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...
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
3. The ancient audiences conceived of the heroic world as one big interconnected family, Dannaus, Aegyptus, Agenor etec knit Persians, Greeks, Egyptians, and Phoenicians into one family. Hektor and Memnon were cousins!
4. Skin color and other physical features in epic don't map onto modern concepts of race. These assumptions are truly anachronistic and have everything to do with our own preoccupations
One final thread on why the gender, race, appearance of actors in the #Odyssey shouldn’t matter, and, moreover, why appearances are more complicated in this epic than any other
Athena repeatedly makes him ugly and nobler again, so much so that there’s no sense of what he truly looks like: is he the pirate man in book 8, the withered beggar in book 16, the godlike man before Telemachus in book 16, or the cleaned up beau of Penelope in book 23?
Athena repeatedly makes him ugly and nobler again, so much so that there’s no sense of what he truly looks like: is he the pirate man in book 8, the withered beggar in book 16, the godlike man before Telemachus in book 16, or the cleaned up beau of Penelope in book 23?
sorry folks. Achilles and Odysseus are not role models, they are epic heroes. Each epic starts by specifying their destructiveness to their communities.
Iliad: Achilles's rage sends myriad Achaeans to their doom
Odyssey: Odysseus tried to bring his men home and failed
in fact, the entire heroic age--the events of the Theban and Trojan Wars--is aimed at ERADICATING THE RACE OF HEROES because they are too bellicose towards each other and irreverent towards the gods [see Hesiod's Works and Days and the fragmentary Cypria]
And this is not a modern reading. As early as the 6th century BCE, allegorical interpretations [i.e., those that assumed the epics contained secret or indirect meanings] were dominant alongside the understanding that the poems were complex and their protagonists flawed