Briseis

• 1. Introduction

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  Briseis, also known as Hippodameia, is a woman at the centre of the Iliad, and yet she is never the one who decides anything. Homer's epic sets its plot in motion with a quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, and her role as a status symbol sits at the heart of that dispute. The two men argue over her as if she were a trophy. Who was she before the Greeks claimed her? Was she a wife, a possession, or something in between? What did she say when the poem finally let her speak? And how did poets across many centuries reshape her, even changing her name and her loyalties?

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• 2. Lyrnessus Falls

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  Briseus was her father, and the tradition leaves her mother unnamed. She had three full brothers, and all three died when the city of Lyrnessus was sacked.

  Mynes, a son of the king of Lyrnessus, was her husband until the Achaeans attacked. In the Iliad, Achilles led the assault during the Trojan War and killed several men of her family. Some tellings leave her husband unnamed, but they agree that Achilles killed him.

  In the Mycenaean Greek society the Iliad describes, a captive woman was a slave who could be traded among the warriors. Briseis was handed to Achilles as a war prize. John Tzetzes offers another route, in which Palamedes abducted her and Achilles received her from the spoils the Achaeans had gathered. Either way, her new owner was a man who had just destroyed her household. Barely any time passed before the events of the Iliad began, and a second man would soon demand her.

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• 3. A Prize Taken

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  Chryseis was Agamemnon's own slave, and in Book 1 of the Iliad the god Apollo forced him to give her up. Agamemnon demanded Briseis as compensation. That demand led to a quarrel with Achilles. Briseis was delivered to Agamemnon, and Achilles withdrew from the fighting for a long stretch.

  Inside his tent, Achilles seethed. He was furious that Agamemnon had dared to insult his honor and his standing among the Greeks by stripping away a prize that had been awarded to him. His absence had disastrous consequences for the Greek side. Agamemnon later made lavish offers of treasure, women, and even the return of Briseis. Achilles refused every one of them.

  Only the death of Patroclus brought Achilles back to the battle. By then he no longer minded Briseis, nor anything tied to the quarrel, so Odysseus had to persuade him to take her back from Agamemnon. Agamemnon swore an oath that he had never had sex with her. In Book 9, though, Achilles had spoken of her in very different terms.

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• 4. Wife or Slave

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  In Book 9, Odysseus, Ajax, and Phoenix visit Achilles to negotiate her return, and he calls her his wife, or his bride. He says he loved her as much as any man loves his wife. He even invokes Menelaus and Helen when he protests that his wife was taken from him.

  Book 19 contrasts sharply with that domestic picture, because Briseis herself speaks. She is mourning Patroclus, and she wonders what will happen to her without his help. She says Patroclus had promised to persuade Achilles to make her his legal wife instead of his slave.

  Also in Book 19, Achilles gives a rousing speech to the Achaean soldiers, publicly declaring that he will set aside his anger with Agamemnon. During it he says he wishes Briseis were dead, and he laments that she ever came between the two men. Those words clash with what he said in Book 9. Her hope of becoming a legal wife had rested on Patroclus, who was already dead when she spoke.

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• 5. Imagined Faces

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  Homer tells us very little about how Briseis looked. Like most minor characters in the Iliad, she receives only the standard metrical epithets the poet uses for a great beauty, and her beauty is compared to that of the goddesses. Everything else is left to the audience's imagination.

  About two millennia later, the Byzantine poet John Tzetzes filled in the portrait. In his verses she is tall and white, with black curly hair, lovely cheeks and nose, a bright smile, and big eyebrows. He adds that she was well-behaved.

  Dares the Phrygian, probably writing in the 5th century AD, pictures a different woman. His Briseis is small and blonde, with soft yellow hair and eyebrows joined above lovely eyes. He calls her charming, friendly, modest, ingenuous, and pious.

  Malalas returns to a tall, fair woman, well dressed, with close-knit eyebrows, a good nose, and big eyes with kohl on the lashes. Her curly hair is worn long at the back, and she has a ready smile. Malalas, who supplied those kohl-lined lashes, is also the writer who records how her life ended.

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• 6. After Achilles

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  When Achilles died, Briseis was still with him, and his death plunged her into great grief. According to later authors, she soon took it upon herself to prepare him for the afterlife.

  Robert Bell wrote that after the fall of Troy she "was given to one of Achilles's comrades-at-arms just as his armour had been". Malalas gives her a quieter end. In his account, she died from illness. Medieval romances would not let her story close so plainly. They gave her a new father, new lovers, and a new name.

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• 7. Many Names

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  The Roman de Troie, a medieval romance, renames her Briseida and makes her the daughter of Calchas. In this tradition she loves and is loved by Troilus, and then by Diomedes.

  Over time she was confused with Chryseis, and the character developed further under variations of that name. That path leads to Chaucer's Criseyde and then to Shakespeare's Cressida.

  Ovid's Heroides, made up of letters from mythological heroines to their heroes, is among the older works that portray her. A papyrus drawing, possibly of Ancient Egyptian origin, shows her being abducted by Agamemnon's heralds, Talthybius and Eurybates.

  In 2018, The Silence of the Girls retold the Iliad from her point of view and focused on her life with Achilles. It gives her the kind of voice Homer allowed her in Book 19.

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