Interview: Natalie Haynes, Author of A Thousand Ships : NPR npr.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from npr.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Iliad
So Homer tells us in the Iliad we think of it as the great Trojan War narrative, and it is but actually it tells us about two months of the war, which lasts for 10 years. And that s the story that we have in the
Odyssey, which is a much more expansive story, then we get very many more female characters. So much so that in the 19th century, one slightly impish suggestion was that a woman must have written the
Odyssey because no man could have written all these plausible female characters. I can t imagine who they d been reading that gave them that idea, but obviously I totally would agree.