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ithaca-my-beloved · 7 months

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We're studying the Aeneid in class and I'm gradually coming to discover that any time my teacher asks if we "noticed anything interesting going on here" 99% of the time the answer is homoeroticism

#literally hadn't even read book 10 because i was away at the weekend and i guessed it #aeneas and pallas #nisus and euryalus #classicists look at any two dudes virgil writes and immediately rush to open wattpad #virgil #aeneid #queueusque tandem abutere catilina patientia nostra

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proceduralbob · 1 year

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The spear kept on the fatal course, unstay'd By plates of ir'n, which o'er the shield were laid: Thro' folded brass and tough bull hides it pass'd, His corslet pierc'd, and reach'd his heart at last. In vain the youth tugs at the broken wood; The soul comes issuing with the vital blood: He falls; his arms upon his body sound; And with his bloody teeth he bites the ground.

Aeneid, Virgil (trans. John Dryden)

#books i read in 2022 #aeneid #virgil #john dryden #i mean i think it's john dryden #the copy i have actually does not list the translator #so i may just be mistaken based on what came up when i googled it #if so please let me know #in any case #two stars #i did not enjoy it like i did the iliad and odyssey

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dilfaeneas · 2 years

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virgil giving kassandra a husband was tragic and cute. She deserves love even if she doesn’t know what to do with it. Big up Coroebus! Sorry u got merced

#Virgil's Aeneid #The Aeneid #the aeneid book two #kassandra #kassandra of troy #coroebus #ch: i get it tho #tagamemnon #classics #Greek Mythology #trojan heroes #The Trojan War #pre fall of troy #Coro's death and the aftermath is one of the darkest things in the aeneid honestly

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all-pacas · 1 year

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I finished my Rome book and have now begun one about Pompeii. I’m 65 pages in and I already love it: yes, it covers the volcano, but most of the book is about “this is what the town and daily life of it would have been like, actually.” Fascinating stuff. Things I’ve learned so far:

- The streets in Pompeii have sidewalks sometimes a meter higher than the road, with stepping stones to hop across as “crosswalks.” I’d seen some photos before. The book points out that, duh, Pompeii had no underground drainage, was built on a fairly steep incline, and the roads were more or less drainage systems and water channels in the rain.

- Unlike today, where “dining out” is expensive and considered wasteful on a budget, most people in Pompeii straight up didn’t have kitchens. You had to eat out if you were poor; only the wealthy could afford to eat at home.

- Most importantly, and I can’t believe in all the pop culture of Pompeii this had never clicked for me: Pompeii had a population between 6-35,000 people. Perhaps 2,000 died in the volcano. Contemporary sources talk about the bay being full of fleeing ships. Most people got the hell out when the eruption started. The number who died are still a lot, and it’s still gruesome and morbid, but it’s not “an entire town and everyone in it.” This also makes it difficult for archeologists, apparently (and logically): those who remained weren’t acting “normally,” they were sheltering or fleeing a volcano. One famous example is a wealthy woman covered in jewelry found in the bedroom in the glaridator barracks. Scandal! She must have been having an affair and had it immortalized in ash! The book points out that 17 other people and several dogs were also crowded in that one small room: far more likely, they were all trying to shelter together. Another example: Houses are weirdly devoid of furniture, and archeologists find objects in odd places. (Gardening supplies in a formal dining room, for example.) But then you remember that there were several hours of people evacuating, packing their belongings, loading up carts and getting out… maybe the gardening supplies were brought to the dining room to be packed and abandoned, instead of some deeper esoteric meaning. The book argues that this all makes it much harder to get an accurate read on normal life in a Roman town, because while Pompeii is a brilliant snapshot, it’s actually a snapshot of a town undergoing major evacuation and disaster, not an average day.

- Oh, another great one. Outside of a random laundry place in Pompeii, someone painted a mural with two scenes. One of them referenced Virgil’s Aeneid. Underneath that scene, someone graffiti’d a reference to a famous line from that play, except tweaked it to be about laundry. This is really cool, the book points out, because it implies that a) literacy and education was high enough that one could paint a reference and have it recognized, and b) that someone else could recognize it and make a dumb play on words about it and c) the whole thing, again, means that there’s a certain amount of literacy and familiarity with “Roman pop culture” even among fairly normal people at the time.

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mask131 · 4 months

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The truth about Medusa and her rape... Mythology breakdown time!

With the recent release of the Percy Jackson television series, Tumblr is bursting with mythological posts, and the apparition of Medusa the Gorgon has been the object of numerous talks throughout this website… Including more and more spreading of misinformation, and more debates about what is the “true” version of Medusa’s backstory.

