Thus, Bradley overturns the tradition began by Homer and Aeschylus of a jealous Klytemnestra and a victimized Kassandra to create an epic which affirms the goddess-centered values of Kassandra and her Amazon mentors. Her mother Hecuba, although subdued as Priam's wife in Troy, is the daughter of a nomad tribe and sister to Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, who teaches the young Kassandra her warrior ways. Her other teacher, Queen Imandra of Colchis, provides the model of the queenly woman and the keeper of serpent and healing lore, which Kassandra learns in the Serpent Palace of Colchis. Thus the female characters in the novel fall into two traditions—one the domesticated "house women" who accept the new patriarchal regimes, such as Kassandra's mother and sisters and even Queen Imandra's daughter Andromache, the wife of Hector, and the other the "warrior women" descended from Penthesilia.

The cleavage between...