A Thousand Ships

In Greek epic tradition, Helen is the daughter of Zeus and Nemesis, the goddess of retribution. She is conceived in sexual violence, as Nemesis tries to escape Zeus, and her birth is cited as part of his plan to end the Age of Heroes. In Roman mythology, Helen is the daughter of Zeus and Leda, the mortal queen of Sparta, after Zeus rapes Leda in the form of a swan. In Homer’s Iliad, Helen is coded as potentially both divine and a hero and is depicted weaving a garment on which she crafts scenes of the warriors’ struggles on the battlefield.

Two pivotal scenes of her in the Iliad reflect her paradoxical role as agent of the war and instrument of the gods’ plans. In the first scene (in Book 3), as she arrives at the city walls to watch the battle unfold below, Trojan elders remark on her goddess-like beauty and express their ambivalence about her: They both understand that she is a prize worth fighting over and wish her to be gone from Troy, as her dangerous beauty will be their destruction. In the second scene, Aphrodite summons Helen to go to Paris, and Helen refuses. Furious, Aphrodite threatens that if her violent love for Helen becomes violent hate, she will suffer gruesome consequences; Helen silently complies, going to Paris. In the Odyssey, set after the Trojan war, Helen is back in Sparta with Menelaus, which she professes to want in the Iliad but which Menelaus casts doubt on in the Odyssey.

Haynes’s Helen retains some of her ambiguity. When Hecabe rages at her, Helen replies that her “grudge is with the goddess,” meaning Aphrodite, and Zeus and Themis are shown planning to use Helen to spark the war they seek to diminish the burden of the large population on Gaia (138). Hecabe, however, seems to reject Helen’s claim, arguing that there are always choices to be made. Like Hecabe, Calliope has “had enough of Helen,” who is denied a voice in A Thousand Ships.

Haynes portrays Themis as flighty and concerned with how she appears to Zeus. When he comes to her for advice, she seems surprised (“Advice for the king of the gods himself!”) and has to force herself not to feel flattered, since “[s]he preferred to think of herself as unruffled” (249). She notices Zeus looking at her feet and swings them a bit higher.

In Greek epic, Themis is the goddess of divine order and mother to Zeus’s daughters the Fates (Moirai) and the Hours (Horai, who are Peace, Good Order, and Justice). Themis’s presence indicates that the divine order will bet set right, as in the beginning of Iliad Book 24, when the gods confer over how to address Achilles’s impious desecration of Hector’s body. In this instance, Themis calls the gods to assembly, and they set a plan in motion that leads to the moment of reconciliation between Achilles and Hector, after which the warrior returns his enemy’s body to his father.

In the Iliad, Thetis is a sea nymph forced to marry a mortal king, Peleus, and mother to the greatest Achaean warrior, Achilles. Other Greek texts, some fragmentary, allude to a prophecy that Thetis’s children will be greater than their father. Because of the threat to stability this could represent with a son, Themis advises Zeus to neutralize the threat by forcing Thetis to marry a mortal. Thus, the stability of Zeus’s reign comes at the cost of Achilles’s mortality. The marriage of Peleus and Thetis is also cited as part of Zeus’s plan to initiate the Trojan war. Like Helen, Achilles is conceived in violence and implicated in a divine plan for destruction.

In Book 1 of the Iliad, Thetis asks Zeus if ever she has done him a service for him now to honor her son, who has been diminished by Agamemnon. Zeus recognizes that submitting to Thetis’s request will bring strife to Olympus, since other gods (especially Hera) will not agree with his plan to do so, but he consents anyway because he is concerned to show Thetis respect. Throughout the Iliad, Thetis grieves deeply that her son must die. She informs him of two prophecies about him. In one, he is granted a long but unremarkable life. In the second, he dies at Troy but is immortalized in epic song. By refusing to fight, Achilles seems to have chosen the former, but unfolding events make it impossible for him to stay out of battle. He returns to avenge the death of Patroclus, his beloved companion. As Haynes reports, in the Odyssey, Achilles seems to regret his choice, but its framing in the Iliad casts doubt on whether Achilles had any choice in the matter.

Haynes’s portrayal of Thetis is drawn from a range of sources that provide alternate variants about Achilles. The idea that Thetis attempted to “keep him safe when the war came” by bathing him in the river Styx is believed to be a later, possibly Hellenistic or Roman, variation (107). In Homer, Achilles is fully mortal and capable of being wounded. Thetis is portrayed as a grieving mother whose son is weaponized by the gods not, as Haynes presents her, shamed by her son’s preference to be “a living peasant than a dead hero” (107).