Watch Out For This Vase With Young-looking Hot Menelaus Holding Diomedes, To Prevent Him From Killing

I told you I found it on a dead man

the girls!!!! and toxic old man yaoi.

Ancient Greek culture/mores for deceit and archery is like

Male-coded intelligence vs. female-coded trickery, FIGHT

Male-coded intelligent warfare (fighting from afar is smart and minimizes injury so you can do more of it) vs. female-coded fighting from afar because of trickery and cowardice in not standing up to close combat, FIGHT

Myth-wise, then you've on the one hand got all those female characters resorting to trickery to achieve their aims (Hera, Klytaimnestra, for example) = bad. And on the other hand you've got characters like Odysseus, where the deceit of the wooden horse, which would be the modern-day war crime of perfidy, is smart and good.

And you've got instances like an author writing a dialogue between Chiron and Achilles, where Achilles is scorning archery for being a cowards' method of combat and Chiron rebuking him that it's smart fighting. And in extension/connection, we've got Odysseus who is archery-coded (even if he does not do any archery in the war, at least in our surviving source(s)), and, in the Odyssey, using it to win the day, contra Paris, our ur-example of ~bad coward archer~

sketch

time passes

stand on the axe blade of light and dark

what Aeneas saw when he wake up, received the fire of Vesta.

ehh read Aeneid, love you Virgil💕

i straight up do not believe that odysseus did everything he did to get back to penelope and telemakhos. or even that he did everything he could. wanting to return to them is not the whole story. i like the myth about odysseus pretending to be mad to get out of the war for lots of reasons, but one of them is because it's an attempt to escape the narrative, foiled by his love for his son, but also because there is contrast to what we know of him long after the narrative has sucked him back in. odysseus is no less kleospilled than anyone else! he fights for his pride; he makes mistakes; he gets worn down; he delays his homecoming, in ways that are and aren't his fault, all the time. he wants to go home. he doesn't just want to go home.

but he does try. by leaving ogygia he willingly goes back into the narrative one more time, and he never gives up until he finally returns. isn't that compelling enough? do we have to sand it down?

Do you have any article related to the odyssey you'd reccommend as complementary to the source?

sorry i've been sitting on your ask for so long! i am not and never have been a classics student; i came across most of these articles incidentally or here on tumblr:

"the odysseys within the odyssey" by italo calvino

"a note on memory and reciprocity in homer's odyssey" by anita nikkanen

"penelope and the poetics of remembering" by melissa mueller

"a glossary of haunting" by eve tuck and c. ree (this is mostly about horror fiction and settler-colonialism but it has a gloss on the cyclops that i think everyone, certainly everyone american, should read)

silence in the land of logos by silvia montiglio chapter 8: "silence, ruse, and endurance: odysseus and beyond"

"the name of odysseus" by g.e. dimock, jr.

also ok it's very much not "good" but there's an article by w.b. stanford called "personal relationships" that just lists all his hot takes about the relationships in the odyssey for 25 pages. it reads just like scrolling the blog of a mutual twice removed. they let men publish ANYTHING in the 60s. i love this essay. i would read this essay out loud over discord right now if someone asked me.

thank you troy 2004 for helping me objectify the trojan princes

Al Pacino in Serpico