Briseis

Briseis comes to Achilles as booty. The Iliad's catalogue of ships says he sits idle by his ships in anger over her, after he sacked Lyrnessus and Thebe and killed Mynes and Epistrophus (Iliad 2.688-694). Agamemnon later calls her the daughter of Briseus (Iliad 9.130-132). Briseis herself says that Achilles killed her husband and sacked her city, and that her brothers died too (Iliad 19.282-302). The lines checked here do not name that husband.

Her seizure opens the quarrel. A plague forces Agamemnon to give up his own captive, and he announces that he will take Briseis in her place (Iliad 1.182-187). He sends two heralds to the hut of Achilles, who tells them they are not to blame and orders his companion to bring the girl out (Iliad 1.318-348). Homer says the woman went with them unwilling. Achilles then withdraws from the war, and the rest of the poem follows from that decision.

The embassy of Book 9 shows how Achilles and Agamemnon each speak of her. Agamemnon offers to return Briseis with gifts and swears a great oath that he never went up into her bed (Iliad 9.128-134). Achilles refuses. He says that every sound-minded man loves and cares for his own wife, and that he loved Briseis with all his heart, though she was a captive of his spear (Iliad 9.335-343). The poem lets her be a prize and a wife in the same scene.

Her one speech comes in Book 19. Agamemnon sends her back to Achilles and swears again that he never laid a hand on her (Iliad 19.256-265). She finds Patroclus dead and cries out over him. She says he was always kind to her, and that he promised to make her the wedded wife of Achilles and to carry her to Phthia for the marriage feast (Iliad 19.282-302). The last mention of her is in Book 24, where she lies beside Achilles in his hut (Iliad 24.675-676).

The Iliad ends before Achilles dies, so it gives Briseis no later life. Quintus Smyrnaeus fills part of the gap in Book 3 of the Posthomerica, a Greek epic written long after Homer (Posthomerica 3). There she mourns the dead Achilles, tears her own skin, and says no earlier loss compares with this one. She fears that another Achaean will carry her to Sparta or Argos.

Briseis stays a minor figure in the war's wider story. She belongs to the group of myths on the Trojan Cycle page, and her only use in the poem is as the object of a quarrel between two men. The sources checked here give her no children by Achilles, and Apollodorus names his son as Neoptolemus, born to Deidamia on Scyros (Library 3.13.8).