Where Every Scroll is a New Adventure
Homer - Blog Posts
One of the most obvious arguments in favor of a romantic relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is simply that it makes sense from a writers perspective. Want to absolutely destroy your main character? Bring them to their breaking point? Punch your reader in the gut? Kill the love interest.
I mean, come on, the greeks were the inventors of the tragedy for a reason. What's more tragic? The death of cousin/comrade or the death of the person you are irrevocably and maddly in love with?
My thoughts are that I need to sit back and soak all this in. Ten times over. I knew there was a reason I liked Le Guin. Anyway, that's beside the point: I think now, perhaps more than ever, it is a crucial time to be reconsidering the lenses we place on history, fiction, and general media. How we even look at everyday life. I agree with Le Guin that Homer tends to take a very "middle ground" almost approach to telling The Iliad, which I like, and I think serves well in the telling of any story.
At the end of the day, I think it's important that an author presents a problem or a theme - and does not quite comment on it. They allow the audience to draw their own conclusions. From that principle alone, as Le Guin points out, there is a lesson in objectiveness and rejecting the creation of limiting dichotomies of Good vs Evil, Deserving vs Undeserving. It makes you question whether your idea of what's right... is what's right. Which is fascinating. And something I think people could possibly stand to do more of. We should critically evaluate moral ideas - what even is moral, why, okay but why do we think that, all right now so why are morals even important? Are there good or bad morals or just morals? (Spoiler: just morals)
Because morals are, by definition, either a lesson that can be derived from a story or experience, or standards of behaviour; principles of right and wrong. But that's the thing, isn't it? There can be a dozen views on what is right and what is wrong, but they're all principles - morals - that can be held by someone. People often confuse morals with ethics, making the mistake of believing someone's morals to coincide with ethics, or that ethics perfectly reflect morals. Ethics are their own slippery slope, because they do source from morals, but on a broader scale and blah blah blah (cue one of my university professors prattling on about theories of ethics...) The moral of the story I'm essentially getting at is: there's even different kinds of ethics. Many of these philosophical concepts have come from Greek scholars (legendary and otherwise).
I cannot say for certain whether this objective approach to storytelling on themes as complex as war where there are sides but no sides are taken is necessarily "a Greek thing", since I did not grow up in Greek schools. But! I do know that Greeks value the sacred Middle. I have been taught this since I was a child. You never choose the lowest, smallest, least or the highest, biggest, most, but whatever sits in the middle, because that will have the best balance.
Homer strikes balance between Greece and Troy by presenting you with two sides of a war: both fighting for their own reasons, neither Good nor Bad, because the moment you take a side, you are falling prey to evaluating things on your personal moral basis and not the broader picture of what is simply war. War never changes. As outlined above, Homer illustrates the way war is wasteful and cruel in its entirety. I believe it is often the case that you can only tell a truly resounding tragedy when you consider all sides. Better yet, when you tell all sides objectively. Because it is up to the audience then to take this narrative's detachment to the tragedy unfolding and feel, not be guided into what to feel and by what degree.
The human mind and capacity for empathy is incredible. It is a waste to narrow that potential into a set path of what is Good and what is Bad. Who is the right side and who is the wrong side. All sides in a war hurt. The concept of war hurts. That is the nature of it and of tragedy.
"I think Homer outwits most writers who have written on the War [fantasy archetype], by not taking sides.
The Trojan war is not and you cannot make it be the War of Good vs. Evil. It’s just a war, a wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted, cruel mess full of individual acts of courage, cowardice, nobility, betrayal, limb-hacking-off, and disembowelment. Homer was a Greek and might have been partial to the Greek side, but he had a sense of justice or balance that seems characteristically Greek — maybe his people learned a good deal of it from him? His impartiality is far from dispassionate; the story is a torrent of passionate actions, generous, despicable, magnificent, trivial. But it is unprejudiced. It isn’t Satan vs. Angels. It isn’t Holy Warriors vs. Infidels. It isn’t hobbits vs. orcs. It’s just people vs. people.
Of course you can take sides, and almost everybody does. I try not to, but it’s no use; I just like the Trojans better than the Greeks. But Homer truly doesn’t take sides, and so he permits the story to be tragic. By tragedy, mind and soul are grieved, enlarged, and exalted.
