Reading Consent Into the Iliad
The Stakes of Writing From Briseis’ Perspective
Homer’s Iliad tells us little of Briseis, concubine of Achilles, object of the cataclysmic feud between Achilles and Agamemnon that sets the narrative’s events into motion. Her silence sits like a weight at the center of the epic. Her voice is a palpable absence. We do not hear her thoughts, fears, or hopes as her captors squabble over her like a pawn in their game of masculine posturing.
Until one moment, which I have always found both stunning and startling. As the Greeks mourn the death of Patroclus, Briseis steps forward from a crowd of captive women and offers a lament. She speaks with personal fervor of the horror of Patroclus’ loss, describing him as a comfort during the sorrows of her captivity, “most pleasing to [her] heart,” a voice of hope and compassion in the aftermath of devastating loss (Iliad 19, tk line #):
And yet you would not let me, when swift Achilleus had cut down
My husband and sacked the city of godlike Mynes,
You would not let me sorrow, but said you would make me godlike Achilleus’
Wedded lawful wife, that you would take me back in the ships
To Phthia, and formalize my marriage among the Myrmidons.
Therefore I weep your death without ceasing. You were kind always.
[19.295–300, translation Lattimore]
In this passage, the interiority of this character, previously such a blank, opens wide. Reading it, my mind follows various paths: I start thinking about lament as a genre, lament as a rare public avenue for female speech, the differences between laments by wives and by concubines, parallels in epic, tragedy…
But there are more human, less academic questions that scholarship can’t answer for me. What is the nature of this tenderness between Briseis and Patroclus? How do we even begin to understand on an emotional level the kindness, the comfort of telling a woman who has just lost her husband and her brothers and her city, who is awaiting the certain fate of rape by their murderer, that the man who has killed her family will marry her?
The passage brings Briseis into focus not as an object of desire, a symbol of rank, but as a woman under the pressure of extreme coercion. A woman who, with dramatically limited choices, continues, somehow, to discriminate between what choices she does have, to understand her own experience as varied and complex, to notice kindness in her captors and imagine a future where she might be restored to a position of security.
It’s that open, unresolved space of Briseis’ agency that Emily Hauser and Pat Barker are interested in exploring in their recent novels about her and her fellow captives, For the Most Beautiful and The Silence of the Girls.
Novels that retell the story of the Trojan War from the perspective of one or more of its female characters are hardly a new phenomenon. The genre dates back to Chaucer’s Trolius and Criseyde and La Calprenéde’s Cassandre (or arguably even to Ovid’s Heroides). In more recent years, it’s been taken up by as varied a set of authors as Christa Wolf, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Margaret George. Hauser and Barker’s works fit squarely into this tradition, while innovating on it with their careful attention to the source texts and a combination of historical accuracy and educated guesswork. Both novelists (who each write in first person, centering Briseis’ voice as much as possible) are also deeply concerned with the empowerment and agency of their female characters, ensuring that telling their stories of their objectification doesn’t mean treating them like objects. Fascinatingly, however, they seem to have dramatically divergent ideas about what that project might entail.
Hauser and Barker are writing from different backgrounds and different positions in their careers. Hauser is an early career academic living the crossover dream, with both a lecturer position at the University of Exeter and a three-book deal for her first novel and its companions. Barker, on the other hand, is a Booker Prize-winning novelist at the height of her mature powers, who made a name for herself with devastating novels on combat trauma during the first world war. Hauser’s welcoming afterword, thoughtful (and unconventional) transliteration choices, and elegant website filled with background information invite readers to begin a journey to broader learning about the classical world, of which her novel, she seems to suggest, is only the beginning. Barker appears to have dove headfirst into the Iliad, bringing her own values and sensibilities along with her, and hasn’t come up for air yet; we can join her in her intense engagement with a text she clearly loves, but she has no desire to educate us.
In For the Most Beautiful, the issue of agency and empowerment seems to come down to this main idea: consent is paramount; consent has its own power. Men and gods in the novel might capture women, might torment them, might subject them to suffering and restraint, but there is a certain kind of respect and safety which is won by consent and its refusal.
Hauser’s sleazy Apollo sums up this principle in a conversation with her second protagonist Chryseis that left me, a person who has spent more of my life then I’d like to admit thinking about the sexual dynamics between mortals and gods, deeply perplexed:
Apulunas smiled, and I felt myself shiver with pleasure at the beauty of him. ‘If a mortal consents to come with us to our mountain home then, yes, we can touch them,’ he said. ‘But they must come willingly. My father Zeus is annoyingly firm on free will.’ He rolled his eyes.
