Honor and Violence Theme Analysis

This is what free people never understand. A slave isn’t a person who’s being treated as a thing. A slave is a thing, as much in her own estimation as in anybody else’s.

“It’s not his fault,” she said. “He has these awful nightmares, sometimes he wakes up, he thinks I’m a Trojan.”

“You are a Trojan,” I said.

“No, I mean a fighter,” Tecmessa said.

Perhaps, at that age, I thought all the stirring tales of courage and adventure were opening a door into my own future, though a few years later—ten, eleven years old, perhaps—the world began to close in around me and I realized the songs belonged to my brothers, not to me.

Everybody in the arena was moved by the old man’s tears—and by the size of the ransom he’d brought with him. Sentiment and greed—the Greeks love a sentimental story almost as much as they love gold.

“Because I know what it’s like to lose everything and be handed to Achilles as a toy.”

His honesty winded me. But at the same time I was thinking: How can you know? You, with all your privileges, all your power, how could you possibly know what it’s like to be me?

“None of that gives him the right to take another man’s prize of honour. It doesn’t belong to him; he hasn’t earnt it.”

There was a lot more, but I’d stopped listening. Honour, courage, loyalty, reputation—all those big words being bandied about—but for me there was only one word, one very small word: it.

This isn’t about you.

It would have been easier, in many ways, to slip into thinking we were all in this together, equally imprisoned on this narrow strip of land between the sand dunes and the sea; easier, but false. They were men, and free. I was a woman, and a slave. And that’s a chasm no amount of sentimental chit-chat about shared imprisonment should be allowed to obscure.

“I might just get his knife in my guts.”

Nestor smiled. “Not you.”

“You’re sure about that, are you? I wish I was. But, then, I know what it’s like to kill a friend and spend the rest of your life regretting it.”

Some of the younger women had since had children by their Greek owners, and I’m sure they loved those children too—as women do—but when I spoke to them, it was the Trojan children they remembered, the boys who’d died fighting to save Troy.

I’ve said Achilles awarded prizes—oh, and what prizes they were! Nothing was too much for him to give in memory of Patroclus: armour, tripods, horses, dogs, women . . . Iphis. He made her first prize in the chariot race.

He’s in control of everything he sees.

But every morning, he’s compelled to drive his chariot round and round Patroclus’ grave, to defile Hector’s body, and, in the process—as he understands perfectly well—to dishonour himself. And he has no idea how to make any of it stop.

“You won’t do it.”

“He’s a guest.”

“Not invited.”

“No, but accepted.”

We need a new song.