69 pages • 2 hours read
Natalie HaynesA Thousand Ships
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Calliope”
Calliope is the Muse of epic poetry, and her chapters are narrated in the first person. She is annoyed as a bent old man prays to her, giving no consideration to whether Calliope is “in the mood to be a muse today” (1). She wonders what he can possibly believe has not yet been said in epic. Noticing a brooch he is wearing, she decides that she will only assist him when he surrenders it as an offering.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Creusa”
Creusa is the wife of Trojan prince Aeneas and mother of their son Euryleon. Her chapter, narrated in third person, contrasts her memories of Troy during the war with her experiences trying to flee the burning city.
Creusa wakes up to find the city invaded and in flames; her husband and son are gone. She recalls years earlier, when Aeneas had divulged Priam’s order: If Troy were to fall, Aeneas should flee with his family to build a new city. Certain that Aeneas must have gone to find his father and is expecting her to meet him at the city’s gates.
Seeing the city in flames, Creusa recalls the previous day’s celebration. The Greeks seemed to have left Troy’s shores days earlier, leaving behind a giant wooden horse, apparently as an offering to the gods, according to Sinon, a Greek soldier. He claimed to have run away from the Greeks because they planned to sacrifice him, eliciting sympathy from many Trojans. Trojan queen Hecabe disbelieved and questioned him, and a priest, Laocoon, urged the Trojans to burn the horse, which he claimed was cursed. When his children became entangled in seaweed and drowned before the assembled crowd’s eyes, the Trojans believed Laocoon was being punished and brought the horse into the city.
Creusa runs through the city but cannot get through and dies before dawn.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Trojan Women”
Chapters from the points of view of various Trojan women are narrated in the third person. Women of Troy huddle under guard waiting to be divided as war prizes among the Greek warriors. The narrative focuses on the Trojan princess Cassandra, whom Apollo has cursed to speak prophecies that are never believed, and her mother Hecabe, the Trojan queen, who meditates on her “desire for revenge” against “that conniving Spartan whore,” Helen (31).
Hecabe thinks about her youngest son who had been spirited out of the city to keep him safe and her husband’s death while he knelt as a suppliant at a god’s shrine. She wonders what will become of her daughters and daughters-in-law. Cassandra rages silently that her visions of the future were never believed and feels consoled that she can see her own death drawing nearer. Hecabe realizes Theano is missing.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Theano”
Theano is the wife of Antenor, an advisor to king Priam. Her chapter takes place before the events described in Creusa and the Trojan women’s chapters.
All four of Theano’s sons have died; only her daughter Crino is still alive. Huddled with her husband in deliberation, Theano warns him that Greek warriors must be hiding in the horse that the Greeks left behind, and Sinon, now in the city, will open the gates for them. Antenor has tried to warn Priam to no avail. Now, their family’s only chance of survival is to betray the Trojans. He must go open the gates for the Greeks. He agrees, and the Greeks give him the hide of a panther to nail to the door so raiding warriors will know to leave them alone.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Calliope”
Calliope can barely stop herself from laughing at the “[i]diot poet” who continues to demand that she inspire him but does not understand the inspiration she is trying to give (40-41). The poem is meant to be about all the Trojan women, except perhaps Helen because, “She gets on my nerves” (40).
Chapter 6 Summary: “Trojan Women”
Hecabe takes stock of which Trojan women are missing: Creusa, Theano, and Crino. Hearing that Antenor’s house was spared, Hecabe immediately knows that he must have betrayed Troy. She recalls that he urged Priam to come to peace terms with the Greeks and assumes it was for Antenor’s benefit rather that the city’s. She cannot deny that his family has fared better than hers. While Hecabe silently curses Theano and Crino, Andromache feels happy that they are spared what she is enduring. Waking from a nightmare, Polyxena asks her mother when she knew that Troy would fall. Hecabe replies, when “the Amazon died” (45).
