Briseis

Briseis is the woman Achilles won as a prize of war and Agamemnon took from him, the seizure that unleashes the wrath of Achilles in the Iliad. Her loss and her return frame the quarrel on which the whole poem turns.

Her name means daughter of Briseus; later commentators give her own name as Hippodameia. She comes from Lyrnessus, a town of the Troad near Troy; Achilles sacks it, killing her husband and her three brothers, and she is given to him as his share of the spoils. In Book 1, Apollo's plague forces Agamemnon to return his own captive, Chryseis, to her father, a priest of the god. To make up for his loss, the king sends heralds to take Briseis from Achilles' tent, and she goes with them unwilling. Achilles withdraws from the fighting and, at the request of his mother Thetis, Zeus gives the Trojans the upper hand: the Greeks bleed for his absence.

In Book 9 Agamemnon offers her back with rich gifts and an oath that he has never shared her bed; Achilles, who calls her the wife of his heart, refuses. She returns only in Book 19, after Patroclus has died. Agamemnon swears his oath, and Briseis weeps over the body of Patroclus, remembering that he had promised to make her Achilles' lawful wife in Phthia. It is her only speech in the poem. In the last book she sleeps at Achilles' side.

Homer says nothing of her after Achilles' death. Ovid gives her a voice in the third of his Heroides, a letter begging Achilles to take her back. In the medieval romances of Troy her name passed to another woman: Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Briseida, daughter of Calchas and beloved of Troilus, whom Boccaccio renamed Criseida and who became Chaucer's Criseyde and Shakespeare's Cressida.