Mythology and Oppressed Perspectives Theme Analysis

“Cheers, lads,” he said. “She’ll do.”

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.

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.

I was Helen now.

What I came away with was a sense of Helen seizing control of her own story. She was so isolated in that city, so powerless—even at my age, I could see that—and those tapestries were a way of saying: I’m here. Me. A person, not just an object to be looked at and fought over.

I heard Odysseus talking as I approached, laughing at the idea that Agamemnon hadn’t laid a finger on me. “It’s not his finger I’m worried about,” he sniggered. Then he caught sight of me and snapped, “Where’s your veil?”

The defeated go down in history and disappear, and their stories die with them.

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 do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son.

These words echoed round me, as I stood in the storage hut, surrounded on all sides from the wealth Achilles had plundered from burning cities. I thought: And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and brothers.

We’re going to survive—our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them.

We need a new song.