A Thousand Ships

“Because the Spartan king had lost his queen, a hundred queens lost their kings.”

“Waiting is the cruellest thing I have ever endured. Like bereavement, but with no certainty.”

“He loses his wife so he stirs up an army to bring her back to him, costing countless lives and creating countless widows, orphans and slaves. Oenone loses her husband and she raises their son. Which of those is the more heroic act?”

“But this is a women's war, just as much as it is the men's, and the poet will look upon their pain - the pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges of the story, victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men - and he will tell it, or he will tell nothing at all. They have waited long enough for their turn.”

“When a war was ended, the men lost their lives. But the women lost everything else.”

“It does hurt, I whispered. It should hurt. She isn't a footnote, she's a person. And she - all the Trojan women - should be memorialised as much as any other person.”