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Chapter 20
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
As Briseis serves Agamemnon and Nestor wine, Agamemnon vehemently refuses Nestor’s suggestion that he beg Achilles to fight again. Nestor says that Agamemnon could send someone else to beg, as Achilles wouldn’t expect Agamemnon himself to do it. Agamemnon retorts that Nestor isn’t accounting for Achilles’s pride. Then Odysseus stumbles in, wounded in the arm. Nestor orders Briseis to get him wine. When Odysseus announces that the battle is going extremely badly, Agamemnon resignedly asks what “it’ll take.” Odysseus replies that “he” will likely want a lot.
Like Achilles, Agamemnon focuses more on his individual honor than he does on the Greek army’s success: he refuses to personally ask Achilles to fight again because he feels that to do so would humiliate his honor, even though personally asking is the strategy most likely to yield results. When Agamemnon asks what “it’ll take,” it suggests he would rather bribe Achilles (the “he” in question) than ask him nicely.
Themes
Agamemnon says he’ll offer a great deal of treasure and seven female slaves from Lesbos. When Nestor asks about “the girl,” Agamemnon dismissively replies, “obviously.” Odysseus suggests that Achilles may not want Briseis back now that she’s “shop-soiled,” but Agamemnon claims he never touched her and agrees, at Nestor’s prompting, to swear as much under oath. Agamemnon further offers to give Achilles one of his own daughters in marriage. After some discussion, Agamemnon, Nestor, and Odysseus agree that Odysseus and Ajax will go to Achilles with the proposal—and bring Briseis, whom they are supposed to say Agamemnon never touched.
Yet again, this passage emphasizes that the Greek warriors view women, whether slaves or relatives, as tokens for trade between men rather than as individuals: Agamemnon plans to offer Achilles nine women total, including seven women from Lesbos, Briseis (whom the men call only “the girl”), and his own daughter in marriage simply to avoid apologizing to Achilles directly and so damaging his own honor.
Themes
Briseis rushes to the women’s hut and tells Ritsa that the men may be sending her back to Achilles as a bribe. She grabs her mantle and goes to meet Odysseus and Ajax. Though Odysseus has just been joking to Ajax about Agamemnon’s claim that he never touched Briseis, he demandingly asks where Briseis’s veil is as she approaches. Ritsa fetches a long white veil and throws it over Briseis; it reminds Briseis unpleasantly of Helen. She knows she probably resembles a girl being sent from her father’s house for the first time, but she feels more like a dead body: she’s unwilling to hope that the deal will work.
Aristocratic married women in this culture wear veils to mark them as the sexual possession of their husbands. Odysseus demands that Briseis wear a veil when he returns her to Achilles to bolster the lie that Agamemnon never raped her—that she remains Achilles’s exclusive sexual possession. The disturbing parallel between Briseis’s father giving her in marriage at age 14 in a veil and Odysseus bringing her back to Achilles in a veil suggests that there are strong similarities between wifedom and enslavement in the ancient Greeks’ misogynistic culture as the novel represents it.
Themes
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Abruptly, Odysseus hands Briseis an opal necklace and tells her to put it on. Briseis knows the necklace: her father gave it to her mother as a wedding gift. Agamemnon presumably took it as plunder from Lyrnessus. Though at first sickened, Briseis puts the necklace on and feels her mother’s comforting presence. Then Odysseus and Ajax lead Briseis to Achilles’s compound. Achilles’s guards let them in. Odysseus and Ajax approach the private entrance to Achilles’s rooms, and Odysseus tells Briseis to wait outside. After a wait, in which Briseis can hear the men’s voices but not what they’re saying, Odysseus opens the door and beckons her to come in.
Briseis is wearing her mother’s wedding gift as Odysseus and Ajax bring her back to her former slave-owner and rapist, Achilles—another detail paralleling marriage for women with sexual enslavement in the highly misogynistic society of the ancient Greeks as represented in the novel.
Themes
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Briseis is sitting in the dinner hall where Patroclus has brought her, numbly remembering how they took her veil to show her “barefaced like a whore in the marketplace” and what Achilles said to her. Patroclus pours himself and Briseis cups of Achilles’s best wine. Briseis says she doesn’t know why Patroclus brought her, a slave, wine her first night in Achilles’s compound. Patroclus responds: “You know why.” Briseis chooses to think he is referring to his own childhood exile in Achilles’s household, as anything else would be “too difficult.” Patroclus apologizes to Briseis, saying Odysseus should never have brought her. Briseis wonders if that would have been better—maybe things would have gone differently if her face hadn’t revealed to Achilles that Agamemnon lied.
Earlier in the novel, Briseis scorned enslaved women who still wore aristocrats’ veils as insane. And, to some degree, she appreciated the freedom of movement and sight that losing her veil afforded her. Yet having her veil forcibly removed still makes her feel like “a whore in the marketplace,” a description that underscores how the veil in this culture symbolizes a single man’s sexual possession of a woman in contrast with potentially many men’s sexual abuse of a woman. When Patroclus claims that Briseis knows why he brought her wine that first night, it’s possible he’s implying that he knew Achilles would rape her and thought wine would dull the trauma for her. It is “too difficult” for Briseis to accept this meaning because she doesn’t want to think of Patroclus, one of her only friends, as complicit in her rape—though he clearly is complicit in the hierarchical slave society that enables her rape.
Themes
Odysseus appears, and Patroclus escorts him, Ajax, and Briseis to the compound gate. As Odysseus, Ajax, and Briseis walk back to Agamemnon’s, Briseis thinks that now she has no value to Agamemnon or Achilles, she is likely to be given to the soldiers. Those common slave-women live terrible lives. Back in Agamemnon’s compound, Odysseus gives Agamemnon an edited version of Achilles’s response, correctly reporting that Achilles no longer thinks the war is worth his life but claiming Achilles was very honored by the offer of Agamemnon’s daughter.
Once again, Briseis’s fears about becoming a common slave make clear that there is a hierarchy among the enslaved women: prized slaves are raped and abused only by their owner, whereas common slaves can be raped and abused by anyone. Odysseus’s elision of Achilles’s insults to Agamemnon, meanwhile, shows that Odysseus in his shrewdness doesn’t want to insult high commander Agamemnon’s masculine honor even if he’s only delivering a message.
Themes
Nestor suggests that they get the Myrmidons to fight without Achilles. Agamemnon asks whether Patroclus could lead them. Odysseus (disrespectfully) and Ajax (respectfully) say that Patroclus won’t agree without Achilles’s consent, though Agamemnon asks whether Patroclus, a prince, would like “go[ing] down in history as Achilles’ bum-boy.” Nestor suggests that Patroclus would be aiding Achilles by leading the Myrmidons into battle, because (Nestor believes) Achilles doesn’t actually like the status quo either. Agamemnon reluctantly agrees to let Nestor try. The other kings trail out. Briseis is following them when Agamemnon orders her to remain.
Agamemnon’s question about Patroclus “go[ing] down in history as Achilles’ bum-boy” suggests an assumption that all the major Greek warriors at Troy care how they will be discussed in future myths and legends. The phrase “bum-boy” refers pejoratively to a receptive male partner in anal sex; it reveals that Agamemnon (and implicitly the disrespectful Odysseus) look down on Patroclus in a homophobic way: they believe him to have played the “receptive,” stereotypically feminine role during sex with Achilles. Though it is not clear why Agamemnon orders Briseis to remain, context suggests that he may sadistically rape her again—as a means of punishing the enslaved woman who “failed” to bribe Achilles adequately.
Themes