Whether war itself can rise to tragedy, can enlarge and exalt the soul, I leave to those who have been more immediately part of a war than I have. I think some believe that it can, and might say that the opportunity for heroism and tragedy justifies war. I don’t know; all I know is what a poem about a war can do. In any case, war is something human beings do and show no signs of stopping doing, and so it may be less important to condemn it or to justify it than to be able to perceive it as tragic.
But once you take sides, you have lost that ability.
Is it our dominant religion that makes us want war to be between the good guys and the bad guys?
In the War of Good vs. Evil there can be divine or supernal justice but not human tragedy. It is by definition, technically, comic (as in The Divine Comedy): the good guys win. It has a happy ending. If the bad guys beat the good guys, unhappy ending, that’s mere reversal, flip side of the same coin. The author is not impartial. Dystopia is not tragedy.
Milton, a Christian, had to take sides, and couldn’t avoid comedy. He could approach tragedy only by making Evil, in the person of Lucifer, grand, heroic, and even sympathetic — which is faking it. He faked it very well.
Maybe it’s not only Christian habits of thought but the difficulty we all have in growing up that makes us insist justice must favor the good.
After all, 'Let the best man win' doesn’t mean the good man will win. It means, 'This will be a fair fight, no prejudice, no interference — so the best fighter will win it.' If the treacherous bully fairly defeats the nice guy, the treacherous bully is declared champion. This is justice. But it’s the kind of justice that children can’t bear. They rage against it. It’s not fair!
But if children never learn to bear it, they can’t go on to learn that a victory or a defeat in battle, or in any competition other than a purely moral one (whatever that might be), has nothing to do with who is morally better.
Might does not make right — right?
Therefore right does not make might. Right?
But we want it to. 'My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.'
If we insist that in the real world the ultimate victor must be the good guy, we’ve sacrificed right to might. (That’s what History does after most wars, when it applauds the victors for their superior virtue as well as their superior firepower.) If we falsify the terms of the competition, handicapping it, so that the good guys may lose the battle but always win the war, we’ve left the real world, we’re in fantasy land — wishful thinking country.
Homer didn’t do wishful thinking.
Homer’s Achilles is a disobedient officer, a sulky, self-pitying teenager who gets his nose out of joint and won’t fight for his own side. A sign that Achilles might grow up someday, if given time, is his love for his friend Patroclus. But his big snit is over a girl he was given to rape but has to give back to his superior officer, which to me rather dims the love story. To me Achilles is not a good guy. But he is a good warrior, a great fighter — even better than the Trojan prime warrior, Hector. Hector is a good guy on any terms — kind husband, kind father, responsible on all counts — a mensch. But right does not make might. Achilles kills him.
The famous Helen plays a quite small part in The Iliad. Because I know that she’ll come through the whole war with not a hair in her blond blow-dry out of place, I see her as opportunistic, immoral, emotionally about as deep as a cookie sheet. But if I believed that the good guys win, that the reward goes to the virtuous, I’d have to see her as an innocent beauty wronged by Fate and saved by the Greeks.
And people do see her that way. Homer lets us each make our own Helen; and so she is immortal.
I don’t know if such nobility of mind (in the sense of the impartial 'noble' gases) is possible to a modern writer of fantasy. Since we have worked so hard to separate History from Fiction, our fantasies are dire warnings, or mere nightmares, or else they are wish fulfillments."
- Ursula K. Le Guin, from No Time to Spare, 2013.
i find it so hilarious that in pjo zeus is prickimus maximus but in the odyssey he is literally described as the nicest god
“Why have you come to me here, dear heart, with all these instructions? I promise you I will do everything just as you ask. But come closer. Let us give in to grief, however briefly, in each other’s arms.” - Homer
Kind of feeling like a 2 or 3
Which Achilles are you today?
Latest painting! What do you think?
