If Barker is really after conveying the violent abuse of women in wartime, she’s remarkably circumspect about it. Rape by Achilles: “What can I say? He wasn’t cruel. I waited for it — expected it, even — but there was nothing like that, and at least it was soon over.” Rape by Agamemnon: “So what did he do that was so terrible? Nothing much, I suppose, nothing I hadn’t been expecting.”

I have mixed feelings about these cool, sanitized depictions: relief to be spared harrowing details of sexual violence, but also vexation. To confront a subject redolent of pain, then to shy away from describing it seems, in some ways, a feeble choice, if not a betrayal of the countless women who have suffered, and who suffer still, from war’s ardent atrocities.

It’s not that Barker doesn’t have it in her to convey horror. In a searing moment, she describes Agamemnon prying open Briseis’ mouth and spitting a gob of phlegm into it. It’s ghastly and cruel and one of the few instances when this reader felt authentic emotional recoil because, yes, that is exactly the kind of depravity in which a brutal conqueror might engage.

Henry James famously warned historical novelists never to go back more than 50 years beyond their own era, since “the old consciousness” would surely elude them. I’ve always thought James undervalued the universality of human experience — the timeless nature of love and hate, grief and joy and all of the common, powerful emotions that shape us. The endurance of the “Iliad” is in itself evidence of this. We all know talented, arrogant asses like Achilles, who indulge their rages no matter what the cost, in boardrooms just as on battlefields. We can all identify with Priam’s desperate grief for his fallen son. Mary Renault’s Alexander trilogy and Hilary Mantel’s magisterial “Wolf Hall” offer more recent examples of novelists who reach far into the dark backward abyss of time and give convincing voice to old consciousness.

Unfortunately, Barker’s voices are dissonant and unpersuasive. The girls, alas, remain silenced.