C A Caesar

Currently writing: Lord of the Silver Bow Ask me Anything! <3 Please keep interactions respectful! (I will NOT reveal my identity to strangers, or in asks. This is for a combination of personal safety online, as well as to keep my academic work separate from the fiction I write!) All opinions my own (unless otherwise stated)

[thhouseofblack]

I don't understand why so many greek mythology fans, especially those in the retelling side of things, are so eager to erase the agency of female characters. There was no one forcing Penelope to wait for Odysseus. She did it because she loved him. Not every woman is a victim.

[poetryofapollo]

This!! A woman in a society that denies most of her agency can still make decisions in areas where she is able to — and whether it is good or bad, trying to erase these decisions in favor of making perfect victims only does the opposite of what people claim they're doing. You are doing a woman of antiquity no favors when you deny the decisions she has made of her own volition, and doing so only strips the little agency she does have.

[cacaesar]

And even more, many of the women of myth held quite a lot of agency due to the royal household structure of their societies which is portrayed… class features hugely in agency in antiquity, and is a line I would LOVE to see explored more in retellings, but it’s always ignored in favour of the “perfect” victim of a wholly misogynistic system instead.

[aquarterpastsevennow]

Okay can someone please hear me out on this:

I was thinking the other day about the sims (as I am entering into my two week sim phase), and I know it's called the sims because it's a simulation but ALSO!!

Sim is the latin present subjunctive form of sum which translates to "I am". When turned into Sim (as a subjunctive), it expresses possibility or wishes. So instead of simply translating to "I am" it could roughly (on it's own) translate to "I may be" or "If I were". This is interesting of course because the sims is a life simulation game, where you ideally create a "perfect world" or whatever.

I don't know 😭 My friends thought I was crazy so I may just be an overworked classics student always doing latin work but I thought this was interesting to share

[cacaesar]

As a Classicist who frequently uses the Sims to relax by creating (the closest thing Sims lets me get to) Classicists who have stable employment and full home libraries... I appreciate this immensely!

[poetryofapollo]

"Mischaracterization isn't a thing cause the myths have several variations" oh so I, a random person who isn't a renowned poet or playwright who is also not greek, living several centuries later, can proclaim that Odysseus was actually successful in his ploy of madness and never actually went to war at all, and can also say this proclamation has enough merit to be comparable to something Euripides and Homer wrote? Simply because the myths have several variations?

[cacaesar]

THIS!! And not to mention that many of those "multiple variants" change rather small plot points/genealogies rather than entire characterisations, pulling on local religious and cultural tradition, not just because the author wanted to have fun with it. We start seeing the 'for the lols' variants in the Hellenistic and then Roman periods where they are already self-consciously playing with reception...but even they still operate in very similar/related religious and cultural structures to the authors they are intentionally riffing from! And just again to highlight... these rarely have complete mischaracterisations in, because characterisation is very much linked to social ideas and ideals of the time, as well as to the religious contexts of these texts/their traditions - Apollo's Greek characterization and depiction, for example, was very much the standard for a wealthy young male in much of Archaic and Classical Greece...

[cacaesar]

… I’m going to go lay down for a few days. Or weeks. Or years.

(I have waited so long for this and they couldn’t have done it more perfectly!! Absolutely love human Al, 100/10, absolutely no notes, and absolutely all the love to Viv, Amir, and the rest of the team who brought him (and the wonderful Hazbin world!) to life 🤍)

[adrenaline-revolver]

ever since i found out about Hyacinthus and Iphigeneia likely being pre-helenic gods whose roles were subsumed so much of the Homeric epics feel strangely post apocolypticy? dystopicy? like it no longer just feels like the gods playing with humans. it feels like a horrifying version of the titanomachy where the losers were punished with the worst possible thing the olympians could come up with: Mortality.

[ulises-aithon]

@katerinaaqu I need answers, this true!?

[katerinaaqu]

This is literally the first time I hear this like...for starters "pre-hellenic"? With purely hellenic names? I highly doubt it. Now would the characters like Iphigenia or Hyacynthus be based on some sort of pre-hellenic tradition? I suppose so I mean traditions move about people's memories and cultures but with names such as these to say they were not Greek? To be honest that is the first time I hear it.

