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.

• This article from the British Museum provides a helpful and student-friendly overview of the mythology of the Trojan War.
• This BBC article discusses the historicity of the Trojan War.

2. Haynes’s novel is largely inspired by ancient Greek and Roman epics, such as The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid. What is an epic? What kinds of themes, motifs, and/or narrative devices are often used in this form of literature?

Teaching Suggestion: An epic is typically a long narrative poem that features heroic themes related to war and adventure. The earliest written epics in the West are Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, which dealt with the mythology of Troy; later, Virgil’s Aeneid continued Homer’s story by writing about the adventures of the Trojan hero Aeneas, regarded as the ancestor of the Romans. Epics outside of Western culture include works from Mesopotamia (e.g., Epic of Gilgamesh) and India (e.g., Ramayana and Mahabharata). Students may benefit from the opportunity to briefly research and report on an epic of their choice to strengthen their understanding of the form and its overall impact.

• This article from MasterClass introduces epic poetry by reviewing its history and characteristics.
• This article from Mythopedia discusses the mythological, literary, cultural, and historical background of Homer’s Iliad.

Personal Connection Prompt

This prompt can be used for in-class discussion, exploratory free-writing, or reflection homework before reading the text.

Think about wars that have taken place during your lifetime. How do these conflicts affect people? How have wars affected you or your family members? In what ways can war transform daily life, even for those who are not directly involved?

Teaching Suggestion: Consider reminding students that war can affect people in a variety of direct and indirect ways: People can lose friends or family members as casualties and become dispossessed, displaced, or drafted for military service. War can have far-reaching economic and political consequences as well; conflicts in Asia and the Middle East have historically caused significant fluctuations in the price of regional imports such as oil, and these fluctuations in turn can lead to economic upheaval in countries all over the world.