They do now, in the midst of a fourth-wave feminist surge. They won’t want to know we were living in a rape camp.” There seems a particular urgency to these new novels – especially when the classics are also being invoked, perniciously, to underpin an insurgent, misogynist 'alt-right'

They won’t want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. “What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times? One thing I do know: they won’t want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. Towards the end of Barker’s novel, Briseis ponders how the war will be remembered. Madeline Miller’s beguiling Circe has the witch from the Odyssey at its centre, while Pat Barker’s remarkable The Silence of the Girls retells the Iliad from the perspective of Briseis. Haynes’s book is emphatically not this: it is, as Calliope’s intervention explains, the story of the shadowy women on the edges of Homer’s poem, who nonetheless – in Briseis’s case, in Helen of Troy’s case – drive the plot.Ī Thousand Ships is one of a trio of recent novels by women that, to a greater or lesser degree, rewrite the Homeric epics from the point of view of female characters. Eventually, after the death of his beloved companion Patroclus, Achilles enters the battle, and the poem culminates in his slaughtering of Hector, Troy’s greatest warrior. When Agamemnon insists on pulling rank and taking Briseis, Achilles withdraws from the conflict, and the Greek invaders of Troy are pushed to the verge of defeat. The quarrel between the two men, who are ostensibly on the same side, is about the apportioning of loot – predictably enough, a captured woman, Briseis – and the stakes are so high because Achilles is by far the better fighter. “One man’s anger at the behaviour of another” is a way of summing up the plot of the Iliad: the wrath of Achilles, directed at the Greek commander-in-chief, Agamemnon.

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