The prize
Briseis is the woman Achilles receives when the Achaeans sack Lyrnessus, and she becomes the token of his honour. When Agamemnon must return Chryseis, he takes Briseis to show that he is not less than Achilles. The quarrel that follows is not about the woman as a person but about what her transfer means: a king can take a hero’s prize without fighting for it.
The Iliad rarely gives captives a voice, and Briseis’s silence for most of the poem is part of its subject. She is treated as property, and the poem shows the consequences of that treatment for the men who own her.
The lament
In Iliad XIX Briseis returns to Achilles and sees Patroclus dead. She laments him because he was kind to her and promised to make her Achilles’ wife, and because her own husband and brothers were killed when Achilles took her city. Her speech is short and devastating: it places the heroic quarrel inside the life of a woman who has already lost everything.
She then prepares Patroclus’s body with the other women. The poem does not follow her after the Iliad. Her fate is one of the many silences that the epic’s ending leaves open.
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