Already let us make that clear: the idea that Medusa was actually “blessed” or “gifted” by Athena her petrifying gaze/snake-hair curse is to my knowledge not at all part of the Antique world. I still do not know exactly where this comes from, but I am aware of no Greek or Roman texts that talked about this – so it seems definitively a modern invention. After all, the figure of Medusa and her entire myth has been taken part, reinterpreted and modified by numerous modern women, feminist activist, feminist movements or artists engaged in the topic of women’s life and social conditions – most notably Medusa becoming the “symbol of raped women’ wrath and fury”. It is an interesting reading and a fascinating update of the ancient texts, and it is a worthy take on its own time and context – but today we are not talking about the posterity, reinvention and continuity of Medusa as a myth and a symbol. I want to clarify some points about the ACTUAL myth or legend of Medusa – the original tale, as told by the Greeks and then by the Romans.

Most specifically the question: Was Medusa raped?

Step 1: Yes, but no.

The backstory of Medusa you will find very often today, ranging from mythology manuals (vulgarization manuals of course) to Youtube videos, goes as such: Medusa was a priestess of Athena who got raped by Poseidon while in Athena’s temple, and as a result of this, Athena punished Medusa by turning her into the monstrous Gorgon.

Some will go even further claiming Athena’s “curse” wasn’t a punishment but a “gift” or blessing – and again, I don’t know where this comes from and nobody seems to be able to give me any reliable source for that, so… Let’s put this out of there.

Now this backstory – famous and popular enough to get into Riodan’s book series for example – is partially true. There are some elements here very wrong – and by wrong I do mean wrong.

The story of Medusa being raped and turned into a monster due to being raped does indeed exist, and it is the most famous and widespread of all the Medusa stories, the one people remembered for the longest time and wrote and illustrated the most about. Hence why Medusa became in the 20th century this very important cultural symbol tied to rape and the abuse of women and victim-blaming. HOWEVER – the origin of this story is Ovid’s Metamorphoses, from the first century CE or so. Ovid? A Roman poet writing for Roman people. “Metamorphoses”? One of the two fundamental works of Roman literature and one of the two main texts of Roman mythology, alongside Virgil’s Aeneid. This is a purely Roman story belonging to the Roman culture – and not the Greek one. The story of Medusa’s rape does not have Greek precedents to my knowledge, Ovid introduced the element of rape – which is no surprise given Ovid turned half of the romances of Greek mythology into rapes. Note that, on top of all this, Ovid wasn’t even writing for religious purposes, nor was his text an actual mythological effort – he wrote it with pure literary intentions at heart. It is just a piece of poetry and literature taking inspiration from the legends of the Greek world, not some sort of sacred text.

Second big point: The legend I summarized above? It isn’t even the story Ovid wrote, since there are a lot of elements that do not come from Ovid’s retelling of the story (book fourth of the Metamorphoses). For example Ovid never said Medusa was a priestess of Athena – all he said was that she was raped in the temple of Athena. I shouldn’t even be writing Athena since again, this is a Roman text: we are speaking of Minerva here, and of Neptune, not of Athena or Poseidon. Similarly, Minerva’s curse did not involve the petrifying gaze – rather all Ovid wrote about was that Minerva turned Medusa’s hair into snakes, to “punish” her because her hair were very beautiful, and it was what made her have many suitors (none of which she wanted to marry apparently), and it is also implied it is what made Neptune fall in love (or rather fall in lust) with her. I guess it is from this detail that the reading of “Athena’s curse was a gift” comes from – even though this story also clearly does victim-blaming of rape here.

But what is very fascinating is that… we are not definitively sure Neptune raped Medusa in Ovid’s retelling. For sure, the terms used by Ovid in his fourth book of Metamorphoses are clear: this was an action of violating, sexually assaulting, of soiling and corrupting, we are talking about rape. But Ovid refers several other times to Medusa in his other books, sometimes adding details the fourth-book stories does not have (the sixth book for examples evokes how Neptune turned into a bird to seduce Medusa, which is completely absent from the fourth book’s retelling of Medusa’ curse). And in all those other mentions, the terms to designate the relationship between Medusa and Neptune are more ambiguous, evoking seduction and romance rather than physical or sexual assault. (It does not help that Ovid has an habit of constantly confusing consensual and non-consensual sex in his poems, meaning that a rape in one book can turn into a romance in another, or reversal)

But the latter fact makes more sense when you recall that the rape element was invented and added by Ovid. Before, yes Poseidon and Medusa loved each other, but it was a pure romance, or at least a consensual one-night. Heck, if we go back to the oldest records of the love between Poseidon and Medusa, back in Hesiod’s Theogony, we have descriptions of the two of them laying together in a beautiful, flowery meadow – a stereotypical scene of pastoral romances – with no mention of any brutality or violence of any sort. As a result, it makes sense the original “romantic” story would still “leak” or cast a shadow over Ovid’s reinvented and slightly-confused tale.

