Contrasting ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Silence of the Girls’: Women as Objects in Patriarchal Status Struggles of Men
How have our societies changed since ancient times, and how have they not?
Warning: This article includes discussion of war, rape and assault
The ancient epic poem The Iliad is set in Mycenaean Greece and tells the fictional story of Achilles, son of the goddess Thetis, the king of the Myrmidons, in the last few days of the Trojan War. While the main thrust of The Iliad is the war, the story also describes the power struggles of the main protagonists — the various Greek kings and leaders — against a backdrop of intrigue, fighting, rape and plunder.
The Silence of the Girls is a modern novel by Pat Barker, based on The Iliad and the Trojan War, but which moves the lens from the male characters to focus on the story of a Trojan queen, Briseis, taken after the fall of Lyrnessus as bedslave to Achilles.
Both The Iliad and The Silence of the Girls explore the egos and pride of the male ‘heroes’ and the lives of women during times of war, but whereas Homer largely objectifies and ignores the women, Pat Barker attempts to explore the emotions and struggles of women during times of war and gives a voice to female characters who previously had none. In particular, The Silence of the Girls sheds light on the way that the Greek men treat their Trojan slaves, the way that women are used by men as symbols of status and glory and how women are used as objects in a patriarchal society.
The objectification of women
Objectification is the action of degrading someone to the status of an object, not acknowledging the person as a human with emotions and treating them as if they were an ownable commodity. We see this happen frequently in The Iliad, as Greek society saw the ownership of slaves as normal and slavery was universally accepted in Greece at the time. Aristotle even describes slaves as ‘a piece of property that breathes’. The objectification, not only of the slave girls but of all the women in The Iliad, is clear in both texts. In The Iliad, Homer is more subtle about the dehumanisation of the women, as they are not the focus of the book. The way women are freely given as prizes and exchanged between the Greek men as easily as cattle is evident in book 23 at Patroclus’s funeral games, where a women is listed as a prize along with cooking utensils and animals “For these he (Achilles) brought out prizes from the ships — cauldrons and tripods, horses, mules and fine head of cattle, grey iron and well-girdled women” (lines 259–260). Homer glosses over the mistreatment of the Trojan women, likely so as to portray the Greeks in a better light, as he himself was a Greek performing his poem to a Greek audience.
Pat Barker, however, gives a voice and a name to the woman given as a prize. We are told in The Silence of the Girls that the woman is Iphis and Barker describes, from the perspective of Briseis, the emotions on Iphis’s face as she is dragged off by Diomedes, who wins her: “as the crowd opened up before them she turned and looked back, straight at me: one last, agonising glance, and she was gone” (p.237). The Silence of the Girls doesn’t shy away from the brutalities inflicted on its female characters and directly describes the scene where the women are doled out to different men as objects. It restores their humanity through vivid descriptions of their emotions. The fact that Homer doesn’t question or discuss the objectification of the women in his story shows the patriarchal system of his time and the way that women were used as objects to support it.
Women as victims of war — an ongoing issue
The way in which Briseis and her fellow Trojan women are enslaved makes them a special kind of victim of war because, unlike the men and children of Lyrnessus, they survive the downfall of the city and are forced to endure the hardship of slavery. It is perhaps due to the patriarchal system of Homer’s society that only women are sometimes kept alive. This issue is very pertinent now, given the current treatment of women in Afghanistan by the Taliban and accusations of war crimes, such as rape, possibly committed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine. The most recent example is the horrific incident in Manipur, India where two women were paraded through the streets naked and assaulted as a result of violent ethnic clashes.
We see in both The Iliad and The Silence of the Girls, the ways in which the voices of women are silenced by men in times of war. In book six of The Iliad, when Andromache gives sound battle advice to Hector, he responds “don’t distress yourself too much” (bk6 line 487) and “war is men’s business” (bk6 line 492), dismissing her on the subject. The way he delivers these patronising lines places Andromache beneath him and again a parallel can be drawn between the disempowerment and control of women in Mycenaean Greece and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. This is perhaps why the Iliad is still so relevant in the modern day: the way war affects women still is the same today as it was in 600 BCE.
Most hearing The Iliad read out in Homer’s time would have recognised the advice as good and sensible and it’s easy to perceive Andromache as a strong female character, from her willingness to watch the war from the battlements, her description of the terrible events she’s has already been through and the way she refuses to shy away from the topic of death and the destruction of Troy. But even a female character written as stronger than most, is silenced by the patriarchy. The very fact that Andromache is a woman who speaks is unusual in The Iliad: even Briseis, a catalyst for much of the plot, delivers very few lines, and Chryseis doesn’t speak at all. Homer literally silences all the women, preventing them from telling their individual stories. Homer’s women also lack action; they are either enslaved or sacrificed and are given as war prizes because Greek society was one of male dominance over women.