Now for the worship part we know that both Hyacunthus and Iphigenia had some sort of worship but both were associated to the gods they served or represented aka Apollo and Artemis Orthia. I don't personally recall anything of these two have some individual worship as gods.

Now for the part of Iliad or Odyssey being dystopia material well one can talk about it especially given that the mycenean era was over by the time Homer synthesized his poems. One could say he was inspired by the ruins he was seeing every day around him. The very essence of this is highly dystopian but I am not sure this is what he aimed for. Sounds more like a headcanon than anything Fascinating of course but I do not think that was the purpose or aim of Homer or Hesiod or anyone for that matter

[ulises-aithon]

Thank you so much as always! 🩵

[katerinaaqu]

Not at all. Technically I wasn't that much of help. Maybe I should research on it more in the future

[cacaesar]

Only adding to this (and potentially more for @aaronofithaca05 ‘s sake!) that Hyacinthus IS speculated to have “pre-Hellenic” (I.e. Mycenaean/Minoan) roots, due to the -nth suffix of “Hyacinth”, though I really don’t agree with/understand what the original post is trying to say.

My own research is looking at how the Hyakinthos cult in Amyclae being placed under Apollo at a potentially later date (as is, to my understanding, the current agreement in the limited literature) might be linked to Spartan early colonisation of the town and what this might mean for the origins of Artemis Orthia… but we’re not talking apocalyptic feeling literature because of it… we’re talking a pretty normal blend and assimilation of cultures which occurs often in antiquity.

Many of the over-dramatisations about the “dark age” between the Pre-Hellenic (Mycenaean and Minoan) world and the age of Homer can be incredibly damaging to reading some kind of mass event where there just is no real evidence for one!

Hope some of that helped a little, and always happy to yap more on it if you have any specific Q’s … and if I’m able to access to reading haha - quite a bit is in person and I’m now home from uni but should have some notes somewhere! 🤍

[cikero]

my phone thinks I’m dating emperor augustus

[cacaesar]

Troubling news from Rome today.

[brisim-claimhte]

Lily would like to have a lil chat

[cacaesar]

And I would like to stay as far away from blades as possible until Brutus and Cassius are at the end of mine :))

[cacaesar]

Troubling news from Rome today.

[cacaesar]

Was Hesiod or Homer earlier? Or do we not rlly know? Thx!!

Hesiod! But not by much and in different regions - in fact, by such a small amount of time that we maybe have some textual response/allusion to the Works and Days in the Iliad, but that's about as far as their traditions interact with each other, which essentially created two whole different canons by how Homer and Hesiod each adapted and subverted the existing tradition!

There's been quite a lot of work done on this, and sadly I only recall this because it was something we discussed at length in my tutorial so I can't cite a specific source rn, but generally Martin West and Bruno Currie are two great scholars for Homer and Hesiod's interactions with tradition, possibly also Oliver Taplin? BUT - we place Hesiod c.730 BC, and Homer c.700 BC (according to the Neo-Analyst school for the dates; but afaik every school of thought is now in agreement that Hesiod is older, if only marginally!)

[katerinaaqu]

Actually many still place Homer as older (roughly 750 BC) and Hesiod around ten or twenty years later (I think Cambridge and Oxford research line go with this interpretation but not fully certain it's been a while since I last saw some of those) Many do see them as contemporary (and technically they are) but place Homer and his Iliad (and Odyssey even if later than Iliad) at an earlier mark while others as you say place Hesiod earlier and place Homer to late 8th century instead or beginning of 7th even.

It was classical Greek philologists of 5th century BC that firstly placed Hesiod at an earlier mark (and many modern researchers agree) but later Homer began being seen as older which I guess plays its role as to why some more traditional reading places him at an early mark?

But because the two writers technically lived in the same time period the debate on which of the two epics is older is always on. I have seen many people claim Homer being earlier mark but always so close to each other that I doubt that we will have TRUE accuracy as to who is earlier.

They could easily be creating at the exact time period. They do come back and forth a lot in analysis and because they also use different dialects to what I remember is very hard to pinpoint exactly who is truly early. At this point I almost imagine them write at the same time and looking at each other hahaha like Scarlatti and Handel in pre-classical music hahaha

[cacaesar]

Just to reply on my actual feed, the view I stated in mine was the line that Oxford and Cambridge both take - I’m actually researching at Oxford, haha! 🤍

Homer was originally taken to be older because “modern” scholars understood how important he was in the classical world as a staple part of education and just *assumed* he had to be older than Hesiod and everything else was an imitation of him - a view we still see in a lot of the reception of Hellenistic literature - on that ground.