Step 2: So… no rape?

Well, if we go by Greek texts, no, apparently Medusa was not raped in Greek mythology, and only became a rape victim through Ovid.

The Ancient Greek texts all record Poseidon and Medusa sleeping with each other and having children, but no mention of rape. And the whole “curse of Athena” thing is not present in the oldest records – no temple of Athena soiling, no angry Athena cursing a poor girl… “No curse?” you say “But then how did Medusa got turned into a Gorgon”? Answer: she did not. She was born like that.

As I said before, the oldest record of Medusa’s romance but also of her family comes from Hesiod’s Theogony (Hesiod being one of the two “founding authors” of Greek mythology, alongside Homer – Homer did wrote several times about Medusa, but only as a disembodied head and as a monster already dead, so we don’t have any information about her life). And what do we learn? That Medusa is part of a set of three sisters known as the Gorgons – because oh yes, Ovid did not mention Medusa’s sister now did he? How did Medusa’s sisters ALSO got snake-hair or petrifying-gaze if only Medusa was cursed for sleeping with Neptune? Ovid does not give us any answer because again, it is an “adaptational plot hole”, and the people that try to adapt Ovid’s story have to deal with the slight problem of Stheno and Euryale needing to share their sister’s curse despite seemingly not being involved in the whole Neptune business. Anyway, back to the Greek text.

So, you have those three Gorgon sisters, and Medusa is said to be mortal while her sisters are not. Why is it such a big deal? Because Medusa wasn’t originally some random human or priestess. Oh no! Who were the Gorgons’ parents? Phorcys and Keto/Ceto, aka two sea-gods. Not just two sea-gods – two sea-gods of the ancient, primordial generation of sea-gods, the one that predated Poseidon, and that were cousins to the Titans, the sea-gods born of Gaia mating with Pontos.

So the Gorgons were “divine” of nature – and this is why Medusa being a mortal was considered to be a MASSIVE problem and handicap for her, an abnormal thing for the daughter of two deities. But let’s dig a bit further… Who were Phorcys and Ceto? Long story short: in Greek mythology, they were considered to be sea-equivalents of Typhon and Gaia. They were the parents of many monsters and many sea-horrors: Keto/Ceto herself had her name attributed and equated with any very large creature (like whales) or any terrifying monster (like dragons) from the sea. The Gorgons themselves was a trio of monsters, but their sisters, that directly act as their double in the myth of Perseus? The Graiai – the monstrous trio of old women sharing one eye and one tooth. Hesiod also drops the fact that Ladon (the dragon that guarded the golden apples of the Hesperids), and Echidna (the snake-woman that mated with Typhon and became known as the “mother of monsters”) were also children of Phorcys and Ceto, while other authors will add other monster-related characters such as Scylla (of Charybdis and Scylla fame), the sirens, or Thoosa (the mother of Polyphemus the cyclop). Medusa herself is technically a “mother of monsters” since she birthed both Pegasus the flying horse and Chrysaor, a giant. So here is something very important to get: Medusa, and the Gorgons, were part of a family of monsters. Couple that with the absence of any mention of curses in these ancient texts, and everything is clear.

Originally Medusa was not a woman cursed to become a monster: she was born a monster, part of a group of monster siblings, birthed by monster-creating deities, and she belonged to the world of the “primordial abominations from the sea”, and the pre-Olympian threats, the remnants of the primordial chaos. It is no surprise that the Gorgons were said to live at the edge of the very known world, in the last patch of land before the end of the universe – in the most inhuman, primitive and liminal area possible. They were full-on monsters!

Now you might ask why Poseidon would sleep with a horrible monster, especially when you recall that the Greeks loved to depict the Gorgons as truly bizarre and grotesque. It wasn’t just snake-hair and petrifying gaze: they had boar tusks, and metallic claws, and bloated eyes, and a long tongue that constantly hanged down their bearded chin, and very large heads – some very old depictions even show her with a female centaur body! In fact, the ancient texts imply that it wasn’t so much the Gorgon’s gaze or eyes that had the power to turn people into stone – but that rather the Gorgon was just so hideous and so terrifying to look at people froze in terror – and then literally turned into stone out of fear and disgust. We are talking Lovecraftian level of eldritch horror here. So why would Poseidon, an Olympian god, sleep with one of these horrors? Well… If you know your Poseidon it wouldn’t surprise you too much because Poseidon had a thing for monsters. As a sort of “dark double” of Zeus, whereas Zeus fell in love with beautiful princesses and noble queens and birthed great gods and brave heroes, Poseidon was more about getting freaky with all sorts of unusual and bizarre goddesses, and giving birth to bandits and monsters. A good chunk of the villains of Greek mythology were born out of Poseidon’s loins: Polyphemus, Antaios, Orion, Charybdis, the Aloads… And even his most benevolent offspring has freaky stuff about it – Proteus the shapeshifter or Triton half-man half-fish… So yes, Poseidon sleeping with an abominable Gorgon is not so much out of character.

