The Silence of the Girls: Chapter 38 Summary & Analysis

Briseis doesn’t attend Patroclus’s cremation: women aren’t allowed. Alcimus tells her about it later, stuttering as if fearful both of and for Achilles. Evidently, Achilles sacrificed 12 Trojan captives, Patroclus’s horses, and Patroclus’s dogs on the funeral pyre. In the women’s huts, Iphis keeps asking aloud what will happen to her; Briseis embraces her but doesn’t know how to reply. During Patroclus’s funeral games, Briseis sees Iphis talking to Tecmessa and realizes that both fell in love with their Greek “captors”—yet Briseis only scorns Tecmessa for it, not Iphis. Briseis speculates that it was easier for her to understand Iphis because Briseis also loved Patroclus.

The women don’t know that Achilles has made Iphis first prize in the chariot race for Patroclus’s funeral games until Automedon comes to take her. Iphis tries to cling to Briseis, but Automedon wrenches her into the yard. The other women follow to find out who will own Iphis. When a man named Diomedes wins the race, Achilles indicates Iphis as his prize. Diomedes examines her just as Achilles first examined Briseis. Then he and Achilles embrace and chat while Diomedes’s servant takes Iphis away. Iphis glances back miserably at Briseis as she goes.

With the funeral games over, Briseis goes back to serving Achilles dinner in his compound. She’s terrified to even glance at him, as he has wished in public that she’d died. She feels no sympathy for him and finds that while she grieves Patroclus, she also resents that he received a lavish funeral while her brothers’ bodies were simply abandoned. Yet she’s constantly conscious of Achilles’s lonely presence in the dinner hall. She feels utterly lonely too now that Patroclus and Iphis are gone.

Four or five nights later, Automedon informs Briseis at dinner that Achilles wants her that night. Briseis, terrified, waits until Achilles has had some after-dinner wine with Automedon and Alcimus to enter Achilles’s room. Once alone in the room with Achilles, Briseis asks why he doesn’t play his lyre. Achilles claims that he can’t anymore. Later, in bed with Briseis, Achilles can’t get an erection, though she tries to arouse him both manually and orally because she’s terrified of what will happen if she can’t. At last she stops and asks whether he’d like her to leave. He rolls silently away from her. She flees the building for the women’s huts, worried that he might sell her in a “slave market” now.