The same rules seem to apply to the mortal men in the novel, at least when they threaten Briseis (the other women, alas for them, don’t have the same immunity). Briseis actually slaps Achilles in the face when he touches her, an act of courage that leads him to proclaim her his “match,” and assure her, “I shall not force you … No one should make love because they have to.” This promise is enough to start the deeply conflicted Briseis’ fall for him, and, when they do have sex, there is no question in Briseis’ or our own minds that she has made a choice to do so, despite her agonized internal conflict and the power differential between them. Later, when she is stolen by Agamemnon, her quick wits and bravado preserve her from rape at his hands, as she persuades the high king that he seriously risks Achilles’ wrath if he learns he has violated his treasured possession.
This is an enormously enticing fantasy, but it is a fantasy; I doubt that most enslaved women are going to walk away unscathed from the decision to slap their captor’s hand away. Maybe that’s not a problem; maybe there’s a particular value in telling a version of this story with an Achilles who respects consent (living under the rule of a Zeus who respects consent!). I have a hard time saying that there’s something wrong with a female character not experiencing rape. Hauser’s Briseis is smart and canny and brave and appealing to identify with. Her struggle between her love and desire for Achilles and her guilt at knowing he has destroyed her family makes for a dark and visceral romance, a little bit of Richard III and Queen Anne but without Richard’s penchant for sly manipulation.
But something in that fantasy doesn’t sit right with me; the ease with which Briseis evades sexual victimization feels alienating to all of us who have to live outside the fantasy and contend with the reality and pervasiveness of rape. (I want to note here that Hauser is not entirely averse to writing her characters as sexual assault survivors; although, as we’ve seen, Chryseis isn’t raped by Apollo, who is bound by the divine law of consent, she isn’t able to avoid victimization by Agamemnon. The two protagonists don’t really get the chance to compare notes about this, which is probably for the better.)
Narratives about women who avoid sexual assault through their power, skill, and strength of character are a staple of our time. Take a moment and imagine a scene of a heroine, held captive by a sexually predatory male villain, being momentarily threatened before saving herself with some act of fantastic resistance (spitting in his face! Pulling out a dagger conveniently hidden in her boot! Launching into a elaborate spinning kick!). You probably thought of a pretty invigorating example (mine was from Xena). Hauser’s Briseis relies on wits and sheer force of will where other modern heroines might use physical prowess, but the principle remains the same.
There is certainly a validation and empowerment to these stories, and a place for them in our lives. But sometimes their cultural weight leads us to lose track of something crucial: the women (fictional and not) who don’t manage to successfully resist are not any less strong, empowered, or possessing of agency.
Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls starts from that very idea. For her Briseis, sexual violence is not something that can be avoided, but it is something that can be endured. And resistance can take other forms, the most profound of which is also the simplest: survival.
Survival in the novel often relies on solidarity, an element which appears intermittently in Hauser’s telling in the form of the shifting bonds between Briseis and Chryseis, but which is truly central in The Silence of the Girls. The captive women may cope in different ways (the contrast between the bawdily cynical former sex worker Uza and Barker’s teenaged, terrified Chryseis is well-drawn and heartbreaking), but they come together for complaints, consolation, privately baked desserts, and mockery of their captors. None of them have been able to avoid rape, but we never get the sense that their humanity is in any way reduced by this fact: they are full people, adjusting to living within a traumatizing environment as people have and do every day.
Sexual violence is a fact in the lives of Barker’s characters; a miserable, ugly, and not particularly interesting fact. There’s a gritty mundanity to the book’s handling of its rape scenes. This is particularly visible in Briseis’ descriptions of her repeated rapes by Achilles, which are eerily detached on his part, sometimes mechanical and other times wordlessly passionate, with oedipal undertones (the son of Thetis moans “mother” when Briseis comes to his bed smelling like seawater). Achilles fascinates Briseis, but for reasons having more to do with his numinous divinity than with any kind of sexual attraction. Briseis suggests that she sees him more as an inhuman predator than as a possible romantic object:
Somebody once said to me: You never mention his looks. And it’s true, I don’t, I find it difficult. At that time he was probably the most beautiful man alive, as he was certainly the most violent, but that’s the problem. How do you separate a tiger’s beauty from its ferocity? Or a cheetah’s elegance from the speed of its attack? Achilles was like that — the beauty and the terror were two sides of a single coin.
As we see here, Briseis as narrator remains an astute and pointed analyst of her own experience, whose assessment of others is at its sharpest when she’s regarding her perpetrators. Both novels answer the question of Briseis’ hope for marriage with Achilles by showing her as making a choice between the two men who claim her (a choice she isn’t empowered to act on, but a choice nonetheless). While in Hauser’s reading this choice is about love, for Barker’s Briseis it is more related to the vigilant, finely calibrated attunement of a survivor making her way through ongoing danger.
