Achilles Was A Queer (and other queer musings)

Queer takes on classics and other shitposts.

[grubloved]

[ancientegyptdaily]

Modern papyrus makers. [source]

[elexecution]

this is his etsy store. he’s selling prints and also the papyrus paper !

[anarchist-memes-1]

[chthonic-isabelleadjani-deactiv]

and what is “translate truthful to the time it was written” even supposed to mean like there’s no way a translation now in the US could be read the same way it was a couple thousand years ago in Greece when english didn’t even exist yet

[sinbrook]

Yep, in the original Odyssey, in the scene where Telemachus murders the slaves who were “sullied by” Penelope’s suiters, he refers to them with a word that roughly just means “the female ones”, however most translations will use words like “whores”, “sluts” and “creatures”, these were all choices of the translators. The original text did not refer to them that way. Dr. Wilson refers to them instead as “girls”, to highlight their age and the brutality of the action. She also fixed all the times the previous male translators dodged around the existence of slaves in the text. Where they call slaves anything but slaves (housemaid, nurse, cook, ect.) Dr. Wilson’s translation correctly calls them slaves as in the original texts. It’s really a great translation, it doesn’t soften anything, and lays bare the reality of the story. One thing she did too, was she refused to make the descriptions of the women in the story more palatable to modern western beauty standards. The original text, for example, describes Penelope’s hands as “thick”. Most male translators change this to “steady” but Dr. Wilson’s translation calls them “firm, muscular hands” to correctly portray the original intent, that Penelope, as a character who weaves every day and every night undoes her weavings, has strong hands, as weaving does make one’s hands more muscular, and that was clearly what was originally intended to be said given the context of her character and the weavings. Of Odysseus himself, the original epic calls him “polytropos” poly, meaning many, and tropos, meaning turn. Some male translators used this to say the story itself had twists and turns, other ignored the word completely to write in a way that made Odysseus seem as though a straight up hero, a man “skilled in all ways of contending”, but Dr. Wilson uses it to mean “complicated”, because Odysseus isn’t a straight up hero, he does some really shitty things. So her translation got a lot of men very very mad, because they said that her being a woman has caused her to translate with bias since her translation is so different to others. She pointed out that perhaps people should have suggested that bias in the inaccurate men’s translations. Anyway, go read Dr. Wilson’s version of The Odyssey. It’s very good.

[charlesoberonn]

This is a very good explanation but I just want to add.

“So, translating with a different ad hoc agenda is better?”

If it’s a less bigoted agenda that maintains more of the original context, then yes, it is better.

[architects-archive]

obsessed with this photo series about trans love by photographer landyn pan (source)

[pixalry]

Greek Myths and Legends - Created by Carly Allen-Fletcher

You can purchase these prints from the PosterSpy shop. Follow the artist on Tumblr and Twitter.

[hungwy]

my ancient greek history professor is making us post memes weekly. i swear to god

[blackpyrefly]

heres one for you

[thepringlesofblood]

my time has come for hyperspecific classics memes

[saltykingsalty]

I…I need context. I’m gonna research all this shit one day.. If I remember after work

[lemonsharks]

I understand most of these!

[finmoryo]

My brother has to submit memes about ancient rome to his class so I’m definitely going to give suggestions.

[writingsforwinter]

-Meggie Royer

March 23, 2021

[cryptonature]

Survival

When we’re born, we arrive on the shores of a wilderness. 

Our minds. 

We search for shelter. We tumble into ravines. 

We taste the berries that nourish and the ones that leave us delirious for days.

 All our lives we struggle to find footing in the forests of ourselves. 

There are strange hills inside our skulls. 

Slowly, through trial and error, we become native to these inner landscapes. 

This process isn’t easy or tidy or graceful. 

Don’t be ashamed of your stumbles, your scars, your sleepless nights. 

You are here. Wild and whole.

[deepwaterfiction]

Text: The houses grew straight out of the ground. Their crooked doors had been formed by the earth itself. 

[dycefic]

Uli was the first to find this place. There was only one house then, a strange and crooked thing of packed earth, roofed with daub and flat stones, its door a misshapen slab of thin rock swinging on thick roots. Uli found it when he was wandering alone and destitute, close to death. He had turned off the road, seeking a place to lie down and die. Then, he says, the trees parted before him, and he found a little clearing, with a strange little house.