Step 3: The missing link

Now that we established what Medusa started out as, and what she ended up as… We need to evoke the evolution from point Hesiod to point Ovid, because while people summarized the Medusa debate as “Sea-born monster VS raped and punished woman”, there is a third element needed to understand this whole situation…

Yes Ovid did invent the rape. But he did not invent the idea that Medusa had been cursed by Athena.

The “gorgoneion” – the visual and artistic motif of the Gorgon’s head – was, as I said, a grotesque and monstrous face used to invoke fright into the enemies or to repel any vile influence or wicked spirit by the principle of “What’s the best way to repel bad stuff? Badder stuff”. Your Gorgon was your gargoyle, with all the hideous traits I described before – represented in front (unlike all the other side-portraits of gods and heroes), with the face being very large and flat, a big tongue out of a tusked-mouth, snake-hair, bulging crazy eyes, sometimes a beard or scales… Pure monster. But then… from the fifth century BCE to the second century BCE we see a slow evolution of the “gorgoneion” in art. Slowly the grotesque elements disappear, and the Gorgon’s face becomes… a regular, human face. Even more: it even becomes a pretty woman’s face! But with snakes instead of hair. As such, the idea that Medusa was a gorgeous woman who just had snakes and cursed-eyes DOES come from Ancient Greece – and existed well before Ovid wrote his rape story.

But what was the reason behind this change?

Well, we have to look at the Roman era again. Ovid’s tale of Medusa being cursed for her rape at the hands of Neptune had to rival with another record collected by a Greek author Apollodorus, or Pseudo-Apollodorus, in his Bibliotheca. In this collection of Greek myths, Apollodorus writes that indeed, Medusa was cursed by Athena to have her beautiful hair that seduced everybody be turned into snakes… But it wasn’t because of any rape or forbidden romance, no. It was just because Medusa was a very vain woman who liked to brag about her beauty and hair – and had the foolish idea of saying her hair looked better than Athena’s. (If you recall tales such as Arachne’s or the Judgement of Paris, you will know that despite Athena being wise and clever, one of her main flaws is her vanity).

“Wait a minute,” you are going to tell me, “The Bibliotheca was created in the second century CE! Well after Greece became part of the Roman Empire, and after Ovid’s Metamorphoses became a huge success! It isn’t a true Greek myth, it is just Ovid’s tale being projected here…” And people did agree for a time… Until it was discovered, in the scholias placed around the texts of Apollonios of Rhodes, that an author of the fifth century BCE named Pherecyde HAD recorded in his time a version of Medusa’s legend where she had been cursed into becoming an ugly monster as punishment for her vanity. We apparently do not have the original text of Pherecyde, but the many scholias referring to this lost piece are very clear about this. This means that the story that Apollodorus recorded isn’t a “novelty”, but rather the latest record of an older tradition going back to the fifth century BCE… THE SAME CENTURY THAT THE GORGONEION STARTED LOSING THEIR GROTESQUE, and that the face of Medusa started becoming more human in art.

[EDIT: I also forgot to add that this evolution of Medusa is also proved by strange literary elements, such as Pindar's mention in a poem of his (around 490 BCE) of "fair-cheeked Medusa". A description which seems strange given how Medusa used to be depicted as the epitome of ugliness... But that makes sense if the "cursed beauty" version of the myth had been going around at the time!]

And thus it is all connected and explained. Ovid did invent the rape yes – but he did not invent the idea of Athena cursing Medusa. It pre-existed as the most “recent” and dominating legend in Ancient Greece, having overshadowed by Ovid’s time the oldest Hesiodic records of Medusa being born a monster. So what Ovid did wasn’t completely create a new story out of nowhere, but twist the Greek traditions of Athena cursing Medusa and Medusa having a relationship with Poseidon, so that the two legends would form one and same story. And this explains in retrospect why Ovid focuses so much on describing Medusa’s beautiful hair, and why Ovid’s Minerva would think turning her hair into snake would be a “punishment fit for the crime”: these are leftovers of the Greek tale where Medusa was punished for her boasting and her vanity.

CONCLUSION

Here is the simplified chronology of how Medusa’s evolution went.

