Other authors have deployed Briseis as a character in their fictions: Christa Wolf, in her novel Kassandra Judith Starkston, in Hand of Fire (2014) Madeline Miller, in The Song of Achilles (2011). Daughter of Troy, by Sarah B Franklin, precedes The Silence of The Girls, but I haven’t been able to find information about that book. Pat Barker, Man Booker-winning author of the Regeneration Trilogy, which tells of the human damage wrought by WW1, is not the first author to retell Homer’s Iliad in the imagined voice of Briseis, the young girl at the centre of the rift between Agamemnon, commander-in-chief of the Achaeans (Bronze Age Greeks) and the armies’ most feared warrior, Achilles. A few women – or rather a very few girls, mainly royal or of aristocratic birth – would be shared out among the kings I might easily end up living the life of the common women, dodging blows by day and sleeping under the huts at night Every man and boy killed pregnant women to be speared in the belly on the off chance their child would be a boy, and for the other women, gang rape, beatings, mutilation, slavery. Why did Pat Barker not title her intelligent, engaging and troubling novel The Silence of the Women? Because she tells a tale of girls, mostly, young girls taken as war trophies and held in sexual servitude by the killers of their families. The Human Stain, Philip Roth – as quoted in the frontpiece of The Silence of The Girls “ ‘Divine Muse, sing of the ruinous wrath of Achilles… Beginning where they first quarreled, Agamemnon the King of men, and great Achilles.’ And what are they quarreling about, these two violent, mighty souls? It’s as basic as a barroom brawl.

All of European literature springs from a fight.” And then he picked up his copy of The Iliad and read to the class the opening lines.

“You know how European literature begins?” he’d ask, after having taken the roll at the first class meeting.

Daughter of Troy by Sarah B. Franklin