A Woman Slighted
Do you find me fair, poet? Am I not beautiful? I see from your eyes that you do as they follow me as I move. Is not my hair as golden as hers was, my breasts as full, my lips as red? My king thought so.
The queen of Sparta may have had the face to launch a thousand ships, and turn the Greek world upside down, but it was my thighs, my hot breath upon his royal staff that launched the greatest poem written.
Do you not know me, poet? Do you not remember?
Where would the tale of your Illiad be if I hadn't wrapped myself around Agamemnon so tightly that he demanded to have Achilles' bitch to make up for the coldness of his own bed? Ah, how he made me scream at night. I was in love, in lust, and in bliss, laying under his broad shoulders, wrapping my legs around his strong buttocks, free from all that hateful spinning and temple keeping my father had me to do.
I never wanted it to end.
And you, poet, you called me up, created me, used me for your tale and tossed me into the mud, and didn't even give me a real name. Just called me the daughter of Chryses, Chryseis, like I was nothing, and sent me back to my father to help him tend that tedious shrine.
But where would your precious story have gone if it hadn't been for me?
I hope you like eternity, poet. Persephone has told me I have the next three thousand years to pay you back.
A/N At the start of the Illiad, we learn that Agamemnon is asked to give up Chryseis, who was given to him as a prize of war and whom he admits is finer than his own wife, but he refuses to allow her father, a priest of Apollo, to ransom her. An oracle of Apollo then sends a plague sweeping through the Greek armies, and Agamemnon is forced to give Chryseis back in order to end it, so Agamemnon sends Odysseus to return Chryseis to her father. Agamemnon compensates himself for this loss by taking Briseis from Achilles, an act that offends Achilles, who refuses to take further part in the Trojan War. The Illiad is the story of what results from Achilles' refusal to fight.
The poet here, of course, is the creator of the Illiad, traditionally assigned to Homer