Modern scholarship on the topic currently sits with them as contemporaries, but with Hesiod being likely to be the marginally older of the two thanks to various comparative and linguistic studies on the texts. The only school I know of who deviate from this are the analysts… who put Homer at least a century later.

It’s been pretty much since West’s rather groundbreaking works on Hesiod’s Near Eastern literature corrections that we’ve had this near consensus. You’re right we can never know for sure, but as for the summary of the current field of scholarship, the general consensus is that Hesiod is seen as older, if only by a little! 🤍

[worrywrite]

As the Ides of March approaches, let us all remember it not as the day Caesar was stabbed a whole bunch, but for what it truly was: the day a group of organized elected representatives killed a sitting unelected dictator.

[cacaesar]

Perhaps even more pertinent to modern times: He was elected into/granted that position by the Senate.

(Now, I will admit I'm a bit of a Caesarian - peep the username, it's literally Augustus' name - BUT, Caesar, unlike a certain modern parallel being made, did at least do a lot of good by the people instead of just serving himself and the aristocracy) But like... The day a group of organised elected representatives (albeit a comparatively small group of them) turned on one of their own to crush his ever-growing and ever-concerning power in an attempt to bring back democracy and stability is still just as good...

[cacaesar]

People that critique folk for replying with facts to a 'funny haha' post that inherently spreads misinformation will amaze me. Like yes, the context of that post means it's clearly not meant super literally... but it's still misinformation.

Moreover, it's misinformation people internalise as they then spread that joke, which eventually makes its way into more serious discussions, and how people approach the real-life topic it's based on. Jokes can be found funny while misinfo is also corrected - they're not mutually exclusive ideas (and often times, the truth actually makes the joke funnier or produces a funnier joke with a different punchline!). Can we stop excusing spreading misinfo bc it's "not that deep" or "just a joke"? It is literally just as harmful as spreading misinfo as *not* a part of a joke.

[grecoromanyaoi]

its called alpha/beta/omega dynamics bc the ancient greeks wouldve loved them

[grecoromanyaoi]

u think they wouldntve loved it if cis men could reproduce by themselves? u think they wouldntve jumped at the opportunity to kick All Women down a comically long set of stairs???? be serious

[brisim-claimhte]

a) please do not generalise Ancient Greece to be a monolith.

b) I'm speaking here specifically about women in Classical Athens - because this is my area of expertise - they did not hate them, they saw them essentially as perpetual children because they believed them to be irrational. This idea of them as irrational stemmed from the idea that women could not control their sexual desire (see Lysistrata as a prime example of this idea) vs men, who could control their desire [Walcot 1984]. This control, or absence of it, is why men could take up positions of leadership in their community and go to war, while women could not. They did not hate women, they saw them as incompetent. This is how we get texts like Xenophon's Oikonomikos, where he talks about guiding his hypothetical new wife in her new role a head of his household. He refers to her in a way that is condescending and in no way sees her as his equal, but there is no hatred in his tone. Classical Athens was extremely patriarchal and misogynistic, but they did not hate women.

c) This idea of their incompetence stemming from irrationality caused by sexual desire also explains why Athena was still able to be their patron, in spite of being a woman. In HAph. 7-11, she is described as immune to the powers of Aphrodite, in her [Aphrodite] capacity as a goddess of lust/love. Because she does not experience this lust/love she is capable of being rational like a man, and therefore holding patronage over Athens, and having domain over typically male spheres such as strategic warfare and wise council. This also applies to Artemis [HAph. 7-19; Sappho Frag. 44A] and is how she can hold domain over the hunt, again, a typically male sphere.

[grecoromanyaoi]

"they didnt hate women they were only extremely vitriolic towards women n despised them" is rly not the take u think it is

[ancient-myth-daily]

so did you not read what @brisim-claimhte wrote or do words not have meaning to you?

nothing they wrote about classical athens says "extremely vitriolic" or "despised". infantilization of women is still misogyny and it can be done without any vitriol; women may be treated affectionately.

misogyny takes many different forms. if you approach the world with the premise that all misogyny is hatred of, vitriol towards, and the desire to kill and/or do bodily harm (like kicking them down stairs) to women then you will fail to recognize other forms of misogyny.