In The Silence of the Girls, a book which gives a voice to the women of The Iliad, Barker opens the story with a description of the quiet, agonising wait of Briseis and the other Trojan women in the Citadel, as they anticipate the fall of Lyrnessus to the Greeks. Briseis is forced to quietly wait, fearing for her life and the lives of those she loves while her brothers die on the battlefield. She is rendered helpless and has to silently go along with what the Greeks want as she has no means of her own to run or fight. However by giving her a voice, Barker subtly fights back against the idea that women are objects and inferior to men.
In The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker also uses Homeric style similes to show how Briseis is forced to be silent and inferior to Achilles. “Achilles was the hawk. I was his slave to do what he liked with; I was completely in his power. If he’d woken up one morning and decided to beat me to death, nobody would have intervened. Oh, I watched him alright, I watched him like a mouse” (p.39). The imagery of a hawk and a mouse in this passage, shows not only the dynamic between the two as master and slave, like predator and prey, but also displays the way that Briseis must be quietly subservient to Achilles. It also displays the dangerous power imbalance between the two, that Achilles could suddenly turn on Briseis and kill her if he chose to. This Homeric simile mirrors those of The Iliad and by using this technique Barker can contrast the differences between the two books, and how differently they present women.
Language and sexism
Barker also includes anachronisms that can be jarring to show the Greeks’ objectification of women. Briseis notes that the Greek soldiers argue over whether King Menelaus should simply execute his wife, Helen, or “fuck her first, then kill her” (p.201). Barker also portrays the Greeks singing obscene drinking songs about Helen and her fate: “When she’s dead but not forgotten, Dig her up and fuck her rotten” (p.202). The crude language used to describe Helen shows how the Greek soldiers disregard Helen as a person, despite the fact that she is also a free Greek unlike the Trojan slaves. The vulgarity of the curse words and talk of death and sex display Greek attitudes towards women, portraying them as objects they can kill or rape at their will.
Another such example is when Achilles claims Briseis as his property, after picking her from a line up at the market when she and the other Trojan women were paraded like cattle and divided among their Greek captors. He does so by saying, “Cheers, lads. She’ll do” (p22). Moments like these that clash awkwardly with the more classical and poetic sections of prose, force readers to compare the misogyny of ancient Greece with the misogyny of the present. The drinking songs of the Greek soldiers could be a reflection of the sexist drinking songs and chants still used today, for example among American university fraternities. The way that Achilles tells his men that Briseis “will do” could be seen to reflect “locker room talk” that has come to light in recent years, for example from Donald Trump, who was recently found guilty of sexual assault. Furthermore, as Briseis recounts the story of how Helen had been raped as a child, Briseis tell us “Of course I believed her. It was quite a shock to me, later, to discover nobody else did” (p.126). This moment seems to reflect directly the “#metoo” movement, which gained traction after the Harvey Weinstein scandal in the years preceding the release of The Silence of the Girls.
The spread of misogynistic language and conversation also spreads the ideas of toxic masculinity, whereby men are taught to display a form of masculinity which is harmful to both women and themselves. In The Silence of the Girls, after the death of Patroclus, Achilles thinks “can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t play the lyre and now, apparently, can’t fuck… Useless” (p.241), the emphasis on the words “can’t fuck” shows how much Achilles’s masculinity and status rely on his sexual exploits and the fact that he now “can’t fuck” makes him “useless” as a man.
Bodies and pretty faces of women are objectified by men
Women’s beauty being held by men as objects can be seen in Helen’s beauty, which has come from Aphrodite: Helen’s beauty keeps her safe from abuse and criticism in Troy. The men and elders of the city are mesmerised by Helen’s looks, and understand why Paris took her, “and cannot criticize him” (bk3 line 165). Another example of this objectification appears in Book 14 when Aphrodite helps Hera to seduce her husband by allowing her to use a magic girdle filled with deceptive sexual power. Aphrodite has found a way to compete in the patriarchal universe but only by prostituting her own body, or the bodies of other women, to the desires of men. Similarly, Briseis and the other Trojan women in The Silence of the Girls can only find some level of power and security by prostituting their bodies to the Greek soldiers in the hopes that they might give birth to a boy and subsequently be married to make the child legitimate. This would give the woman the security of her own home and husband to take care of her, as we see in the case of Tecmessa, who marries Diomedes. But it is not the choice of the women: they are raped by the Greeks either way.
This is further evidenced by Barker when King Priam arrives to collect his son’s body. Priam kisses Achilles hands in exchange for Hector’s body and remarks that he does what no man has done before, “kiss the hands of the man who killed my son.” Briseis, who does not have the power to resist, standing and watching, thinks: “And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers” (pg.267). The difference here is that Priam has a choice and has decided to kiss Achilles’s hands: Briseis has no choice. The women have their autonomy and choices taken away from them and, by proxy, the men remove any aspect of their person that they don’t like or agree with, also seen in the way that Nestor tells the women in The Silence of the Girls to “forget your previous lives” (pg.20). But within this Briseis finds a small rebellion that she can carry out, remembering her past life and who she is, fighting against the harsh patriarchal system that seeks to put her down. The women of The Iliad were not allowed to define their womanhood: their femininity was treated as a commodity in a male-dominated society. But Pat Barker illustrates the struggle of women to remove themselves from those patriarchal narratives.
