Teesside Novelists and the Ancient Underclass

Two internationally acclaimed novelists, Barry Unsworth and Pat Barker, both attended the same grammar school in Teesside and went on, later in their careers, to publish novels set in the ancient world, specifically retellings of episodes in the Trojan War cycle and its aftermath. Both are from deprived working-class backgrounds, and their fiction is characterised by a commitment to viewing history from the perspective of the underclass, which in antiquity means the perspective of slaves. Unsworth’s reading in The Songs of the Kings (2002) of the events dramatised in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis privileges the life experience and emotional vicissitudes of the enslaved prophet Calchas and Iphigenia’s personal slave Sisipyla, both abducted by Greeks from their Asian homelands; Pat Barker’s trilogy The Silence of the Girls (2018) , The Women of Troy (2021) and The Voyage Home (2024) recasts scenes from the Iliad and Greek tragedy to produce an epic of slavery, the brutal events of the war seen through the eyes of Briseis and later her friend, the medical expert and personal slave of Cassandra, Ritsa. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the use of first-person and free indirect third-person witnessing to ‘brush history against the grain’ and imagine what it felt like to be amongst history’s ‘losers’.