The fate this Briseis most fears is to lose the tenuous protection that comes with being the concubine of a highly-placed lord, and with it access to food, clean clothes, and leisure time. The thoughtlessly sadistic Agamemnon has a history of tossing his concubines to his men when he’s tired of them, while Achilles, in all his terrifying objectification of Briseis, seems invested in her, and Patroclus’ baffling kindness acts as a buffer. So Barker challenges us to imagine the sentiments expressed in Briseis’ lamentation not as contradicting her victimization, but as complicating it, demonstrating the awful choices that survivors living within captivity and ongoing abuse constantly must make.
The difference between the two authors’ methods of writing Briseis’ agency into the Iliad can be seen perhaps most clearly in their handling of a famous moment between Agamemnon and Achilles. In Iliad 9, the “Embassy to Achilles,” one of the components of Agamemnon’s extravagant attempt at making amends is his claim that the original insult isn’t as bad as Achilles might have feared: he never once had sex with Briseis. It’s one of the moments where Briseis’ own silence is most visible - I at least can’t help but wonder what she thinks of this claim being made over her body.
In Hauser’s version, though the embassy itself is not shown, we’re implicitly offered access to a secret truth behind the text: the boast was true, and Briseis’ idea all along! She’s the one who warned Agamemnon not to anger Achilles by violating her.
In Barker’s, there is no such consolation; her Agamemnon rapes Briseis immediately, without thinking of the consequences. She is then present at the embassy, visibly offered up as a part of the gifts. When Agamemnon’s claim is recited, however, Briseis cannot bring herself to lie and confirm it as she is ordered. In her silence, she communicates the truth of her rape and dooms the embassy to failure.
For all their differences, each novel invites us to see Briseis’ agency even in a moment in The Iliad in which she seems most objectified, to look for the the thread of her choice running through the narrative. They are part of a larger conversation about what feminist readings in Classics might look like, what forms they can take.
As we continue to grapple with hard questions about sexual violence in the texts we study and the communities we live in, they enter into that conversation as well. We know that sexual violence was a pervasive reality for women in the classical world, taking forms at once alike to and different from the forms it takes now. As we try to envision a space in our academic and personal communities that centers the empowerment and agency of women present and past, alive and imagined, does that mean finding a way out of narratives of rape, looking for texts and stories and versions in which women’s consent can be respected and their refusals hold power? Does it mean centering narratives of sexual violence, and focusing on the continued endurance and strength of survivors, even if that means surrounding ourselves with rape narratives?
While this comparison is dreadfully unfair to Hauser (who, as I’ve mentioned, does indeed include survivors in her novels), the contrast between these two versions of Briseis cannot help but make me think of the persistent difficulty scholars in Classics have naming sexual violence in the texts we study, the way this elision ends up amounting to a repeated silencing and denial, as we read texts that depict rape scenes and are told (or tell ourselves) that this isn’t what we’re reading. This silencing has been exploded in recent years with new feminist scholarship, calls for trigger warnings in the classroom, and a renewed determination to face the ways that our denial of sexual violence in text mirrors our denial of it in life. Such activism is often interpreted as a demand to remove the offending materials from the syllabus entirely. Occasionally, to be fair, it is — but mostly it’s not. And, really, to do so would be another kind of silencing, a denial of the realities of the survivors who lived when the Iliad was first performed, and who read it in our classrooms now.
Imagining Briseis’ victimization challenges us: can we hold both sides of the coin, as Barker puts it?
So, Achilles, the hero of Greek epic, idol of everyone from Alexander the Great to half the readers of Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles, is a rapist. What do we do with that? Can we look at the sexual violence in the texts that we study straight on, rather than slanted, through squeezed-shut eyes? Can we hold the nuance and complexity and contradictions of gods and heroes who do glorious things and also horrific ones, in ways that are parallel to and different from the people in positions of power who continue in our times to exploit those around them? I think we can.
We talk a lot about the utility of bringing concepts from modernity to bear on classical texts; in this concept, that can include everything from PTSD to the very word rape — there was no single verb in Greek to describe the concept, which doesn’t mean they didn’t have it. But we have just as much to learn from the specificity of how the Greeks did describe sexual violence as we do from their absences. Narratives like that of Briseis represent the whole world of survival that can exist within captivity, and the potential for someone to have opinions and feelings, to make choices even while being victimized. Our difficulty tolerating the discomfort of that idea isn’t the Iliad’s fault; that one’s on us. The modern world has just as many prejudices and misconceptions about sexual violence as the ancient one; sometimes theirs get in the way, but other times ours do.
I saw The Silence of the Girls advertised recently as “The Trojan War in the age of #MeToo.” Sure. But the sexual violence was always there. Survivors have always been here. Looking at those narratives can be ugly, and uncomfortable; it demands things of us. So Achilles is a rapist: what next?
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Rachel Herzog is a social worker at the Crime Victims Treatment Center and an independent scholar. She holds a BA in Classics from Barnard College and a Masters in Social Work from New York University.
