Edward Tripp, Dictionary of Classical Mythology
Racine, Iphigénie
Euripides, Iphigeneia in Aulis
Aeschylus, The Oresteia (translated, with an introductory essay, by Robert Fagles)
Homer, The Iliad
M. P. Nilsson, Minoan-Mycenaean Religion
Walter Burkert, Greek Religion
Hugh Lloyd-Jones, “Artemis and Iphigeneia” (Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1983)
E. O. James, The Ancient Gods
M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Barry Unsworth won the Booker Prize in 1992 for Sacred Hunger; his next novel, Morality Play, was a Booker nominee and a bestseller in both the United States and Great Britain. His other novels include After Hannibal, The Hide, and Pascali’s Island, which was also short-listed for the Booker Prize and was made into a feature film. He held the position of visiting fellow at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and lives in Umbria with his wife.
ALSO BY BARRY UNSWORTH
The Partnership
The Greeks Have a Word for It
The Hide
Mooncranker’s Gift
The Big Day
Pascali’s Island
(published in the United States
under the title The Idol Hunter)
The Rage of the Vulture
Stone Virgin
Sugar and Rum
Sacred Hunger
Morality Play
After Hannibal
Losing Nelson
PUBLISHED BY NAN A. TALESE
AN IMPRINT OF DOUBLEDAY
a division of Random House, Inc.
DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark
of Random House, Inc.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
businesses, organizations, places, events, and
incidents either are the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Unsworth, Barry, 1930– The songs of the kings: a novel / Barry Unsworth. —1st ed. in the United States of America p. cm. 1. Iphigenia (Greek mythology)—Fiction. 2. Agamemnon (Greek mythology)—Fiction. 3. Greece—History—To 146 B.C.—Fiction. 4. Trojan War—Fiction. I. Title. PR6071.N8 S’.914—dc21 2002066845
Copyright © 2003 by Barry Unsworth
All Rights Reserved.
April 2003
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-42414-3
v3.0r1
ALSO BY
BARRY UNSWORTH
“Unsworth is one of the best historical novelists on either side of the Atlantic…his vast knowledge of 18th-century social and material conditions creates a rich and strange rendering of daily life that’s utterly persuasive.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Told with bite and freshness…Unsworth gives his figures glittering definition, and then leaves them open and undefined.” —The Boston Globe
“[Unsworth’s] sentences recall the sharp detail, moral sensitivity and ready wit of Charles Dickens. But his sense of the lumbering, uneven gait of social progress is more sophisticated, more tempered, one might say, by history.” —The Washington Post
The Songs of the Kings: A Novel Page 28