Orestes lost both his sister and mother that day...
absolutely nuts for this copy of the illiad + odyssey
the edges are GOLD
I love this couple so much
calypso run
that is her sad wet cat of a husband and she will not tolerate bullying
a quick psa to anyone recently getting into greek mythology and is a victim of tumblr and/or tiktok misconceptions:
-there is no shame in being introduced to mytholgy from something like percy jackson, epic the musical or anything like that, but keep in mind that actual myths are going to be VERY different from modern retellings
-the myth of medusa you probably know (her being a victim of poseidon and being cursed by athena) isn't 100% accurate to GREEK mythology (look up ovid)
-there is no version of persephone's abduction in which persephone willingly stays with hades, that's a tumblr invention (look up homeric hymn to demeter)
-as much as i would like it, no, cerberus' name does not mean "spot" (probably a misunderstanding from this wikipedia article)
-zeus isn't the only god who does terrible things to women, your fav male god probably has done the same
-on that note, your fav greek hero has probably done some heinous shit as well
-gods are more complicated than simply being "god of [insert thing]", many titles overlap between gods and some may even change depending on where they were worshipped
-also, apollo and artemis being the gods of the sun and the moon isn't 100% accurate, their main aspects as deities originally were music and the hunt
-titans and gods aren't two wholly different concepts, titan is just the word used to decribe the generation of gods before the olympians
-hector isn't the villain some people make him out to be
-hephaestus WAS married to aphrodite. they divorced. yes, divorce was a thing in ancient greece. hephaestus' wife is aglaia
-ancient greek society didn't have the same concepts of sexuality that we have now, it's incorrect to describe virgin goddesses like artemis and athena as lesbians, BUT it's also not wholly accurate to describe them as aromantic/asexual, it's more complex than that
-you can never fully understand certain myths if you don't understand the societal context in which they were told
-myths have lots and lots of retellings, there isn't one singular "canon", but we can try to distinguish between older and newer versions and bewteen greek and roman versions
-most of what you know about sparta is probably incorrect
-reading/waching retellings is not a substitute to reading the original myths, read the iliad! read the odyssey! i know they may seem intimidating, but they're much more entertaining than you may think
greek mythology is so complex and interesting, don't go into it with preconcieved notions! try to be open to learn!
I think one of my favourite parts about the iliad is the gods interacting on Olympus. Obviously I love my lil greek heroes but somehting about the gods just hanging about like normal people is so silly. Like people are dying Zeus why are we having brunch 😭
As someone who got into greek myths when I was 10, because of pjo ^^^ no notes : perfection even
a quick psa to anyone recently getting into greek mythology and is a victim of tumblr and/or tiktok misconceptions:
-there is no shame in being introduced to mytholgy from something like percy jackson, epic the musical or anything like that, but keep in mind that actual myths are going to be VERY different from modern retellings
-the myth of medusa you probably know (her being a victim of poseidon and being cursed by athena) isn't 100% accurate to GREEK mythology (look up ovid)
-there is no version of persephone's abduction in which persephone willingly stays with hades, that's a tumblr invention (look up homeric hymn to demeter)
-as much as i would like it, no, cerberus' name does not mean "spot" (probably a misunderstanding from this wikipedia article)
-zeus isn't the only god who does terrible things to women, your fav male god probably has done the same
-on that note, your fav greek hero has probably done some heinous shit as well
-gods are more complicated than simply being "god of [insert thing]", many titles overlap between gods and some may even change depending on where they were worshipped
-also, apollo and artemis being the gods of the sun and the moon isn't 100% accurate, their main aspects as deities originally were music and the hunt
-titans and gods aren't two wholly different concepts, titan is just the word used to decribe the generation of gods before the olympians
-hector isn't the villain some people make him out to be
-hephaestus WAS married to aphrodite. they divorced. yes, divorce was a thing in ancient greece. hephaestus' wife is aglaia
-ancient greek society didn't have the same concepts of sexuality that we have now, it's incorrect to describe virgin goddesses like artemis and athena as lesbians, BUT it's also not wholly accurate to describe them as aromantic/asexual, it's more complex than that
-you can never fully understand certain myths if you don't understand the societal context in which they were told
-myths have lots and lots of retellings, there isn't one singular "canon", but we can try to distinguish between older and newer versions and bewteen greek and roman versions
-most of what you know about sparta is probably incorrect
-reading/waching retellings is not a substitute to reading the original myths, read the iliad! read the odyssey! i know they may seem intimidating, but they're much more entertaining than you may think
greek mythology is so complex and interesting, don't go into it with preconcieved notions! try to be open to learn!
