69 pages • 2 hours read
Natalie HaynesA Thousand Ships
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Character Flaws
A recurring motif across the vignettes is the cruelty, barbarity, and/or self-absorption of the Greeks, men and women, mortal and immortal.
Haynes portrays the Greek warriors as weak and arrogant men who have no honor and believe in nothing. They are all “equally bad,” as Chryseis says, and have no redeeming qualities (78). Achilles delights in viciously murdering as many men as possible. Agamemnon is selfish, slovenly, and cruel, sacrificing his own daughter to ensure Artemis’s favor and good sailing winds. Menelaus is a drunken bore who razes a city because his wife runs away from him. Odysseus preys on the vulnerable and victimized to ensure his own goals are achieved. All the heroes who have been sung about in ancient epic are ruthless exploiters and butchers, acting only in pursuit of their own ends, which are to inflict as much cruelty, pain, and destruction as possible. The bard is an “idiot” who celebrates war without understanding its true toll (41).
Greek women and goddesses overall tend to be portrayed as either flighty or cruel. Athene, Hera, and Aphrodite fight pettily over the golden apple that has no value other than what it reflects about the one who possesses it. Themis is overly concerned with her appearance, as is Iphigenia, who is so preoccupied with the image she is projecting that she does not notice she is being led to slaughter until she is almost upon the altar. Clytemnestra’s blood-thirsty desire for vengeance, though motivated by her daughter’s murder, will lead to more bloodshed in future. Helen takes no responsibility for her actions, blaming the gods for bringing her to Troy and plotting the war. Penelope, who seems to be an exception, spends most of her time complaining about Odysseus’s travels, angry that he has humiliated her.
The Golden Apple
The golden apple inscribed with “Te kalliste” (“to the most beautiful”) symbolizes Helen and, more generally, the excuses men use to justify war (146). Haynes’s characters continually note that Helen leaving Sparta provided a pretext for war, but the Greeks are violent and destructive by nature and thus would have found a reason. Helen is merely a beautiful object for them to fight over. None of these men are shown to value, understand, or love Helen in particular. They wish to possess her because of how she reflects on the man who claims her, like the goddesses with the golden apple. Even Calliope expresses herself tired of Helen.
When Themis and Zeus settle on war as the best option for culling the population and lightening Gaia’s load, they do not require a complex plan, merely a provocation. The nature of men and gods will make the outcome inevitable.
The Bard
The bent old bard who Calliope addresses in A Thousand Ships represents epic tradition that centers male narratives and marginalize women. In the first chapter, Calliope mocks the bard who “like all poets […] thinks only of himself,” describing him as “old,” with “sloped” shoulders, and a spine that “has begun to curve at the top” (1). His reduced physical state represents the failing tradition of epic poetry. Like the bard who Calliope threatens to silence if he does not understand the story she is telling him, epic tradition must evolve and improve or die out. The epic that Calliope offers to the bard is A Thousand Ships, a new and improved version of war epic.
The Gold Brooch
As Calliope watches the bard invoke her in the first chapter, she notices the brooch he is wearing: “a beautiful gold brooch, tiny leaves wrought into a gleaming knot” (2). The brooch indicates to Calliope that “someone has rewarded him handsomely for his poetry,” and “he has prospered” (2). The gold and the leaves (perhaps evocative of laurel leaves associated with victors at competitive games) represent the success and acclaim that poets and epic have achieved. Calliope decides that she will require he surrender this brooch to her if he wants her help. The brooch represents the muse’s refusal to feed the success and acclaim of epic unless it surrenders to her demand that the tradition evolves to be more correct.