A) Primitive Greek myths, Hesiodic tradition: Born a monster out of a family of sea-monsters and monstrous immortals. Is a grotesque, gargoylesque, eldritch abomination. Athena has only an indirect conflict with her, due to being Perseus’ “fairy godmother”. Has a lovely romance with Poseidon.

B) Slow evolution throughout Classical Greece and further: Medusa becomes a beautiful, human-looking girl that was cursed to have snake for hair and petrifying eyes, instead of being a Lovecraftian horror people could not gaze upon. Her conflict with Athena becomes direct, as it is Athena that cursed her due to being offended by her vain boasting. Her punishment is for her vanity and arrogant comparison to the goddess.

C) Ovid comes in: Medusa’s romance with Poseidon becomes a rape, and she is now punished for having been raped inside Athena’s temple.

[As a final note, I want to insist upon the fact that the story of Medusa being raped is not less "worthy" than any other version of the myth. Due to its enormous popularity, how it shaped the figure of Medusa throughout the centuries, and how it still survives today and echoes current-day problems, to try to deny the valid place of this story in the world of myths and legends would be foolish. HOWEVER it is important to place back things in their context, to recognize that it is not the ONLY tale of Medusa, that it was NOT part of Greek mythology, but rather of Roman legends - and let us all always remember this time Poseidon slept with a Lovecraftian horror because my guy is kinky.]

EDIT:

For illustration, I will place here visuals showing how the Ancient art evolved alongside Medusa's story.

Before the 5th century BCE: Medusa is a full-on monster

From the 5th century to the 2nd century BCE: A slow evolution as Medusa goes from a full-on monster to a human turned into a monster. As a result the two depictions of the grotesque and beautiful gorgoneion coexist.

Post 2nd century BCE: Medusa is now a human with snake hair, and just that

#greek mythology #medusa #gorgon #athena #gorgons #poseidon #neptune #minerva #ovid #rape in mythology #greek monsters #roman mythology

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dionysus-complex · 3 months

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i. The Wanderer (anonymous Old English poem ca. 9th-10th century; trans. A.S. Kline)

ii. Maffeo Vegio, Book XIII of the Aeneid, 1428, trans. Michael Putnam

iii. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers, 1954

#intertextuality #web weaving #lingua latina #old english #tolkien

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totally-italy · 1 day

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Wherefore dost motivation hold deep hatred for me?

As the heading probably implies, I am currently lacking a lot of motivation, which is truly sub-optimal because I literally have my Italian GCSEs this week and I literally have not revised. Moreover, my End of Years are fast approaching and I have my French GCSEs in three week's time. Help.

Consequentially, even though my history teacher still refuses to believe that it is a word, I have decided to turn this into one of those posts where my dopamine literally just relies on the number of notes that I recieve. As promised, @the-red-planet-mars, the floor is yours you have been tagged.

Rules:

Please don't spam the comment section.

You can tag a maximum of 5 people.

Please don't spam reblog.

10 notes: I will actually plan my English homework so that I can then do it without having to ask for an extension. It is due on the day on which I have two of my Italian papers.

15 notes: I will update my 'Aeneid' notes so that my virtual document is up to date with the translations that we have done in class. I should technically also revise the themes and how Juno is portrayed, but we don't talk about that right now.

20 notes: If I haven't done this yet, I will create both a Spanish Quizlet with all the vocabulary I need to learn and I will create a Latin one for all the vocabulary from 'The Aeneid' that I need to know.

25 notes: I will plan, in English, different things that I could say for the picture for my French IGCSE oral. Also, this is a picture I will be using for my Spanish End of Years, so that is doubly helpful.

30 notes: I will do an Italian listening paper though I will listen to it at a faster speed than what is asked because otherwise I will literally get so bored and lose all will to live.

45 notes: I will finish researching Virgil and the historical context.

60 notes: I will practice Latin and Greek vocabulary on Quizlet every day after this week, for at least 10 minutes each day for each language.

75 notes: I really need to do this. I will make a poster with how to form different tenses in Italian.

100 notes: I will do an Italian Writing practice paper. This is going to cause me so much suffering. Help me.

120 notes: I will actually write down different expressions, including idomatic phrases, that I could use to describe the picture for my French IGCSE oral.

130 notes: I will make physics notes on energy.

140 notes: I will make notes on quantitative chemistry.

150 notes: I will make a poster with how to form different tenses in French.

155 notes: I will watch the AQA videos on the Cold War and make notes on them.

170 notes: I will do a practice Spanish listening paper.

200 notes: I will practice Latin and Greek vocabulary on Quizlet every day after this week, for at least 30 minutes each day for each language, including a written vocabulary test.

