"I was six years old when King Nicander came to the island of my birth, demanding tribute and a hostage. I did not know what a hostage was, nor tribute."
Anaxandra is the protagonist and first-person narrator of the story. These are the opening lines of the novel. They effectively serve to situate the basic premise of the story's foundation. Anaxandra is the daughter of a chieftain of a small Greek island. Nicander, on the other hand, is the king Siphnos. What these opening lines establish is that the story that will be told is one of the increasingly powerful people ultimately proving to be powerless pawns set against the much larger forces of history. Nicander will eventually be killed by Menelaus. Even this king of Sparta will ultimately be put at the mercy of Helen of Troy. This quote is foreshadowing one of the overarching themes of the novel: in the end, everybody becomes a hostage to history.
“May your eyeballs be eaten by fish when Zeus holds you underwater!”
In addition to being an example of some of the more entertaining quotes in the novel, this passage also delineates Anaxandra's character. The context here is that Anaxandra has an octopus on her head and is pretending to be Medusa, the mythological figure who had live snakes for hair and could turn any person to stone who dared look directly at her. The context for why Anaxandra is using octopus tentacles to replicate live snakes is that she is trying to save herself from a pirate attack against Siphnos. After six years, she has actually come to enjoy her life with Nicander who took her hostage for the purpose of finding a playmate for his own daughter. This seemingly over-the-top issuance of a curse is done in the name of dramatic effect and it reveals the depths of imagination which will become essential to Anaxandra's survival over the course of tumultuous youth.
“Paris is my destiny. I was not conceived by a god to waste my years with so dull a man as Menelaus. It was the red hair, you know, that made me choose him. I thought a man with a flaming mane would himself be fire. No. Menelaus is merely an ember on the hearth. I have met fire at last. Paris flames. Paris is mine and I am his. I am Helen of Troy.”
This novel is another in the increasingly robust retellings of the mythical story of Helen of Troy. What sets this version apart from so many others is that Helen's story is told from the perspective of another and, in the process, becomes hostage to Anaxandra's version of her history. From the narrator's point of view, Helen is vain, narcissistic, and without empathy. The context of this little speech is the shockingly rapid transition of Helen from her "housewifely demeanor" to a lusty enjoyment of the chaos and violence which her great beauty has stimulated. The reference to Menelaus and the final expression in this quote is a callback to an earlier scene in which a dying soldier curses her by addressing her as "Helen of Sparta" with a final breath. At that moment, Helen proudly accepts her destiny as a Trojan after being taken hostage while a Spartan. It is Paris who first addresses her as Helen of Troy.
