Agamemnon, in a press conference today, declared the start of a 1266 BCE Commission to combat the #fakenews Helen and Clytenmestra apologists and the #AntiArgive lies of the Iliad which shows the Trojans as human beings
IN particular, the Peloponnesian death lord was eager to combat anti-Greek and pro-women propaganda, claiming that Helen wasn't all to blame or that people shouldn't sacrifice their daughters.
Agamemnon continued by telling the assembled ghosts that liberal Marxists like Homer and Euripides had been corrupting the youth for too long and that they needed real patriotic education to rid their fatherlands of their epidemics of sympathy, pity, and human understanding
As the ghosts looked around in confusion, Agamemnon started to get a little louder, claiming that the plague was fake news, planted by the Trojans, that Achilles was a Trojan puppet running a sex-trafficking ring, and that Odysseus wasn't a real Greek anyway...
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Ok, one more thread on Achilles and Odysseus and how we should read Homer then I promise I will chill
The reason I am profoundly unchill about this is the confusion of rich epic narrative for simple paradigmatic propaganda
Homeric poetry is like a philosophical dialogue, a tragedy, or a piece of visual art: it invites audiences to explore its narrative through their experiences, and to compare their experiences to epic
No one reads, hears, or experiences the epic at any given time and no one comes away with the same conclusions—we bring our experiences and expectations closer together through conversation
At the beginning of the poem, the narrator says he tried super hard to rescue his men, but failed, "because they died thanks to their own recklessnesss" (gr. σφῇσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν)
25 lines later, Zeus complains
“Mortals! They are always blaming the gods and saying that evil comes from us when they themselves suffer pain beyond their lot because of their own recklessness.”
To summarize the problem, in a passage in book 9 of the Iliad dual forms--nominal and verbal forms meant for two people--are used for more than two people in overlap with plural forms.
It is easy to dunk on absurd theories that make Achilles a culture warrior representing some kind of prelapsarian ubermensch. Let me tell you why that’s dangerous.
1.Jocular, attacking dismissals let those desperate hatemongers feel persecuted and feeds their sense of righteous outsider position
2.It implies in a damaging way that there is a correct and singular interpretation of an ancient poem (or really any work of art)
Antigone can do great work and the journal is doing a disservice to its other authors by standing behind a bad decision
All of us who move into this new, fast digital space make mistakes trying to respond and adapt. I have have RT'd some bad stuff, said stupid things, and thought better of earlier stances.
A good journal should have a public editorial board and a clear statement on where their funding comes from.