230 notes: I will do a practice Spanish reading and writing paper.

250 notes: I will do a practice Latin translation and ask my teacher if she happens to have a mark scheme.

270 notes: I will do a practice Greek translation and ask my teacher if she happens to have a mark scheme.

300 notes: I will finish my RSP notes on Crime and Punishment.

350 notes: I finish my Biology notes on reproduction.

380 notes: I will finish my RSP notes on Religion and Life.

430 notes: I will look through my history notes on Germany and finish them in accordance to the AQA book.

520 notes: I will do a practice Greek language paper.

530 notes: I will do a practice Latin language paper.

605 notes: I will actually write down different expressions, including idomatic phrases, that I could use to describe the picture for my Spanish End of Year oral.

720 notes: I will finish my RSP notes on Buddhism.

850 notes: I will make full notes on the Cold War.

Honestly, if you have even bothered to read through all of these, you have absolutely earned more respect that I thought I was capable of giving to a single human being. I technically have a lot more things I should do, including re-reading Things Fall Apart and actually making complete maths notes, as well as notes for the sciences, but I doubt I will never get this many tags anyway.

Edit: It has been five minutes and I already got 14 notes. I am actually terrified of this site. What in Tartarus? Y'all are crazy and I love you so much.

#Good luck #You guys are never going to manage this #I really need the motivation but there are some things that I really don't want to do #Studying is so hard #If you guys happen to have any tips #Do feel free to put them in the comments #Unfortunately #Those count as notes so you would actually be helping #Thank you in advance #I feel like this will never work #But we shall see #l'italiana parla #I'm scheduling this so that it sends after lunch #I need to go and eat now #I also have a couple of pieces of homework to quickly do #Oops

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tylermileslockett · 3 months

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Chthonic Descent (#4 in my Orpheus and Eurydice series)

The Roman poet Virgil, in his poem “Georgics”, gives a lush description of Orpheus descent into Hades;

“…entering the grove gloomy with black horror, he approached the Manes (dead spirits), and the tremendous king, and the hearts that know not how to relent at human prayers. But the thin shades being stirred up by his song from the lowest mansions of Erebus moved along, and the Ghosts deprived of light… mothers and husbands, and the departed bodies of magnanimous heroes, boys and unmarried girls, and youths laid on funeral pyres before the faces of their parents, whom the black mud and squalid reeds of Cocytus, and the lake hateful with stagnant water encloses around, and styx nine times interfused restrains.” (-translation from the Latin by John Martyn.)

The word Chthonic in my title is an adjective describing something belonging to the underworld. This would be an apt time to discuss the structure and details of the ancient Greek underworld; the realm of Hades. Our oldest literary source in Homer’s “Odyssey” (700 B.C.) portrays the realm as dark, gloomy, and frightening. A place where all souls go, and lacking skin and bone; have no physical form. The shades (spirits) wander mindless, and without memory.

In Virgil’s “Aeneid” (25 B.C.) we get a much more detailed account of the geography. Our hero Aeneas pays the boatman Charon to ferry him across the river styx, and after passing the three headed guard-hound Cerberus, they eventually come to a crossroad leading to two important realms; Tartarus (an invincible fortress guarded by one of the Furies, where sinners are punished) and Elysium (a sunny paradise where pure souls pursue leisure activities).

As always thanks for looking and reading. Please share this post and I'll toss charon a coin for you. Xoxo

Like this art? It will be in my illustrated book with over 130 other full page illustrations coming in march to kickstarter. Please check my links in my linktree in my bio to join the kickstarter notification page. 🤟❤️🏛

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what-even-is-thiss · 1 year

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Hey do you have any literature recommendations for people who want to broaden their knowledge on the classics and Greek/Roman myths without taking university courses?

So like for people (such as myself) who have read Bullfinch's Myths of Greece and Rome and Edith Hamilton's Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes but want to deepen their knowledge and maybe go to intermediate level type stuff. Or whatever the level above the mentioned literature is.

Well those two books are quite old and skip over quite a few things. Both are very important to our culture, historically, but I'd recommend reading through some more modern popular retellings like Stephen Fry's Mythos series if you're looking for pure entertainment and a dummy's guide to Greek myths.

The Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology is a useful reference book if you have difficulty keeping track of all these names and whatnot. It's just a reference book but you know. Having a reference book handy is quite useful. I personally prefer reference books when it comes to checking stuff when I'm doing mythology things anyways. They're generally more organized than the internet.

