Introduction
Today's society tends to ignore the women of Troy in favor of heroes such as Achilles, Hector, or Odysseus. Homer and Vergil did not focus on the women in their stories. However, the women in The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid are important, and they deserve to have their stories told. In this Storybook, I want to tell the story of three women who survived the Trojan War--Helen, Cassandra, and Andromache.
Helen, who our society often blames for starting the Trojan War, had no choice in whether or not she went with Paris to Troy. Aphrodite promised Helen to Paris in return for naming Aphrodite the most beautiful goddess instead of Hera or Athena. However, there are some stories that say the real Helen was in Egypt and the Helen in Troy was an eidolon, or a copy, of her. She was powerless to stop the war that we so often lay at her feet. After the war, Menelaus recognized her and took her back to Sparta, where she lived the rest of her life.
Cassandra was the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, and sister of Hector. She was said to have had the gift of prophecy, but Apollo, who the Greeks credited with giving her the gift of prophecy, cursed her when she would not sleep with him so that no one would ever believe what she saw or what she warned them about. She told her family of the fall of Troy, the fate of Hector, and even the journey of Odysseus. The people of Troy, including her parents and her brothers, dismissed her warnings as laughable. After all, no one could get past the gates of Troy.
Andromache was the princess of Troy, the wife of Hector, and the mother of Astyanax, whom Neoptolemus murdered before taking her as a concubine. Andromache had three more sons with Neoptomalus before he died. She went on to become Queen of Epirus.
These women's stories are just as tragic as the stories we think of when we think of the Trojan War. The stories that follow are my attempts to do these women justice.