. By afternoon, Greeks are gathering in the arena. Briseis and other “trophies,” including a shocked-looking Chryseis, watch from Nestor’s veranda. After Agamemnon enters the arena with great pomp, Achilles stands and suggests they call on a seer to tell them how they insulted Apollo, who must have sent the plague. A seer, Calchus, asks for Achilles’s protection if his prophecy offends anyone. When Achilles agrees—adding, insolently, that he’ll protect Calchus even if his prophecy implicates Agamemnon—Calchus says that Apollo is punishing the Greeks because Agamemnon insulted his priest. To stop the plague, Agamemnon must send Chryseis back to her father and sacrifice a hundred bulls.
While Achilles and the other Greek warriors frequently commit brutal and inhuman acts of violence, they have their own culturally complex code of masculine honor: Achilles sends heralds to the other leaders rather than summoning them more directly as a form of politeness. Moreover, the Greeks’ mythological and religious beliefs clearly affect this culturally complex code; though all the Greeks believe what the seer is saying already, they wait for the seer—a religious figure—to say it because his pronouncement gives the belief legitimacy.
Themes
Agamemnon interrupts Calchus, insulting him and claiming to prefer Chryseis to his own wife. Yet out of concern for his men, he agrees to return Chryseis. Chryseis, at Briseis’s side, whispers that he doesn’t mean it. Uza says that Chryseis is an idiot if she wants to go home when Agamemnon likes her better than his wife. Briseis tells Uza to be quiet. After the men have finished cheering, Agamemnon says that a problem remains: if he’s giving up his trophy, he needs a new one. Perhaps he’ll take Odysseus’s prize—or Achilles’s. Briseis is horrified; Chryseis desperately tries to reassure her that it won’t happen.
When Uza claims that Chryseis is an idiot for wanting to go home, it emphasizes differences in opinion among the enslaved women about their status: some, like Chryseis (and Briseis), long to return to their old, free lives, while others, like Uza, believe it’s more practical to manipulate their Greek enslavers to obtain higher status in their current situation. Meanwhile, Agamemnon’s threat to take another king’s “prize” emphasizes yet again that the Greek warriors consider the enslaved women not full human beings but pawns in games among men.
Themes
Achilles says that if Agamemnon takes his trophy, Achilles won’t fight anymore. Achilles and Agamemnon almost begin brawling, but Nestor intervenes. Meanwhile, the other women try to comfort Briseis. When the assembly begins to disperse, one woman tells Chryseis to run home—the Greeks will be coming to get her soon. Before Chryseis goes, she tells Briseis she’s sorry. Briseis says she’ll be fine and insists that Chryseis go.
Achilles’s refusal to fight if Agamemnon takes Briseis makes clear that Achilles is fighting purely for masculine honor glory, of which Briseis, his war trophy, is a symbol: he doesn’t care about the Greek cause or about defeating the Trojans per se.
Themes
Briseis, walking to Achilles’s compound, sees common slave women with injuries and wonders whether any are Agamemnon’s discards. Inside the compound, she sits in her room in silence. Iphis enters and holds her hand. Later, they hear Achilles and Patroclus enter. Achilles tells Patroclus to bring Briseis out to Agamemnon but not to let him enter the compound: if Achilles sees him, he’ll kill him. Patroclus predicts that Agamemnon won’t come—and anyway, he has to return Chryseis and sacrifice 100 bulls first. Briseis allows herself to hope that Agamemnon will forget about her rather than losing Achilles as a fighter. When Patroclus asks whether Achilles wants to see Briseis, Achilles turns down a “farewell fuck.” After a loaded silence, Achilles then says: “No, thanks […] she’ll know soon enough.”
Briseis’s thoughts about the “common” enslaved women make clear that there are hierarchies even among the enslaved: as long as Briseis is the prized “possession” of a well-respected warrior, only that warrior can physically or sexually abuse her—no one else. By contrast, any of the Greek warriors can physically and sexually victimize the women who aren’t seen as one of the men’s “prizes.” Thus, Briseis fears that her enslavement will get even more unbearable if Agamemnon appropriates and discards her. The loaded silence after Achilles makes a snide comment about a “farewell fuck” suggests that Patroclus is glaring at Achilles angrily, another detail hinting at Patroclus’s uncomfortable empathy for the enslaved women and his resentment of Achilles’s monomaniacal focus on his own glory.
Themes
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