As Catherine Lanone points out, “Briseis does not give up and yield to passivity, she does not deny that she is a victim either (unlike Tecmessa), and she knows that she cannot escape or change her circumstances (she tries to hide with Hector’s body when Priam’s chariot leaves, but she realizes that this is useless and slips back into the camp).” Briseis, by working within the boundary conditions to rebuild her sense of identity, works against the silencing of her voice in whatever small ways she can, slowly pushing the boundaries. Briseis takes an ambiguous position, which is symbolised in the novel, by her ability to sneak to the beach and let the waves wash her, “clean, or as clean as I would ever be again” (chapter 27)
How the patriarchy is supported by men and women
In The Silence of the Girls, Barker draws attention to the way the patriarchy and men use women as a show of their worth and to support the unfair system which oppresses women but values men, based on superficial traits. The ancient Greek concept of Kleos (more recognisable in its singular form ‘kudos’, from which the English word stems), often translated as ‘reputation’ or ‘glory’, is the renown and honour that a hero receives for performing heroic deeds. Kleos can be gained in many ways, a common display of Kleos being ownership of lots of property (often won through fighting in battle) of which female slaves were part. This concept of kleos is the scale by which all ancient Greek heroes are judged, scoring their masculine value in relation to how much kleos they have achieved. In book nine of The Iliad, when Achilles is approached by Agamemnon’s embassy to try to convince him back to the battlefield, Achilles refuses the offer of Briseis as a bargaining chip, saying “I loved that girl with all my heart … but now he has snatched my prize from my arms and cheated me, don’t let him try his tricks on me again. I know him too well. He won’t win me over”. This shows how Achilles’s anger is not directly about Agamemnon having taken Briseis, but about the honour and kleos that he lost as a result of losing Briseis. Achilles doesn’t want Briseis, he wants his kleos. In The Silence of the Girls we see this same scene from Briseis’s perspective: similarly, Achilles doesn’t care about Briseis, he explains that what he really wants is “him (Agamemnon) here. I want an apology, I want him to admit he was wrong.” What Achilles cares about is the Kleos he has lost, Briseis is just a symbol of that. The endless pursuit of the Greek and Trojan men for status and power through women is a result of the toxic patriarchal setup of their society and the way it pits men against each other for power and drives them to use women to achieve it.
The cause of the Trojan war further supports this point as it is the result of the dishonour brought to Menelaus from having his wife, Helen, taken by Paris. This scenario is similar to the one displayed by Agamemnon’s removal of Briseis from Achilles, and encapsulates the way in which the men of The Iliad use women as a means of status and kleos. Being possessions, women are only valued for their purity and looks. The way in which Helen and Briseis are considered more worthy because of their looks and social status says something about the way that the ancient Greeks viewed, valued and ‘ranked’ them. In The Silence of the Girls, Briseis even tells us directly, that once they were taken by the Greeks “nothing mattered now except youth, beauty and fertility”(p.46).
In The Iliad, men fight over women and possess women because men are in control. Barker illustrates how Polyxena, the youngest daughter of Priam and Hecuba is captured and gagged by the Greeks, and then at the end of the Trojan War, she is sacrificed on Achilles’ tomb. The girl’s gagged mouth evokes a horrifying image for the silenced voices that paints the terror and sorrow suffered by the victims of war, Barker writes “The deep gash in her throat made her look as if she had two mouths, both silent” and the way her “cries” are described as those of a “sacrificial bull” further illustrates how Polyxena, and all the women, are treated as animals and objects for the pleasure and power of men, as Catherine Lanone says in paragraph 21 of her paper “Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls and the State of Exception”
Conclusion
The introduction of Pat Barker’s novel The Silence of the Girls starts with an epigraph from The Human Stain by Philip Roth, in which he argues that all modern European literature stems from The Iliad, a story about “a fight.. over a woman. A girl really… A girl abducted in war.”, a “typical barroom brawl”. The Iliad has been hugely influential on modern literature, from its characters and plot to its metaphors and descriptions, and continues to be read and studied throughout the western world for that reason. Though The Iliad is a great piece of ancient literature the story takes place against a backdrop of patriarchy and misogyny, where women were seen as second class citizens. This could cause issues such as the objectification and silencing of women and toxic masculinity, which were pervasive in the past, to continue to be present today in our modern literature and media. However, new, feminist adaptations of Homer’s ancient stories, like Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, have shed a light on the female voices that were pushed aside in the original stories and tell of their suffering and hardships, prompting change and pushing for a new narrative. Where Homer silences the women of his story, and uses them only to quietly support the men or as objects to be fought over by the men, Pat Barker empowers the women by giving them a voice with which they can express feelings and emotions and determine their fate.