If you're looking for entertaining retellings of less popular myths, I'd actually recommend going to videos and podcasts for that. YouTubers like MonarchsFactory, Overly Sarcastic Productions, Jake Doubleyoo, and Mythology & Fiction Explained are all people who do a lot of research themselves on the myths they retell and I would recommend all of them to basically anybody. As far as podcasts go, Mythology & Fiction Explained has a podcast version and Let's Talk About Myths, Baby! is a very informative podcast that talks about sources for the myths and has interviews with experts on the subjects. It's also a podcast that is specifically Greco-Roman based.

As far as doing slightly more in-depth research, I cannot recommend theoi.com enough. I really can't. It has overviews of the most common myths, it has pages about god and hero cults, it cites it's sources and has an online library of translated texts. It's just really good. Go clicking around it for a while. It's a lot of fun if you're into that sort of thing.

As far as primary sources for myths go, there's a few places you could start. The Iliad, perhaps. The most recent English translation is by Caroline Alexander but I personally prefer Stanley Lombardo's translation. The Odyssey is a more accessible read in my opinion if you're not used to reading epic poetry. Emily Wilson's translation is especially accessible, written in iambic pentameter and generally replicating Homer's simple conversational language.

The third traditional entrance into the epic cycle of the surviving literature is the Aeneid. The newest translation of that is by Shadi Bartsch, which is pretty good, but it reads more like prose than poetry. Would still highly recommend it though. Robert Fitzgerald's translation is also good.

If you wanna get fancy you can read the Post-Homerica which attempts to bridge the gap between the Iliad and the Odyssey. It's not often read but it's one of the latest pagan sources we have from people who still practiced ancient Greek religion.

If you want a collection of short stories from ancient times, Ovid's your guy. Metamorphosis is specifically Roman and specifically Ovid's fanfiction, but it's also a valid primary resource and Ovid generally views women as people. What a concept!

Though I think the absolute best overview from ancient times itself is The Library aka Biblioteca by pseudo-apollodorus. Doesn't matter what translation you get. The prose is simple to the point where it's difficult to screw it up. Not artistic at all. It is, quite simply, a guy from ancient times trying to write down the mythological history of the world as he knew it. It has a bunch of summaries of myths in it, and most modern printings also have a table of contents so you can essentially use it as a reference book or a cheat sheet. I love it.

The Homeric Hymns weren't actually written by Homer but that's what they're called anyways. They're a lovely bit of poetry because, well, they were originally hymns. They've got some of the earliest full tellings of the Hades and Persephone story and the birth of Hermes in them. They also provide an insight into how ancient people who were most devoted to these gods viewed them. Go read the Homeric Hymns. They're lovely. You can buy the Michael Crudden translation or you can read a public domain translation online. I don't care. Just read them.

If you're into tedious lists, the next place I'd recommend you go after you read all the fun stuff is Hesiod's Theogony. Hesiod, the red pill douchebag of the ancient world, decided he was gonna write down the genealogy of all the Greek gods. That means lists. I'm not exaggerating. Be prepared for a lot of lists. But this work also has the earliest and one of the most complete versions of the story of Pandora, the creation of humans, and the most popular version of the Greek creation myth. So, it's very useful. If you can take all the lists.

The Argonautica aka the voyage of the argo by Apollonius of Rhodes, is also here. That is also a thing you can read. About the golden fleece and whatnot. And Jason. You know Jason. We all hate Jason.

Greek theatre also provides a good overview of specific myths. The three theben plays, Medea, the Bacche, etc. We've only got thirty-something surviving plays in their entirety so like... look up the list. Find one that looks interesting. Read it. Find a performance of it online, maybe. They're good.

If you want to dive into the mythology as a religion that was practiced, Greek Religion by Walter Burkurt and Ancient Greek Cults: A Guide by Jennifer Larson are pretty good books on the topic and often used as textbooks in college courses.

If you wanna get meta and get a feel for what the general public today thinks about Greek myths and what the average person that's sort of knowledgeable about Greek myths knows, the books you already mentioned are good. That's what people usually read. In addition to those, most people's intro to Greek myths generally involves The Complete World of Greek Mythology by Richard Buxton, D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths by Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire, or The Percy Jackson series.

I've been flipping through the big stacks of mythology books I keep on my table trying to remember if I've forgotten anything but I don't think I have so, yeah. Hope this helps. There's no correct starting point here. Once you get started there's a nearly endless void of complications and scholarship you can fall down that you'll never reach the bottom of. This post is basically just a guide to the tip of the iceberg.

#mythology #greek mythology #roman mythology #reference #roman said a thing #classical mythology #classics #classics reference #mythology for beginners #mythology reference #greco-roman

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userdogmeat · 7 months

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sunt lacrimae rerum

@falloutober - 16

Preston Garvey found refuge in the Sole Survivor's compassion and understanding of human sorrow, offering him and the Minutemen a new chance at life.