When he entered, it was strange within as well. But he found a bed-box filled with dried grass and bracken, water in a stone bowl, and fresh vegetables and fruits lying on a stone shelf. He ate, and drank, and lay down to sleep.

Almost half a year later, a new house began to emerge from the ground. He said it grew out of the ground not like a tree, slender at first then growing outward, but like a stone emerging from sinking flood-water, whole and complete. When it was finished growing, he went inside, to find three box beds, and three stone bowls. He had a garden, then – everything grew there, in the rich forest earth, so fast as to be uncanny – and he had found the overgrown remains of an orchard. So he placed food in the new house, thinking to repay his debt.

That night, Albina and her children stumbled out of the trees, thin and weak. He showed them the house that was meant for them, and the food, and they ate, and drank, and slept, and in the morning they arose and began to plant their own garden.

When I came to the village there were six houses, including mine. I had fled from a husband free with his fists and miserly with food for a mere wife, walking until my shoes wore through and my feet bled. Lost in the forest, about to drop from exhaustion, I found a path that led me to the strange little village. The people who lived there welcomed me, leading me to the house that was meant for me. There were more comforts there than there had been in the first few houses, I learned later. When a new houses began to grow, everyone had prepared a welcome. I had a bed covered with furs and woven blankets, carved wooden cups and dishes, food and tools and everything I might need.

There was a tiny box bed in my house, though I didn’t need it yet. When my child was born, Albina and Maike assisted in the delivery. The hunters, Franz and Nikolaus, brought me meat to eat, and rabbit fur to wrap my baby in. When the seventh house grew, I was already knitting a woolen blanket for the bed.

Keep reading

[windypoplarsroom]

Toshiyuki Enoki -

“ Sanctuary “

[jessebalmer]

o to meet with waking eyes the thing you doubted most

[hikingdyke-deactivated20170912]

What advice do you have for a 14 year old girl?

This is so vague I love it. The voices you are hearing are real, god is speaking to you. The nation of France needs you. Don your armor, take up arms, lead the French army. This is your destiny, joan. When the flames come for you let them lick your bones and laugh.

[cryptonature]

One day, your skull will be as empty as a conch shell on a fence post,

full of wind and gentle quiet.

Today, it’s a cauldron of ghosts.

Flesh and electricity.

Water and memory.

A machine that makes reality.

Now. Here. Your skull is the garden where fact flowers into meaning.

[deepwaterfiction]

Text: They fell from the sky each winter, burning and beautiful, disoriented, and hungry. 

[dycefic]

There’s never any predicting where they’ll land, within the Nine Circles. But the lights aren’t hard to follow, out here in the desert, and they don’t move around much. 

This one was crouching in the hollow its impact had made in the sand. Six limbs - arms or legs, hard to tell in that position - and naked wings sticking up like spars from the thin back. I wondered what the feathers would look like when they came in. 

But for now I went over to it, crouching beside it and speaking in a gentle, soothing voice. “Welcome, cousin,” I told it, not touching it yet. “You’re tired and hungry. I’ll give you something, if you’re ready.” 

It lifted its head, showing me a still-glowing face, six-eyed and sharp-angled. It opened a mouth full of light and pale blue tongue, and made a confused sound. They often don’t know how to speak, right at first. 

But I wrapped it gently in a blanket, soft and worn by many washings, and poured soup out of my old thermos and into a cup that looked the right shape for its mouth. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’m good at fitting a cup to a face. It drank eagerly, then reached out a long-fingered hand to touch my arm lightly, tugging on my sleeve like a child. “Uuuur?”

“The words will come,” I told it, still quiet and soothing. I spread out a flat pad – my second largest – and coaxed it onto it, off the stones and sand. It huddled into the soft blanket and watched me while I brought over the fire-pot and lit it. They like the fire, watching its glow as the light that burns inside them slowly fades. I fed it carefully… more cups of soup at first, then pieces of fruit and flatbread. It ate from my fingers at first, like a baby bird, and I had to be careful. They must not taste blood, during the first eating, and they don’t know yet to be careful.

