Showing results for "The Women" in Ancient

Troy has fallen. The Greeks have won their bitter war. They can return home victors, loaded with their spoils: their stolen gold, stolen weapons, stolen women. All they need is a good wind to lift their sails. But the wind does not come. The gods have been offended - the body of Priam lies desecrated, unburied - and so the victors remain in limbo, camped in the shadow of the city they destroyed, pacing at the edge of an unobliging sea.

The great city of Troy is under siege as Greek heroes Achilles and Agamemnon wage bloody war over a stolen woman. In the Greek camp, another woman is watching and waiting: Briseis. She was a queen of this land until Achilles sacked her city and murdered her husband and sons. Now she is Achilles' concubine: a prize of battle. Briseis is just one among thousands of women backstage in this war - the slaves and prostitutes, the nurses, the women who lay out the dead - all of them voiceless in history.

Continuing the story of the captured Trojan women as they set sail for Mycenae with the victorious Greeks, this novel centres on the fate of Cassandra -- daughter of King Priam, priestess of Apollo, and a prophet condemned never to be heeded. (When she refuses to have sex with Apollo, after he has kissed her, granting her the gift of true prophecy, he spits in her mouth to make sure she will never be believed.)

While the rest of Greece mourns for the war that has taken their husbands away, Clytemnestra fears the day it will bring hers back. When her husband willingly sacrifices their eldest daughter to appease the Gods, Clytemnestra vows to do whatever it takes to protect her remaining children. But in doing so she faces losing them altogether.

Euripides's play follows the fates of the women of Troy after their city has been sacked, their husbands killed, and their remaining families taken away as slaves. It serves as an anti-war narrative as it highlights the suffering of the women left behind. The tragedy also calls attention to how women were treated as commodities in the past by showing how they were divided among the remaining men as spoils of war.

When a daughter is born to the King of Arcadia, she brings only disappointment. Left exposed on a mountainside, the defenceless infant Atalanta is left to the mercy of a passing mother bear and raised alongside the cubs under the protective eye of the goddess Artemis. Swearing that she will prove her worth alongside the famed heroes of Greece, Atalanta leaves her forest to join Jason's band of Argonauts. But can she carve out her own place in the legends in a world made for men?

Amara has escaped her life as a slave in the town's most notorious brothel, but now her existence depends on the affections of her patron: a man she might not know as well as she once thought. At night, she dreams of the wolf den, still haunted by her past. Amara longs for the women she was forced to leave behind and worse, finds herself pursued by the man who once owned her. In order to be free, she will need to be as ruthless as he is. Amara knows her existence in Pompeii is subject to Venus, the goddess of love. Yet finding love may prove to be the most dangerous act of all.

The House of Atreus is cursed. A bloodline tainted by a generational cycle of violence and vengeance. This is the story of three women, their fates inextricably tied to this curse, and the fickle nature of men and gods.

Dr. Theia McDormand has spent years perfecting the art of invisibility. As a successful New York dentist, she’s built a life of quiet routine and careful isolation. She believed her family’s secrets were buried in the past. She was wrong. When tragedy strikes close to home involving a neighbor’s child, Theia is thrust into chaos, unraveling her carefully constructed world. Suddenly, every stranger on the street feels like a potential threat, and shadows from the past loom at every corner.

For millennia, two women have been blamed for the fall of a mighty civilisation - but now it's time to hear their side of the story.... As princesses of Sparta, Helen and Klytemnestra have known nothing but luxury and plenty. With their high birth and unrivalled beauty, they are the envy of all of Greece. Such privilege comes at a high price, though, and their destinies are not theirs to command. While still only girls they are separated and married off to legendary foreign kings Agamemnon and Menelaus, never to meet again.

When Leukas, a Christian convert, ventures into the wilds of Gaul to receive the hidden teachings from Mary Magdalene before she dies, he discovers that hidden within the Gospels he thinks he knows is an epic love story—between an educated Jewish woman overwhelmed by her mysterious spiritual powers and a sensual magician devoted to the wisdom of the earth. The secrets she will reveal are both more shocking and more tragic than anything listeners have encountered before.

In Athens, crowds flock to witness the most shocking trial of the ancient world. The royal family is mired in scandal. Phaedra, young bride of King Theseus, has accused her stepson, Hippolytus of rape. He's a prince, a talented horseman, a promising noble with his whole life ahead of him. She's a young and neglected wife, the youngest in a long line of Cretan women with less than savoury reputations. The men of Athens must determine the truth. Who is guilty, and who is innocent? But the women know truth is a slippery thing. After all, this is the age of heroes and the age of monsters.

Before she is Potiphar’s wife, Zuleika is the daughter of a king and the wife of a prince. She rules the isle of Crete alongside her mother in the absence of their seafaring husbands. But when tragedy nearly destroys Crete, Zuleika must sacrifice her future to save the Minoan people she loves.

When Jezebel learns she can't be a king like her father simply because she’s a girl, she vows never to become someone’s decorative wife, nameless and lost to history. At fifteen she’s married off, despite her protests, to Prince Ahab of Israel. There, she does what she must to gain power and remake the dry and distant kingdom in the image of her beloved, prosperous seaside homeland of Tyre, beginning by building temples to the gods she grew up worshipping. As her initiatives usher in an era of prosperity for Israel, her new subjects love her, and her name rings through the land.

Perseus grows up wanting to be a hero, but he cannot become one if his mother Danae still sees him as a boy. When his stepfather Polydektes casts him away on a voyage across the sea, Perseus is determined to fulfil the great destiny of the son of a god and the grandson of a king. But the line between heroism and monstrosity is thin, and when Perseus attempts to seduce first gentle Medusa and then beautiful Andromeda, before finally reuniting with Danae, they each learn of the dangers of resisting a boy prepared to risk it all for greatness.

Among the women of Greek mythology, the witch Medea may be the most despised. Known for the brutal act of killing her own children to exact vengeance on her deceitful husband, Jason, the leader of the Argonauts, Medea has carved out a singularly infamous niche in our histories.

Princess of Mycenae, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, sister of the sacrificed Iphigenia and the cursed Orestes. Electra is forced to flee her home after witnessing the shocking revenge-murder of her father, by her mother, on his return from the Trojan War. Life beyond the palace is frightening, and the scandalous behaviour of her foreign companions disturbs her, but she needs the help of the Trojan Cassandra, and her two lovers, to survive. Driven by her own desire for vengeance, Electra's life becomes one of adventure, peril, pleasure, tragedy and love.

Londinium, AD 211. Zuleika is a modern girl living in an ancient world. She's a back-alley firecracker, a scruffy Nubian babe with tangled hair and bare feet - and she's just been married off to a fat old Roman. Life as a teenage bride is no joke but Zeeks is a born survivor. She knows this city like the back of her hand: its slave girls and drag queens, its shining villas and rotting slums. She knows how to get by. Until one day she catches the eye of the most powerful man on earth, the Roman Emperor, and her trouble really starts....

There are many paths to power. They all come with a price. Neferura, princess and high priestess of Kemet, knows her duty is to her people. When your mother is the great Pharaoh, it is hard to forget. But Neferura's unique position at court comes with high stakes for her country, especially when she's forced to serve her vile half-brother, a man determined to stop Neferura's potential rise.

Ravenna, A.D. 408. Placidia is watching her family fall apart. When her emperor brother accuses their powerful foster father of treason, the naive imperial princess tries to reason with her sibling to no avail. And after her foster father is lured out of sanctuary and brutally executed, she flees the toxic court to avoid a forced marriage… but to dubious safety.