The Women of Troy is published by Penguin (£18.99). The frightened and silenced girls of the first book are well on the way to being formidable women by the time the second book starts. In the end the title remained and I was particularly pleased about that when I started work on a sequel: The Women of Troy. And yet women planning a night out are happy to call themselves girls. “Girls” is a contentious word when applied to females past the age of puberty and, in many situations, referring to a woman as a girl is an insult. The Silence of the Girls came right at the beginning, before I began to write, but it wasn’t universally welcomed, particularly in America. Sometimes you get a really good title with no book attached to it at all. But it can be much later, leaving publisher and author exchanging lists of possibilities – a mildly demoralising business. For me it’s often towards the end of the first draft. Titles come at all stages in the writing of a book. When you look back on all the really difficult men you’ve known in your life, it’s surprising how many of them had a goddess for a mother. And there was another reason she had to be there. He comes from the far north, from the edges of the Greek world, and he occupies a space somewhere between the human and the divine, the land and the sea – and that derives from his mother. I’d have liked to leave the gods out altogether, but Thetis was a special case because it’s impossible to understand Achilles without her. In the end my main difficulty was his mother: the sea goddess Thetis.

The rules for writing historical fiction simply don’t apply. Once you see Achilles in this way, it becomes a lot easier to connect with him. This is an accurate description of Achilles’s actions after the death of Patroclus. In this frenzy prisoners may be tortured and killed and dead bodies mutilated. Shay saw a resemblance between Achilles’s single-minded quest for revenge after the death of his friend Patroclus and the berserker state which many of his patients had experienced – a state in which fear, the instinct for self-preservation, restraint, empathy and compassion all drop away and the man becomes a killing machine.

Shay, in treating Vietnam veterans with PTSD, drew on his knowledge of the Iliad to deepen his understanding of their condition. Many years before, I’d read a book by an American psychiatrist, Jonathan Shay, called Achilles in Vietnam. Though Briseis was always going to be the dominant character, I still had to find a way to write about Achilles – a daunting prospect, since he’s one of the great characters of world literature. And characters from myth can step into our world – history is always then myth is now – whether now is the England of Christopher Marlowe or 21st-century Britain. You’re allowed anachronisms, like the English rugby songs that Achilles’s men sing after dinner. So the rules for writing historical fiction simply don’t apply. Agamemnon, Achilles, Hector, Priam, Helen – none of them existed. She’s not a historical figure at all, none of them is. Would an elite woman in the late bronze age have sounded like that? Possibly not, but then Helen is so much more than that. I think one reviewer was a bit shocked by how modern Helen in particular sounds.

Queen to sex slave in less than 48 hours: change doesn’t come any more rapid or dramatic than that.īriseis has a modern voice, as do all the other women. That night, against her will, she sleeps in Achilles’s bed. He’d killed 60 men in the assault on the city, including Briseis’s husband and all four of her brothers. A day later, the army awarded her to him as his “prize of honour” for his courage in the battle. She was a married woman, queen of Lyrnessus, when Achilles sacked her city and took her captive with all the other women and girls. Why did I choose Briseis? Because of all the women mentioned in the Iliad, her fate is the most dramatic.

Iliad scansion