#which is fine bc the odyssey is literally the events following after but the iliad my forever love <333 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hoeratius · 5 months

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okay, asking this question is maybe the dumbest i've ever felt bc it feels like there should be a straightforward, obvious answer here, but every time i've tried to look it up, i've found nothing but pages upon pages of what feels like people talking in circles and only serving to make me more confused in the end. since you're the most knowledgable person i follow when it comes to the Classics, i figured this might be a good place to ask and maybe get an actual answer? (that being said, it's fine if you don't want to/don't have the time to answer this! obviously!!)

where can i read about the older greek myths? as in pre-trojan war. mostly, i'm interested in theseus but also just pre-trojan war stories in general. i know not everything got the iliad/odyssey treatment and there's probably not any surviving text to point at in a lot of cases, but there must've been something. every time i try to look up where to read about the history of theseus, i'm being directed to a bunch of modern retellings, but google has gotten so bad as a search engine, i literally cannot find anything about the origins of this thing everybody's retelling

from what i understand, theseus was sort of everywhere sticking his nose in everything at all times, so i'm not asking for a comprehensive timeline of his whackass life and everything he ever appeared in or anything, but if you could point me in the direction of anything about him--actual plays or academic texts, anything like that--that's more credible than, like, a self-published, self-described "bold new reimagining" with a stock image of a dude in party city roman cosplay as the cover, it would be MUCH appreciated 😭

(again, sorry about how... basic this question is i guess lol? i'm very new to classics in general and still pretty ignorant about everything, so it's EXTREMELY likely that this is a very dumb question with a very obvious answer, but thank you regardless!)

Hello! What an exciting ask (and apologies for my excited and maybe incoherent answer)!

Since you seem to be most interested in Theseus, I’ll use him as an example but much of this can be applied to other Greek heroes/myths/stories more generally.

As you noted, few get the Iliad/Odyssey treatment. In fact, even Achilles and Odysseus don’t, considering the Iliad spans only 7 weeks or so, and the Odyssey misses out on Odysseus’s actions before and during the Trojan War, and after he came home – and he did a lot after he came home. So where to go to find all the other stories that happened?

Some things to keep in mind:

Writers assumed their audience was familiar with the hero’s greatest deeds already

The big boys – Achilles, Odysseus, Theseus, Perseus, Heracles, Oedipus – had their stories shared in many formats. Think of the Parthenon metopes, which show Theseus’s key deeds in sculpture, or vases, hymns, public performances, bedtime stories, etc. People would encounter these often enough that the outlines of these heroes’ stories were known to them from a young age.

One of the Metopes of the Parthenon, showing (probably) Athena and Theseus.

As a result, ancient texts never show the entire story; they select the moment they want to tell and focus in on that. Hence the Iliad focuses on Achilles’s wrath, the Odyssey emphasises his homecoming, and the Argonautica tells the story of the Golden Fleece. Similarly, tragedies will choose a meaningful moment: not all of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra’s struggles, but his return home in the Agamemnon, or the events that lead directly to Pentheus’s dismemberment in the Bakchai.

So finding one text that will give you a useful overview will be hard!

These heroes are often also connected to so many other famous characters, that sometimes they show up as a side character in their stories, so it depends on which stories capture your interest most.

Pre-Homeric texts are few and far between

But this is not to say there aren’t pre-Trojan-War myths!

There are loads! Anything with Heracles or Theseus is pre-Iliadic, and others, like the house of Pelops, link more to the Trojan War but are also separate from it. Plus, there is Hesiod’s Theogony (roughly contemporary with Homer), which tells of the births of the gods and goes all the way back to the start of the universe.

The Ovid situation

Many Greek texts are lost, and we’ve only got allusions to this or that part of the myth in the existing fragments, etc. etc. So how do we still know so much about so many of these stories?

Enter my fave: Ovid.

Far later than Homer (1st century versus 8th century BC), but with access to all the Greek texts and them some, he wrote a lot of fairly comprehensive stories. These include the Heroides, letters written from the perspective of female characters trying to connect to their male lovers, with letter 10 coming from Ariadne to Theseus, and Metamorphoses 8 with parts of Theseus’s story.

If you’re looking for a high-level overview of what was what in ancient myth, starting with the Metamorphoses will give you all the big boys and many of the smaller ones.

Theseus specifically:

I must admit that Theseus is not my strong suit, but sources I’m familiar with that I would recommend:

Hippolytus, by Euripides and Phaedra by Seneca: these both tell of Theseus’s second wife Phaedra falling for his son Hippolytus and causing his death

Catullus 64: A lament from Ariadne after Theseus has abandoned her on Naxos

Metamorphoses 8, 12, by Ovid: Snippets of Theseus’s life, incl the Minotaur

Ones I’m not as familiar with but might be up your street:

Life of Theseus, Plutarch: a historian/scholar’s biography. He had them in pairs, where he compared the two; Theseus is linked to Romulus

The Argonautica, Apollonius Rhodus: Follows Jason in his quest for the Golden Fleece; Theseus is one of his heroes

Oedipus at Colonnus, Sophocles: apparently Theseus is a major side character here but I don’t remember!

There is also The King must Die by Mary Renault, a modern retelling from the ‘80s that blew me away. The only book set in ancient Greece I’ve ever read that doesn’t shy away from how alien their culture and values are to us today and doesn’t try to sugarcoat things.

And if you’re looking for more heroes: Wikipedia is your friend!

The Classics-related pages are pretty reliable, and they often mention the main sources per character.

I hope this gets you started but please do hit me up with more questions, I always love diving into these things!

#tagamemnon #classics #asks #theseus

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