Meet Birt Swirtson
Achilles
I
To them I am the brute not the lover
The raging king’s hound, his gold spear – death’s kiss
Was this the way, was there no other?
II
History, prayèrs did try to cover –
Those violent delights, and that violent bliss
- To them I am the brute not the lover.
III
Yet, if time would but only uncover
Those extra curves of your smiles that they miss – I miss.
Was this the way – was there no other?
IV
If the Prince of Troy did not hover over
My mind and your ghost – in debt to the Styx –
To them I am the brute not the lover!
V
They forget romeo, the pre-mover;
Was it for this you died, was it for this?
Alas, I am the brute. Not your lover.
Was this the way? Was there no other?
"Achilles" by Sadbh Kellett. First published in The Attic XX, 2017.
Golden mornings and cool sea breezes brought them together.
Playful touches turned to yearnings with depth.
Days passed and love grew.
Until one day a shadow came uninvited.
Soon enough hell broke loose.
Still they managed to find their homes in the arms of the other.
But fate is bitter and sour and cruel.
It took away the black haired boy from his lover.
And left the other to grieve forever.
But what no one saw was the rage deep in the blues.
While the golden haired burned the world alive,
fate watched in the corner scared and small.
When the Trojans took away his home, his love, what could Achilles do except grieve for Patroclus.
And his grief brought the mighty warriors to their knees.
Troy did not not lose the war. Nor did the Greek win it.
Achilles grieved for Patroclus, and soon enough the war ended.
“We men are wretched things”
- Homer, The Iliad
"A last request—grant it, please.
Never bury my bones apart from yours, Achilles,
Let them lie together . . .
Just as we grew up together in your house"
Patroclus to Achilles
The Iliad - Homer
Episode 3 characters
Arya Stark the QUEEN!!!!!!!!!!
Sandor at fire
Jorah’s last moments with his Khaleesi
Melisandre be like Mother Gothel at the end
Your month, your underrated Odyssey incident
January - Telemachus throwing his staff on the ground and bursting into tears
February - Antinous slamming Odysseus with a stool
March - Telemachus lamenting that the gods have forsaken him while Athena, in disguise, is right beside him
April - Odysseus hiding under sheep and behind faeces while escaping the cyclops
May - Odysseus taunting the cyclops even while he throws giant boulders at him
June - Ctesippus throwing a cow’s hoof at Odysseus
July - Nausicaa and her handmaidens washing clothes naked at the riverbank when they find Odysseus, also naked
August - Odysseus wanting to kill Eurylochus at Circe’s island
September - Peisistratus becoming an “intimate friend” of Telemachus
October - Odysseus lying to a disguised Athena, which impresses and amuses her
November - the suitors making excuses for their bad archery, with Antinous blaming it on the fact that it’s the day of Apollo’s feast
December - Penelope getting the suitors to give her gifts, delighting Odysseus by her cunning
I was looking up something today and two of my recent searches popped up. I think that they may perhaps be equivalent.
“Your name isn’t Hermes, it’s Bore-mes. Because you bore me.”
- Apollo to Hermes (at one point, probably)
"Telephones didn't exist in Ancient Greece." What do you mean?? Odysseus literally had one.
How do I explain that my fandom is approximately 3000 years old, my favourite characters are war criminals and Alexander the Great liked the same gay ship as me
Achilles and Patroclus are asteroids
There are two trojan asteroids named after Achilles and Patroclus. Discovered 22 February 1906 by Max Wolf at Heidelberg, 588 Achilles was the first-ever Jupiter trojan found. Only eight months later (17 October 1906), August Kopff discovered the Binary Trojan 617 Patroclus at Heidelberg.
They are reunited in the stars.
There’s a butterfly called Morpho achilles patroclus
So, the other day, I just found out that the butterfly Morpho achilles has a subspecies called Morpho achilles patroclus. There’s also a butterfly called Morpho deidamia.