Chapter 7 Summary: “Penthesilea”
Penthesilea is an Amazon warrior. Her chapter recalls how she accidentally killed her beloved sister, Hippolyta, as a result of which she marched to Troy to be killed by a warrior in battle. Upon arrival, she agrees to fight on the Trojan side, anticipating that she will battle Achilles, the most skilled Greek warrior who killed Hector and defiled his corpse after Hector had killed his companion Patroclus.
Entering battle with her women, Penthesilea is disappointed by the “ragtag gang of fighters” she encounters on the Trojan side, not “the heroes she had heard about in the bard’s song” (52). The small contingent of Greek warriors also disappoint, but she is relieved to see Achilles among them, the one she hopes will bring her death. Penthesilea’s women take down several of Achilles’s contingent, and he is stunned to discover these warriors, whom he assumes are men, do not fear his Myrmidon fighters.
As his men retreat, terrified, Achilles realizes that Penthesilea wants to confront him personally. He rushes at her and sinks his sword into her neck. Her helmet falls off, revealing that she is a woman, and Achilles feels something he never felt before: grief for his victim, not because she is a woman—he has killed many without concern—but because she is “his mirror image” (56). A man behind him laughs derisively, and Achilles kills him without looking or thinking. His thoughts are consumed with Penthesilea, who thanks him as her life slips away.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Penelope”
Penelope is the wife of Greek leader Odysseus of Ithaca. Her chapters are epistolary, written in the form of letters. In this letter to her husband, Penelope recounts when Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek expedition to Troy, came to Ithaca with his men to demand that Odysseus join them.
Referring to the Greeks’ quest to recover Helen as “ignoble,” Penelope writes that she does not blame Odysseus, who tried to avoid going to Troy by pretending to be mentally unwell (58). However, Agamemnon put their infant son in danger, forcing Odysseus to save the baby, thus revealing his sanity. Penelope mocks the “red-faced bore” Menelaus and expresses her hope that Agamemnon will die in an “ignominious” way, perhaps by way of a “rapid dog” (58). She ends her letter saying that she would have found a way both to remain at home and to save her child, by plowing over her own feet. Repeating that she does not blame Odysseus, she writes that it is time he returned home.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Trojan Women”
The guards laugh at Hecabe when she demands food for her women, but eventually, they are given food and the means to prepare it. Hecabe reflects that this may be the last time she is with her women. After the city is looted, the women will be allocated to the Greek leaders according to status. Hecabe wonders which woman she would choose to keep with her. She would not choose Cassandra, whose fits of “madness” render her a “torment” (62). Hecabe recalls Cassandra emerging from Apollo’s temple in torn clothing, after which she would scream terrible prophecies of death and destruction. Her hysteria drove Hecabe to slap her violently until, finally, Cassandra was reduced to quietly muttering her “curses and madness” (64). Polyxena interrupts Hecabe’s thoughts to say that she believes it was not Penthesilea’s death that brought about Troy’s fall, but the gods’ will. After the Greeks had taken “the priest’s daughter,” the gods had almost saved Troy (65).
Chapters 1-9 Analysis
The brief opening chapter, Calliope’s first-person account of being invoked by a bard, announces the book’s stance: Self-absorbed male poets have taken up too much space, retelling the same stories, from the same perspectives. By asserting that these male poets have nothing new to contribute, Haynes establishes the need for a new kind of epic about different kinds of hero: brave women who draw on their strengths and resources to confront the disasters that are the fault of men. This sets up the next chapter that follows Creusa, wife of Trojan prince Aeneas.
