First Line Friday & The Friday 56: Mythica by Emily Hauser

First Line Friday is hosted by Carrie @ Reading Is My Superpower
The Friday 56 is created by Freda's Voice and hosted by Anne @ My Head Is Full of Books
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First Line Friday:

Grab the nearest book and share its first line

From the introduction:
August 2017, and it's a hot summer's day in Boston, Massachusetts, but the stacks of Harvard's Widener Library are as cold as catacombs.

From the first chapter:
She has always been treated as an object of beauty, and so she, too, collects beautiful things. 

The Friday 56:

Grab a book, turn to page 56 (or 56% on your e-reader), and share a spoiler-free snippet.

The decipherment of Linear B was an astonishing achievement, and it took the world by storm. On 1 july 1952, a few months after Queen Elizabeth II ascended the throne, Ventris announced his breakthrough on BBC radio. It marked the unlocking of a code that had been bolted shut for millenia, that opened up unhoped-for secrets about the Mycenaean Bronze Age — written in the hands of actual Bronze Age scribes.

Mythica: A New History of Homer’s World, Through the Women Written Out of It by Emily Hauser

 Did you love Madeline Miller’s Circe? Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls? Jennifer Saint's Elektra? Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships?

But did you ever wonder who the real women behind the myths of the Trojan War were?

Now award-winning classicist and historian Emily Hauser takes readers on an epic journey to uncover the astonishing true story of the real women behind ancient Greece’s greatest legends – and the real heroes of those ancient epics, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.

Because, contrary to perceptions built up over three millennia, ancient history is not all about men – and it's not only men's stories that deserve to be told . . .

In Mythica Emily Hauser tells, for the first time, the extraordinary stories of the real women behind some of the western world’s greatest legends. Following in their footsteps, digging into the history behind Homer’s epic poems, piecing together evidence from the original texts, recent astonishing archaeological finds and the latest DNA studies, she reveals who these women – queens, mothers, warriors, slaves – were, how they lived, and how history has (or has not – until now) remembered them.

A riveting new history of the Bronze Age Aegean and a journey through Homer’s epics charted entirely by women – from Helen of Troy, Briseis, Cassandra and Aphrodite to Circe, Athena, Hera, Calypso and Penelope – Mythica is a ground-breaking reassessment of the reality behind the often-mythologized women of Greece’s greatest epics, and of the ancient world itself as we learn ever more about it.

What do you think of these snippets?