In Greek mythology, Briseis — also called Hippodameia — is a central captive in Homer's Iliad. Taken by Achilles when he sacked Lyrnessus, she becomes the prize whose seizure by Agamemnon sparks Achilles' wrath and withdrawal from battle. Homer presents her both as a status symbol in the Achaean honour economy and, in her own lament for Patroclus, as a woman who hoped to become Achilles' lawful wife.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Briseis" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Capture and the quarrel
Briseis was daughter of Briseus; she had three brothers who died when Achilles sacked Lyrnessus, and her husband (sometimes named Mynes, son of the local king) was killed in the same assault. She was allotted to Achilles as a war prize. When Agamemnon was forced by Apollo's plague to return his own captive Chryseis, he demanded Briseis as compensation. Achilles yielded her under protest and withdrew from fighting — a quarrel that nearly ruined the Achaean cause.
In the embassy of Book 9 Achilles calls her his wife or bride and claims to have loved her as any man loves his wife, comparing the theft to Menelaus' loss of Helen. Agamemnon later offers lavish gifts including her return; Achilles refuses until Patroclus is dead. In Book 19 he accepts her back and Agamemnon swears he never lay with her — yet Achilles also curses the day she came between them, wishing Artemis had slain her at Lyrnessus.
II.Voice and afterlife
Briseis herself speaks when she laments Patroclus: he had promised to persuade Achilles to make her a lawful wife and take her home to Phthia. After Achilles' death she mourns him; later authors have her prepare his body for the afterlife. One tradition says she was given to a comrade after Troy fell, as his armour was; Malalas says she died of illness.
Medieval romance transformed her into Briseida, daughter of Calchas, lover of Troilus and then Diomedes — a figure later confused with Chryseis and developed as Chaucer's Criseyde and Shakespeare's Cressida. Modern retellings include Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, which tells the Iliad from Briseis' point of view.