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In Helen of Joyce (Printwell Books, 2022), Senan Molony argues that Joyce's novel draws not only on the story of Odysseus's long journey back from Troy but also on stories from the previous decade when he helped lead the Greek host besieging the city and devised the stratagem of putting armed warriors inside a statue. The opening paragraphs of Telemachus surreptitiously name Troy and also evoke the wooden horse. Mulligan's face is "equine in its length" and his hair is "grained and hued like pale oak." Molony notes that "hued" imports a pun on "hewed," evoking the cutting down of trees and the cutting down of Trojans. The razor in the chapter's first sentence contributes to the atmosphere: "Mulligan folds his razor (it's therefore a cut-throat, even though safety versions were available in 1904)" (22), and many of Troy's warriors "had their throats cut as they slept" (19).

The intimations of violence continue in the living room of the tower. Mulligan serves up breakfast as if he is slaughtering men: "He hacked through the fry on the dish"; "hewing thick slices from the loaf" (that word again), and "hewing" some more, "He lunged towards his messmates in turn a thick slice of bread, impaled on his knife"; "he growled in a hoarsened rasping voice as he hewed again vigorously at the loaf." This action takes place as the room fills with "a cloud of coalsmoke and fumes of fried grease," choking the inhabitants and evoking the smoke that filled Troy after it had been put to the torch. (Molony notes a lovely pun on "grease.") There are plenty of violent deaths in the Odyssey and Hamlet, but nothing quite like this. Other details in the chapter add to the cumulative impression of violent havoc: Stephen's nickname, "Kinch, the knife-blade"; his purported killing of his mother; Haines's effort to shoot a black panther during the terrible nighttime darkness in the stone chamber. It seems that three killers are loose inside the tower.

Molony cites still other details that line up with stories of the expeditionary assault on Troy. Quoting from the Anabasis, Mulligan declaims "Thalatta! Thalatta!" In Homeric Greek it would be "Thalassa!," but Xenophon's image of Greek warriors reaching the Black Sea coast and celebrating their escape from Anatolia readily maps onto Homer's story of a Greek expedition to the opposite, northwestern corner of Asia Minor. Leaving behind the plains of Troy, the Greeks might well have exclaimed "The sea! The sea!" twice––once at the fleet's deceptive departure, when it left the wooden horse behind on the shore, and a second time when the ships sailed full of gold and bronze spoils and enslaved women. These departures also resonate when Mulligan tells Stephen that "We must go to Athens."

Less persuasive, to me, are Molony's claims that the "wetted ashes" of Stephen's dream recall the wetted ashes of mourning that Hecuba put on her head when she was led into slavery, that the word "noserag" contains a "garrison" when read backward and likewise that the "lemon" is a Molly-like "melon," that Stephen's "trousers" evoke Troy (though Joyce did write in Finnegans Wake, "Gricks may rise and Troysirs fall"!), and that the story of Iphigenia at Aulis underlies a series of superficially similar events at Sandycove. (The pestilence at Aulis, Molony argues, is evoked by Mulligan's complaint that Irish people are diseased from "Living in a bogswamp." Agamemnon's killing of a deer sacred to Artemis surfaces in the name Buck Mulligan. The need to pay the milkwoman's bill recalls the restitution due to Artemis. The "freshened" wind outside the Martello tower, and Mulligan's plunge into the sea, reenact the fleet's escape from Aulis.)

Molony's Introduction suggests that the Iliad may be as important to Joyce as the Odyssey, but the echoes of Troy in Telemachus do not involve any allusions to that work. The story of Iphigenia is only darkly alluded to in book 1, and the construction of the wooden horse and its terrible aftermath, which take place after the epic's conclusion, receive no mention at all. The stories of murdering, pillaging, and burning that fired Joyce's imagination would have come, as Molony recognizes, not from the Iliad but from book 2 of Virgil's Aeneid. But his larger point is that Joyce set out in Ulysses to represent all of the Greek hero's deeds––not just the voyage back to Ithaca but the long preceding struggle to take Troy, concluding with the inspired stratagem of the horse. This insight is brilliant and long overdue. After setting the scene in the first chapter, Helen of Joyce builds toward revealing the narrative use to which Joyce put the symbolic analogue: making 7 Eccles Street a stronghold taken by the enemy, its female prize captured.

Joyce told Frank Budgen that he was working on a book "based on the wanderings of Ulysses. The Odyssey, that is to say, serves me as a ground plan. Only my time is recent time and all my hero's wanderings take no more than eighteen hours" (15). But as Molony notes, he also told Budgen that Ulysses "was an inventor too. The tank is his creation. Wooden horse or iron box––it doesn't matter. They are both shells containing armed warriors" (17). The idea of an "equine" shell of "pale oak" unleasing holy hell on a sleeping city grew into something ripe with symbolic possibilities. Joyce's genius was great enough to encompass both parts of the hero's story: the search for a meaningful home in an alien universe, and the risk to an entire established order posed by competition for a woman's affection. "Make room in the bed," says Mulligan before diving into the fortyfoot. There is room in the bed not just for the wanderer but for the adventurer who invades his home.