Then there’s the courageous quiet dignity of Hecabe and the Trojan women, who’ve lost everything, waiting to be taken back to Greece as slaves.

There’s Creusa, running through the burning city of Troy in search of her husband and child. She decided her punishment was to die and went to battle with Achilles, the most famous warrior of them all, to achieve this. There’s a chapter on Penthesilea, an Amazon girl and fearless horsewoman, who accidentally killed her beloved sister Hippolyta with an arrow. Some stories show women displaying the sort of courage and heroism usually associated in the classical world with men. And for her to be misunderstood and chastised by her mother when she can’t help but whimper and shout out about what she sees. Then there’s Cassandra, whose oracular gifts may be familiar to us-but here we learn what it’s really like for her to see the future ahead, with all its pitfalls and tragedies. The older woman takes pity on Chryseis having to service the sexual needs of this older man and gives her a potion to put in his drink to curb his desire.

Here, the narrative focuses on the tender friendship between Briseis and the younger female captive, Chryseis, who’s first taken by Agamemnon. Like Briseis, the woman captured for Achilles’ friend Patroclus, and the subject of a major fall out in the Greek camp, when Agamemnon demanded her for himself. Some of these are women whose names we know, but whose voices we’ve never heard, appearing as they’ve done so far in stories written by men.

The main thing is, it’s the women who are telling the stories. We hear from nymphs and goddesses too, and not just that famous trio of Athene, Aphodite and Hera but minor players-or are they?-like Eris, the goddess of strife, and Calliope, the muse of epic poetry. There’s a real range of female voices: older noble women like Hecabe, Clytemnestra, Penelope, who have endured the war and its losses over years, the young and headstrong Chryseis, and poor tormented Cassandra. At the same time she has her characters spooling back to the origins of the war, their recollections including well-known stories like the Judgement of Paris, but also lesser known details, like his marriage to nymph Oenone. In a polyphony of female voices, Natalie Haynes describes the final sacking of Troy, with the subsequent capturing and enslavement of the Trojan women. This account of the Trojan War and its aftermath offers a refreshing and enlightened take on that war by telling the stories of the women who endured and lived through it, and the consequences for them.

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