In a thousand years this war will be mine. I am its hero, its villain, the thread with which the tapestry is woven. The nine years before me will not matter; all anyone will remember is that last one, the months that were mine, the months in which I did not fight. Is that not ironic? I left to find glory in battle and found it denying. In a thousand years, they will remember me as the man who refused to fight. Not for honor, not for justice, not for friend or fatherland, but for want of a slave. Most won't even know her name.

But they'll know yours, Patroclus, my cousin, my lover, my friend, my brother, my reason to die. Oh they'll know yours, but only in how much it hurt me. You are dead. You have been dead for thousands of years, dead as Eurydice. You are grief, you are my dead cousin lover friend brother and everyone else's too. You and Hector, the heroic dead, everyone's fallen love. Priam comes to beg me for your killer's corpse and I weep as I realize he too was someone's beloved. For a moment, us enemies in war are connected.

Priam dies, of course, slaughtered when we take Troy, but that did not happen in my story and so it never happened at all. Hector was someone's son but the bodies I drowned Scamander in were no-one's. They are mere splatters on the page, spit that wets the lips, nothing and no-one to mourn. Do you remember her name, Patroclus? They said you were nice to the slaves, that they mourned you. A good slave mourns their master.

She'll be a problem, you know. In a thousand, two thousand, three thousand years they will no longer tolerate slavery, except in the instances they do, of course. But they will no longer tolerate slavery if you call it slavery, if you are open about the selling and the buying and the rights of property. Slavery is an evil act perpetrated by those evil barbarians of the past and this is a problem because you see, Patroclus, we are not evil. We are symbols of love and grief, timeless emotions even those foreigners feel just the same as us. Our story brings them comfort, so she is a problem. She reminds them we were not the same as them, or perhaps she reminds them we have always been the same. They like to think them and us as civilized, so it is a problem, she is a problem in my story. She is a problem that needs dealing with, and hasn't she always been, Patroclus?

This war will be mine, and I will be love and grief and rage, and you will be dead. You will still be dead.

Immortal through legend, I understand my mother's despair. I found glory in grief and for that you must be dead, Patroclus. Was it worth it? Of course not. We could have died somewhere in the unknown, far away from all their eyes. Instead your body is dragged around my grave as I dragged Hector around yours. Priam, we truly are the same, are we not? We fed our family to war and wept at the sight of its teeth. You should have listened to Cassandra. I should have listened to reason.

It would have made for a worse story, though, wouldn't it? Love and grief and rage are timeless. Peace is not.

If Briseis hadn't been a problem, no-one would remember her at all.