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Cast portrait: Briseis
Reading Troy · cast portrait · released after Iliad XIX — Reconciliation
Reading Troy — cast portrait · Briseis
This portrait is released the day Briseis's arc peaks in the cycle, after Iliad XIX — Reconciliation. Read it as a coda — the full cross-cycle portrait, gathered after the moment.
Daughter of Briseus (or, in some accounts, the wife of Mynes, king of Lyrnessus). Taken by Achilles when he sacked her city in the war's tenth year; her husband and three brothers were killed in the sack; she was given to him as his geras, his prize of honour. By the time the Iliad opens she has been with him long enough that the army knows her as his bed-companion and that, when Patroclus is killed, the lament she gives over his body is the lament of a woman who had begun to make a life. Like Chryseis she is a patronymic — "daughter of Briseus" — and like Chryseis she occupies almost no narrative space relative to her structural importance. Unlike Chryseis, she does eventually speak.
In the Iliad
The plot machinery is brutally simple. In Book 1 Agamemnon, forced to give back Chryseis, declares that he will take a prize from one of the other chiefs — and chooses Briseis from Achilles' tent. He sends two heralds, Talthybius and Eurybates; they come in silence, fearing Achilles. Achilles will not touch them. He has Patroclus bring the girl out and turn her over. The narrative line is single-sentence: "he led forth Briseis of the fair cheeks, and gave her to them to lead away, and she went unwilling with them." For nineteen books the war is fought around her absence. Agamemnon's Book 9 embassy promises her return, untouched, "on oath that I have never gone up into her bed or coupled with her" — the public oath itself the proof that the seizure was an attack on Achilles' honour, not the appetite the seizure performed. Achilles refuses the offer. In Book 19, after the death of Patroclus, she is finally returned with the rest of the promised gifts. She comes back to Achilles' tent and sees Patroclus laid out for burial. She falls on the body and gives her one long speech in the poem — twenty-five lines, the lament Homer waited eighteen books to write. She remembers that her city was sacked and her husband and brothers killed; that she wept then; that Patroclus had told her, when he found her weeping, that he would persuade Achilles to make her his lawful wife and take her to Phthia and hold a wedding among the Myrmidons. He had been kind to her. Now she weeps for him as the man who would have made her a wife and not a slave. It is one of the Iliad's most quietly devastating moments — a captive woman naming, in her own voice, the future that has just been killed.
Across the cycle
The Iliad is her one substantial appearance. She is not in the Posthomerica (Achilles is killed before her status comes up again), not in the Aeneid, not in the Odyssey. The later tradition rescued her speech and made it the basis of a whole sub-genre. Ovid's Heroides 3 is a letter "from Briseis to Achilles" begging him to accept the embassy and take her back; she is by then a fully literate elegiac heroine. Twentieth-century reimaginings — Christa Wolf's Cassandra, Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls — give the Iliad's captive women the inner lives Homer left implicit. The scholarly debate behind those reimaginings is whether Homer is the patriarchal poet who reduced these women to property or the poet who, by giving Briseis those twenty-five lines over Patroclus's body, opened the door every later writer has gone through. The dossier here takes the second view. The Iliad has no time to make Briseis a protagonist, but in Book 19 it stops — for the length of one lament — and lets her speak, and what she says is that she had thought, briefly, that she might be loved. Nothing in the cycle complicates the captive-women theme more than that.
This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.