καὶ ποθήω καὶ μάομαι @bakkhe - Tumblr Blog

Another year around the sun.

I cannot believe it is this cold on my birthday

#personal

shop5

Happy March 15th to those who celebrate.

estel0903

Tumblr every march 15th

fickleartdump

flammifer of westernesse

rubylith-art

Thinking about THE GREEN KNIGHT recently

draconym

do you think two pennies is still enough for the ferryman or has inflation driven up the fare

draconym

if he makes me use an app I am simply not crossing the river Styx.

escuerzoresucitado

monday

monidoll

combining light and dark soy sauce to make morally ambiguous and nuanced soy sauce

Curling is so fun

#milano cortina 2026

ilions-end

i don't want to come across as a spoilsport, because i absolutely understand the comfort of "imagine [character a] and [character b] from the homeric epics lovingly reuniting in the underworld" posts, i'll just use them as a jumping-off point because i feel for the sake of thematic understanding and cultural context that it's important to at least be aware that the underworld as it's described in the iliad and the odyssey is very far removed from a christian heaven.

in odyssey 10 circe warns odysseus that apart from tiresias (who's got a special deal going with persephone) the spirits in the underworld do not retain their memories or knowledge or sense of self and are nothing but "empty, flitting shades". in book 11 odysseus describes the underworld as fields of insubstantial spirits shambling restlessly about as they gibber meaninglessly. it seems the extremely recently departed (elpenor and later the suitors) are able to remember who they were for a bit, but after that it's only through drinking the sacrificial blood odysseus offers them that the dead can temporarily regain their senses of self. not even the spirits of agamemnon or odysseus' own mother are able to remember or recognize him until they've drunk the magic blood.

in iliad 22, achilles is painfully aware "the dead forget the dead in the house of Hades", and swears that he'll be the exception, he'll remember patroclus even in the afterlife. whether he succeeds or not is unproven in the homeric sources (magic blood in the odyssey not withstanding) but it confirms how that's the general rule of the afterlife as these characters know it.

as elizabeth vandiver says in her iliad lecture series,

"This is not the kind of afterlife to provide comfort for bodily death or hope for glorious reunions. It is an extremely pallid substitute for life in this world."

as she points out, that super bleak concept of the afterlife shows us why kleos and legacy are so vital to the characters in the iliad and the odyssey. in a pre-literate society, where there is no meaning or comfort in the afterlife, the only thing that will remain of you after you're gone is what people say about you. achilles literally chooses kleos aphthiton, "imperishable glory", that will be sung about forever rather than a peaceful forgettable life precisely with that in mind. the fact that it seemingly worked (the living still know the iliad! the living still remember!) is one of those things that makes me crazy about the homeric epics.