Character Analysis: Briseis? Who's that?

The fact that Briseis is a minor character and in fact merely a symbol of honour in the Iliad and a shallow love interest in Troy, actually gives us a big insight into Ancient Greek culture. Depicting the story of The Iliad without attention to Briseis and her role as a slave is to miss a major cultural aspect present in the poem. The character of Briseis, in the world of Homer's epic poem, mainly follows the male perspective. From descriptions of her appearance and accounts of the events affecting Briseis, the likely male author/narrator as well as the male characters present and shape her into a mostly male dominated culture's idea of women, with its focus on her appearance, domestic skills, and sexuality as the main values concerning woman. Even though Homer sets high priority on both males and females physical appearances, male characters deliver far more dialogue than their female counter-parts, providing better opportunities for development of the male characters. In this quote, Homer describes her as little more to Agamemnon than a prize to claim, “But I will threaten you thus: as Phoebus Apollo takes from me the daughter of Chryses, her with my ship and my companions I will send back, but I will myself come to your tent and take the fair-cheeked Briseis, your prize, so that you will understand how much mightier I am than you, and another may shrink from declaring himself my equal and likening himself to me to my face." 

Although she seems unimportant, she has a large role in the outcome of the war in both texts. The best way to describe how she affects the war is by saying her influence is indirect. She doesn’t really affect the battlefield as she does Achilles. This is very important as Achilles is the best warrior the Achaeans possess and to have the power to change whether or not Achilles even partakes in the war is a large role to have. The reason she doesn’t directly affect the outcome of the war is that she’s merely a symbol of pride and honour amongst the men. The fact that she only has two pieces of dialogue, the second being Briseis expressing her sorrow over Patriclus’ death tells us that she does very little to influence how the soldiers think.