Rumours of war first arrived when an uninvited vessel sailed into our home port on a humid evening in an Ithacan summer. From inside the king’s home, where I served with the other attendants, I recognized the craft, emblazoned with the bellicose colors of Sparta. Calling us back to the kitchen immediately, our superiors, appointed by Odysseus himself, told I and the other maids that the king would host the unexpected visitors and set us to work preparing for them. We scrubbed down the tables in the palace’s hall, butchered cattle, kneaded bread, and set out golden pitchers and basins to rinse the guests’ hands, working quickly all the time; just after the lingering afternoon had faded, an intrusive gaggle of slave traders entered the hallowed feasting room. The king greeted them with goodnatured chuckles and embraced their leader, and the Queen told them of the revelries in store for their (unplanned) stay.
Odysseus’ servants brought the boisterous visitors to the bedrooms, where they bathed and dressed, and then the men, at least thirty of them in total, clambered down the delicate steps. Taking seats around the buffets of the feasting room, the traders poured wine down their unquenchable throats then held their cups out for filling, taking up the prime cuts of cattle served by the king’s servants. Standing next to the table, each of the maids could hear the king and Queen, speaking and trading important news with the leader of the slave traders.
While the conversation began with Odysseus complementing their fine Spartan ship, the captain of the traders, seated at the head of the table, shifted the subject of discussion to the affairs of Menelaus, ruler of Sparta. When asked of his own redhaired king, the foreign traveller’s eyes glinted, and he showed his sharp teeth in a grin. Helen, he said, had forced her husband into a rather uncomfortable diplomatic and romantic situation: the ungrateful woman had run away with a son of Troy’s royal family, leaving her husband in an angry hysteria, and the prince’s well-armed parents had refused to return their new foreign princess.
Hearing this information, Penelope blinked (in what an unfamiliar bystander might mistaken as an eyeroll) and glanced at her husband. As the revellers around him continued to swig drink, filling his palace with shouts of celebration, Ithaca’s king stared down at a platter of untouched food. Odysseus’ ruddy face turned pallid and tense, and the famed warrior and storyteller grew silent. Their visitor, not noticing Odysseus’ sudden change in behavior, continued to recount recent scandals surrounding Helen’s wild whims, but the queen, staring nervously at the king, swiftly turned to the leering sailor. Halting his gossip mid-sentence, the queen and adept hostess grabbed his arm, laughed, and waved over an attendant to pour more wine.
Three main choices: Because I aimed to retell my event for this assignment, I needed to present a clear narrative perspective through syntax, and I decided to recount this event from the perspective of a kitchen maid who admires and sympathizes with Penelope and Odysseus, the king and queen. To do this, the nouns I changed aimed to demonize the visiting sailors and elevate the royal family; examples of this include changing “foreign ship,” in the first sentence of the original piece to “uninvited vessel” in this latest version, which immediately established that the maid telling the story felt negatively about the newcomers, and substituting “Odysseus’ servants” for “slaves” in the sixth line of the this piece, as the former gave a euphemistic representation of Odysseus’ employment of slaves and other unpaid and abused workers. I also changed several nouns within the piece to indicate that the narrator feels close or connected to the royal family in some way; for example, I switched “from the courtyard of King Odysseus’ palace” to “from inside the king’s home” to emphasize that the narrator wants to present herself as connected to the royal family, with a place in their home, and tells her story as such. Finally, I included several epithet-like, extended names for individuals, such as Odysseus’ title of “famed warrior and storyteller” and Penelope’s description as an “adept hostess” to dramatically juxtapose the royal couple’s usual behavior, seen by the narrator as socially comfortable, and their confused and upset state for this piece.
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