Cover of Sunt lacrimae rerum, 1931; dialogue from Fallout 4; Fallout 4 Post-War Sanctuary Hills concept art; "Lacrimae Rerum: building a bridge between literary and monumental commemoration" by Alex Donnelly; "The Battle of Lexington" by William Barnes Wollen; screenshot of Preston Garvey from Fallout 4; "The Aeneid" Book 1, lines 566-568 by Virgil, translated by Stanley Lombardo; "Two Dead" by Käthe Kollwitz

#falloutober #falloutober 2023 #falloutober2023 #preston garvey #webweaving #this prompt had no business being so hard #i dont even know if i did it any justice it was so tough #but anyways your honor i love preston #if anything happens to preston i will kill everybody in this room and then myself #userdogmeat creates

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finelythreadedsky · 2 months

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Hey! I just saw one of your qrts of a poem on censorship and I’m really curious about one of the tags you added that said there is a connection between the Jewish sense of identity and the ancient Carthaginians/Phoenicians and I’m super interested, could you please elaborate?

um so the genesis of those tags is actually in two conference talks i heard in december that discussed dido in the civilization video games, which i have never played and know nothing about, but i found it really interesting that the creators of that game give dido an in-game affinity with judaism (that's the religion she's inclined to 'found' if you play as her? or something) and reconstructed the phoenician dialogue her voice actor delivers based on modern hebrew pronunciation. i think it was maureen attali who went into more detail about various jewish approaches to/reception of dido, but i don't remember specifics. i believe the conference proceedings will eventually be published as a book about the reception of the women of the aeneid-- edith hall and magdalena zira are the people behind that.

in an even broader context, i just think it's fascinating that a sense of affinity with the ancient phoenicians and carthaginians seems to develop so easily among modern jews. like the way sonya taaffe's poetry frames both carthage and judea as victims of roman imperialism. and it's sort of baked in on a linguistic level too: it's really easy to learn phoenician/punic if you already know hebrew, and the older convention was even to print phoenician and punic with hebrew letters. if you're familiar with hebrew or even just anything jewish, there are a lot of moments of recognition when you start to look at phoenician and punic history and material culture! like oh wait the suffete? same word as the hebrew name for the book of judges, shoftim. and that's the baal that the bible is always going off about.

like a friend of mine recently joked that the movie frozen is an aeneid 4 retelling bc the sisters elsa and anna map onto elissa (dido) and anna, but the names aren't a coincidence! elsa derives ultimately from the hebrew elisheva, which uses the same root el- as the phoenician name elishat which became elissa in greek/latin! and the name anna became common in europe because hannah (anna in greek) was a common jewish name around the turn of the millennium, cognate with the phoenician name based on the same root that was also latinized as anna!

and also the phoenicians were characterized (both in texts and in reality) by their involvement with trade, which rings with more modern characterizations of jews, and there's also often a degree of untrustworthiness attributed to them because of that association with trading that feels weirdly akin to the last millennium of antisemitism. like i'm thinking of dougherty 2001, the raft of odysseus ch 5-- the picture of the phoenicians suggested in the odyssey looks very much like portrayals of jews, with varying degrees of antisemitism. so i do think there's a sense of (sometimes defensive) identification that easily arises there.

and all that is particularly interesting bc within the bible the phoenicians/canaanites are presented as the enemies of the israelites against whom they're trying to define themselves! and that israelite hostility toward the canaanites is perhaps precisely because they are so similar and so closely related.

anyway reception of the phoenicians is so cool

#long post #ask #amefuyuu

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lesbiaeneas · 8 months

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do you ever think about how the aeneid is all about vicious repetition?

(troy in book 2 // latium in book 12)

do you ever think about how two queens die by their own hands for heroes that have abandoned them for warfare?

(dido in book 4 // amata in book 12)

do you ever think about how aeneas and turnus are mirror images of one another?

(aeneas in book 1 // turnus in book 12)

do you ever think about how the cycle of horrible echoes gives voice to the fact that the aeneid is a poem about trauma? a poem about a man who can't stop reliving the destruction of his city and of his life, and so brings ruin in his wake everywhere he goes? because i think about it a normal amount

(trans. a.s. kline)

#max.txt #aeneid daily #aeneidblogging

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thoodleoo · 2 years

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i love the scene in book two of the aeneid of hector appearing to aeneas in his dreams and telling him to take the gods of troy and flee so that one day he can found a new city for the trojans' descendants to live in, and it's beautifully and powerfully written, but at the same time every time i read it i picture aeneas like this

#aeneas (natus dea who just woke up)#tagamemnon #aeneidposting #queueusque tandem abutere catilina patientia nostra

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