A Thousand Ships

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. What is the mythology of the Trojan War? What are some important literary, artistic, or cinematic retellings of this myth? What is often associated with these retellings?

Teaching Suggestion: The Trojan War is an ancient Greek myth about a decade-long war between an alliance of Greeks or “Achaeans” and the city of Troy on the coast of Asia Minor. It may be helpful to discuss the history of the Trojan War myth in classical and post-classical literature, including in the Homeric epics (The Iliad and The Odyssey), Attic tragedy (including Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Sophocles’ Ajax and Philoctetes, and Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis), Roman literature (including Virgil’s Aeneid and the works of Ovid), and even Medieval epics (such as Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Le Roman de Troie) and early modern literature (such as Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida). It might also be beneficial to discuss the afterlife of the myth of Troy in contemporary literature and cinema, highlighting films such as Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy and novels such as Madeline Miller’s Achilles and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls.