supporter of Womens Wrongs Since 431 BC

'they would not fucking say that' but its to modern myth retellers

[starbuck]

i say i like tragedies and everyone’s all like ‘why do you like sad stories? are you depressed?’ and never ‘how was the catharsis? was the catharsis fun?’

[quietwingsinthesky]

we’re so lucky that gilgamesh survived and is a banger. can you imagine if we found the oldest written human story ever recorded and it sucked balls.

[gorgonapologist]

When Daphne transforms into a bay tree, the moment is one of both horror and deliverance. She is no longer what she once was, but the metamorphosis frees her from the unwanted attention of Apollo. This duality of horror and emancipation sits, I think, at the core of female transformation. Within the horror genre (and arguably everywhere else), bodies read as female are always subject to pain, and to the threat of violation. Becoming something else—a tree, a freak, a monster—preempts this pain and reduces the risk of harm. It may even, if the transformation is the right one, allow you to cause harm in return.

Julia Armfield, On Body Horror and the Female Body

[undying-princess]

knowing how it tends to go with male authors and their wives it was probably marge who wrote the odyssey

[thedupshadove]

Opera plot: Local Noble realizes that his affections for Pretty Village Girl have a rival in the form of Honest Laborer. Having read enough romances to know that a girl asked to choose between a rich man and a poor man will always pick the poor man, whereas in a love triangle between two rich men it's anyone's game, he decides that his chief object must be to elevate his rival's wealth and status as quickly as possible. What the Compte de Genre-Savie over here forgot to account for, however, was the overwhelming power of the Pygmalion Effect, and now he has to deal with watching two people he's in love with develop ever-stronger feelings for each other. Eventually all of this resolves via...I don't know.

[queenofattolia]

#first of all: ''comte de genre-savie'' is PERFECT. just great. absolutely no notes.#I would love an opera with this exact plot. bonus points if the comte is genuinely genre savvy#he keeps bringing up opera tropes only for the other characters to look at him like he's insane.#the score is diagetic to him; when he points out reoccurring themes or transitions to minor keys#the other characters ask him what the hell he's talking about. the whole chorus gets together to sing about how#comte de genre-savie is going mad. the comte tries to sneak away and keeps getting pulled back in.#I wonder if you could even push it further - have it so that only the comte can speak or 'hear' spoken words;#all other characters communicate in recitativo secco or formally composed songs#then you can have scenes where the comte is speaking but the other character in the scene can't hear him.#this can be played for laughs (the comte tries to order something from a shopkeeper; the shopkeeper walks away as he's talking)#and for dramatic effect (the Honest Laborer is singing a heartfelt duet with the Pretty Village Girl#and neither of them can hear the comte saying 'I love you' in between their lines)#........I am into this actually. I had to convince myself that this wasn't just cyrano de bergerac but no. it isn't. I'm into it.#upon the stage (via @notbecauseofvictories)

[spineless-lobster]

Shit man, this trojan war is fucked. I just saw a guy raise his hands to the sky and say “grey-eyed athena, strengthen my spear” or some similar shit, and he felled 27 men at once before being whisked away by divine mist. The narrator didn’t even mention him, that’s how common shit like this is. My ass is stuck with a bow and 2 arrows. I think I just heard “would to god my rage, my fury would drive me now to hack your flesh away and eat you raw” two groups over. I gotta get the fuck outta here.

[thoodleoo]

classicists will make the ugliest least functional website in the history of html and it will contain the entire library of fragmentary papyri of the works of aeschylus. for free

[thoodleoo]

i am learning about so many beautiful websites from this. they are like horses to me

[stjohnstarling]

↖ this user has drank from the infernal river Lethe, which flows through Hades and brings total oblivion, eradicating all memory and thought

[incurablydepraved]

how did it taste?

[stjohnstarling]

How did what taste?

[annabelle--cane]

it's okay, ulysses ogre. you can back up and try dubliners, it's a short story collection with much more straightforward prose, you can dive deep on one piece at a time, and once you've toyed around with that then I'm sure you'll have an easier time with ulysses. besides, I had an irish lit professor who'd been studying finnegans wake for twenty years and she said she still didn't really know what was going on in it. ulysses ogre, what really matters is if you are enjoying your time with literature and feel like you are gaining something, not whether you reach the "correct" conclusions. there's no need to try and force yourself through something if you feel like you aren't on an even enough plane with the text to reap any of its rewards.

[bonesandthebees]

let's 😐 with mama

[aletheyass]

tes THDPSSSSPS 💜

[aq2003]

grabbed all of the ebook versions of the folger shakespeare library's annotated versions of shakespeare's plays (+sonnets and poems) and put them all in one place in case anyone is interested

[artschoolglasses]

Clay loom weight decorated with an owl, Greek, 5th Century BCE

From the Acropolis Museum

[transgenderer]

euripides was definitely kind of a misogynist (he's bizarrely insistent in his plays that married women should leave the house? maybe this was normal in his time? but it doesnt SEEM normal in the context of his plays, it seems like it was common for women to leave the house but people liked to scold them for it) but he's also a good enough writer that he's unusually woman friendly for the time. like, you cant write a good female character without understanding a woman as a full person, and "understanding a woman as a full person" is kind of a high bar for ancient greek men. its odd, to read. the empathetic misogynist

[isabellaofparma]

historical inaccuracies in period dramas are okay as long as i like them

[isabellaofparma]

they are, however, punishable by death if i don’t

[postarcadian]

Re: my observation that the average undergraduate now seems to have much greater familiarity with Homeric epic and at least some Greek literature (esp. tragedy) than with the Aeneid or any Roman material, I think there’s a myriad of things at work here but at least one is that we’ve reverted to this weird cultural construct where ancient Greek myth and literature is viewed as universal while Roman literature is viewed as particular and this affects what books are taught e.g. in high school and college English classes but also what gets mined for retellings. and I also think Roman material is often imagined as being more deeply implicated in the ideological framework of patriarchal western imperial society and like, in some cases perhaps that’s fair, but I would argue as a literary historian that Roman poetry is precisely where we see the cracks forming in Roman gendered imperialism just like Greek tragedy is where we see the cracks forming in Athenian gendered imperialism. whether we want to commit to any idea of authorial intent is a different question but imo it’s impossible to read e.g. Roman elegy or pastoral or even Lucan and come away with the pop-culture idea of the iconic masculine Roman subject (hell, I think even the Aeneid questions the conventional notion of masculine Roman virtus that Lucan absolutely shatters, but that’s another discussion)

anyways this also gets combined with a dynamic that’s really maddening to me as a classicist where anything Roman is almost exclusively gendered as masculine in popular culture (see the Roman Empire meme, but also the subculture of Jordan Peterson bros roleplaying as stoics and reading or pretending to read Marcus Aurelius) whereas on the Greek side we have Anne Carson’s Sappho translations and a total saturation of feminist rewritings of Greek myth, Homeric epic, and tragedy. this is actually really weird from the perspective of a Roman social historian, given that women are far more visible in Roman material (esp. from the 1st century CE onward) than they are anywhere in classical Greek society, and it has the consequence that Roman poetry (except, like, Lucretius I guess) gets sidelined because the types of dudes that are going to maybe read Marcus Aurelius or Tacitus are definitely not going to read Catullus or Vergil’s Eclogues or even the Aeneid given that poetry itself is often gendered as feminine in the 21st century popular imagination, and the types of non-classicists who like Anne Carson’s Sappho and feminist approaches to Greek myth are also probably not going to read Roman poetry

[terpsikeraunos]

“ὃ δ᾽ ὄλβιος, ὅν τινα Μοῦσαι φίλωνται: γλυκερή οἱ ἀπὸ στόματος ῥέει αὐδή. - But he is blessed, whomever the Muses love: Sweet speech flows from his mouth.”

— Hesiod, Theogony 96-7.