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.
They should also consider their constituents.
I think we can go easy on anyone who took Antigone's money and did something else with it. There was nothing disingenuous there and I think we all take compromised funds in one way or another.
But @antigonejournal team, you can help us all set a standard for positive engagement by rethinking the damage that supporting that work can do.
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