When dawn came, the glow was gone, and I could see it better. It would be tall, half again as tall as I am, when it stood erect. Two legs, four arms, and the wings, all long and spindly. No obvious signs of sex yet, but that sometimes comes later. Its skin had settled to a deep twilight blue, but the eyes still shifted from colour to colour, pupils shrinking to cat slits, then opening to circles or oblongs or ovals. Tiny quills were beginning to sprout on the long, naked wings, their blue skin stretched over fine bones. It looked at me, when I put more fuel on the fire, and cocked its head. “Who are you?” The words came clumsily, but clearly.

“My name is Sam.” I crouched down. Once the sun is up, it’s safe for them to eat meat, so I offered it some. Its teeth had come through at around three in the morning, pearly and square, and now it chewed carefully on meat stewed soft and flaky. “I’ll be here as long as you need me.”

“Why?” it asked, when it had finished eating. “Why are you here?”

I gave it the simple answer. “Because you need me.”

Keep reading

[writing-prompt-s]

When you learned of the god of war, you thought he’d be tall and muscular and angry. When you were about to meet him, you braced yourself for the worst.

You weren’t quite expecting the short, scrawny, shy kid you ended up getting instead.

[thestuffedalligator]

Olive skin, black hair, skinny, dirty face with pale lines where tears had sliced through the ash and dust. A white chiton dress and a threadbare shawl draped over her shoulders.

A pair of wings - huge, black vulture wings, far too large on her tiny body - were the only things that suggested she was divine.

The general shifted his weight from foot to foot. Obviously respect had to be given to gods, but… “Er - I’m sorry, I was invoking Ares? The god of war?”

The child god shrunk in on herself, and pulled the shawl over her shoulders. She muttered something. “Sorry?” the general asked.

“Ares is the god of slaughter,” the child god said in a slightly louder voice. “Not war.”

The general looked at the priest. The priest shrugged, clearly lost at sea. “Well,” the general said, “then maybe Athena? Goddess of tactics in war?”

“Tactics,” the child god repeated. “Not war.”

There was a long, ugly silence, as the huge vulture wings shifted with the whisper of brushing feathers. “My name is - was - Iphigenia. Daughter of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, commander of the Greeks who stormed the walls of Troy. When my father disgraced Artemis, and the winds of Greece would not blow her battleships to Troy, I was brought to Aulis. For my wedding, I was told. I was-”

She sobbed. Teardrops dribbled off her chin and fell to the temple floor. “I was fourteen. And then I was brought to the highest altar in Aulis, and - and then - and-”

Another sob. “I was fourteen,” she said.

The vulture wings draped over her, and she disappeared under the cloak of black feathers. When they parted, and when the child god looked up at the general, he fell backwards. Those eyes. Eyes he’d seen a thousand times in battle -

“I am the true spirit of war, general,” the child god said. “I am the goddess of bloodshed, of sacrifice, of the slaughter of innocents. I am invoked when men ravage, burn and pillage. I am invoked when mothers cry out, when sons die, when daughters are stolen. I hear it all, general. I have heard it all since the fall of Troy.”

The terrible wings opened up. The child god loomed over the fallen man, twenty, thirty feet tall. Somewhere, the priest was screaming. “How dare you call upon my name.”

[teashoesandhair]

A Conversation on Medusa and Fragility, with Anwen Kya Hayward | Let's Talk About Myths, Baby! A Greek & Roman Mythology Podcast on Acast

In this bonus episode, Liv speaks with author Anwen Kya Hayward about Medusa and her ability to attract horrible men on the internet. Find A

IT’S HERE, IT’S HERE!

I sat down (metaphorically) with Liv of Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby! and we ranted for over an hour about how the myth of Medusa is so often purposed by awful cis men on the Internet to abuse and harass women. Have a listen, if you’re so inclined! If the above link doesn’t quite work for you, it’s also available on Spotify and Apple Music - links to all platforms here.

Also, for context, have a listen to the episode Liv released before our conversation; it’s a great explanation of all the appearances of Medusa in the ancient sources.

[cryptonature]

The fossil is not the animal.

The fossil is not the bones of the animal.

The fossil is the stone’s memory of the bones of the animal.

And that’s a poetry older than words.