Creusa’s narrative places the reader in the fallen city of Troy, which is engulfed in flames and where the Greeks commit impieties and atrocities. Having established their excessive cruelty, the narrative then shifts the perspective to Trojan women who the conquering Greeks have captured and enslaved: Hecabe, Cassandra, Polyxena, and Andromache, each of whose perspective will be taken up across the novel. Narratives in this section from Theano, Penthesilea, and Penelope fill out the portrait of women in wartime. Often direct victims of violence, these women use their cunning to improve their personal lot (Theano), don armor and fight in battle (Penthesilea), or are left behind to hold things together alone while their men engage in adventurism (Penelope). Women’s heroism takes many forms in the face of the weaknesses and abuses of men who, in Haynes’s narrative, believe themselves to be heroes but are butchers (Achilles), thieves (the Greeks), and liars (Odysseus).
Haynes bases her characters and narratives on ancient Greek and Roman Trojan war mythologies, sometimes summarizing ancient texts from the points of view of women and other times inventing details of her own. The characters and narratives are drawn from a range of ancient sources that span hundreds of years of pagan antiquity, from small city-states in the highly decentralized Greek-speaking world of the archaic and classical periods to the Augustan Roman empire poetry of Virgil and Ovid, which was composed for wealthy, educated members of society. In this sense, the novel attempts to create a cohesive narrative from ancient poetry and song that served very different social and religious purposes across antiquity.
Creusa, for example, appears in Virgil’s Aeneid, an epic that follows Aeneas, the Trojan prince who in Homer is fated to survive Troy’s fall. In Virgil’s version, Creusa is separated from her husband and son as they rush together through the fallen city and dies. Her ghost appears to Aeneas before he leaves Troy to reveal that she is not part of his future destiny, which is to build a new city. Aeneas’s faithfulness to duty and his willingness to sacrifice the women he loves (later, he will leave behind another lover, Dido) could be seen as celebrating the Roman values advocated by the Roman emperor Augustus. In addition, the Aeneid, composed after the fall of Greek-speaking Alexandria to Rome in 30 BC, provided a foundation myth that enabled the city to frame its conquest of the Greek-speaking world as a form of payback dating back to the fall of Troy.
In Homer’s Greek epics and in the classical Athenian tragedies, from which Haynes also draws, stories about heroes served different functions. Homer’s epics were considered the teachers of Greek speakers across class and gender, educating them about the past, the gods, and the human condition. Their heroes provided both models of excellence and cautionary tales about excess. The epics were also sacred texts that explained to historical listeners their communal religious rituals, and they were recited at festivals in honor of the gods.
Tragedians in fifth century Athens retold stories from Homer and other epics (which have not survived into contemporary times) in dramas that were performed in competitions at religious festivals. Thus, they too had a sacred function in Athenian society. They retold narratives from epic, adding and/or amending details to meet the perceived social needs of their time. Euripides’s Trojan Women, for example, whose play Haynes cites as a major inspiration, uses Trojan war mythology to critique Athens’ cruelty and barbarism. The play was produced in 415 BC, months after Athens had punished the island of Melos for choosing neutrality in the Peloponnesian war by sacking the city, killing all the men, and enslaving the women and children. In democratic Athens, the capacity, perhaps even responsibility, to critique the city was built into the religious rites, and Trojan war mythology provided an opportunity to do so.
Like both Greeks and Romans, Haynes draws on ancient narratives, adding and amending details to create a story for her own time. Haynes’s approach more closely approximates Rome’s, appropriating characters and plots but reframing them to elevate in importance her values and beliefs over inferior ones, including those of ancient Greeks. One way in which this is evident: Haynes refers to the invaders of Troy in her novel as “Greeks,” whereas Homer (one of her primary sources) calls them “Achaeans,” “Danaans,” and “Argives.” Later, Greek speakers adopted the term “Hellenes” to refer to themselves as a group. In Haynes’s context, the term “Greek” is a Latinized anachronism, coming from the Latin “Graeci.” Her characterization through Calliope of the epic bard as a bent old man, an ‘[i]diot poet” who is preoccupied with the deeds of men and fails to understand the story she is giving him, also exemplifies Haynes’s portrayal of ancient Greek epic as presenting an inferior and flawed heroism (41).
