Beautiful, graceful, devoted, patient, dominated, inoffensive: such are the women related by Homer. Anaesthetized women caught in an endless war where men play at being heroes while their wives—or slaves, the difference is small—wait meekly at the hearth if they are lucky enough not to end up as war booty. But who really are the female protagonists of such epics as the Iliad and the Odyssey? What do theywant? What are their dreams? Cassandra, Penelope, Briseis, and scores of other women have a lot to tell us, without gleaming armour, even from the depths of Hades.