[cacaesar]

THIS!!! THIS IS THE PART PEOPLE ARE IGNORING!!! To say misogyny only arises through hatred is to ignore the FAR more dangerous undercurrents of it, how it functions, and the damage it causes - both in antiquity and in the present.

Ancient misogyny was incredibly understated in many ways... it was not the feminist retelling type of display that Tumblr and TikTok LOVE to perpetuate! And acknowledging that is literally just using basic critical thinking, which half the tags on this post lack.

[cacaesar]

Was Hesiod or Homer earlier? Or do we not rlly know? Thx!!

Hesiod! But not by much and in different regions - in fact, by such a small amount of time that we maybe have some textual response/allusion to the Works and Days in the Iliad, but that's about as far as their traditions interact with each other, which essentially created two whole different canons by how Homer and Hesiod each adapted and subverted the existing tradition!

There's been quite a lot of work done on this, and sadly I only recall this because it was something we discussed at length in my tutorial so I can't cite a specific source rn, but generally Martin West and Bruno Currie are two great scholars for Homer and Hesiod's interactions with tradition, possibly also Oliver Taplin? BUT - we place Hesiod c.730 BC, and Homer c.700 BC (according to the Neo-Analyst school for the dates; but afaik every school of thought is now in agreement that Hesiod is older, if only marginally!)

[grecoromanyaoi]

its called alpha/beta/omega dynamics bc the ancient greeks wouldve loved them

[grecoromanyaoi]

u think they wouldntve loved it if cis men could reproduce by themselves? u think they wouldntve jumped at the opportunity to kick All Women down a comically long set of stairs???? be serious

[brisim-claimhte]

a) please do not generalise Ancient Greece to be a monolith.

b) I'm speaking here specifically about women in Classical Athens - because this is my area of expertise - they did not hate them, they saw them essentially as perpetual children because they believed them to be irrational. This idea of them as irrational stemmed from the idea that women could not control their sexual desire (see Lysistrata as a prime example of this idea) vs men, who could control their desire [Walcot 1984]. This control, or absence of it, is why men could take up positions of leadership in their community and go to war, while women could not. They did not hate women, they saw them as incompetent. This is how we get texts like Xenophon's Oikonomikos, where he talks about guiding his hypothetical new wife in her new role a head of his household. He refers to her in a way that is condescending and in no way sees her as his equal, but there is no hatred in his tone. Classical Athens was extremely patriarchal and misogynistic, but they did not hate women.

c) This idea of their incompetence stemming from irrationality caused by sexual desire also explains why Athena was still able to be their patron, in spite of being a woman. In HAph. 7-11, she is described as immune to the powers of Aphrodite, in her [Aphrodite] capacity as a goddess of lust/love. Because she does not experience this lust/love she is capable of being rational like a man, and therefore holding patronage over Athens, and having domain over typically male spheres such as strategic warfare and wise council. This also applies to Artemis [HAph. 7-19; Sappho Frag. 44A] and is how she can hold domain over the hunt, again, a typically male sphere.

[grecoromanyaoi]

"they didnt hate women they were only extremely vitriolic towards women n despised them" is rly not the take u think it is

[cacaesar]

If that's vitriol to you, you need to read the Philippics my friend. That is ancient vitriol. Firstly, I'd like to make it clear that you do not have to hate someone in order to oppress or suppress them; you simply have to view them as 'other'. And that was the Greek view of women - other. Bri's use of 'essentially like children' was to explain to you the concept of how they were othered without active hatred... because do you think they hated their male citizen children??

Do you really think they hated their future male citizens?? Of course not, but they're in the same box because they've been 'othered' as "not as rational as men".... that doesn't mean hatred, and that doesn't mean vitriol. It means 'other' and 'different' and 'not suited to X, Y, Z task'.

This, then, translates into the treatment of women.

If in Athens women are viewed as less suited to certain tasks due to this belief over rationality - namely, the task of statesmanship...which was the key job of the elite Athenians (bear in mind it's only really them we have a full record of 'this is how women should be suppressed' from... and even that's a 'they should be' not a 'they are') serving in a Democracy, then yes, they're going to be seen as lesser because they can't serve the state in the same integral and public way as men could.

Thus, if you can't serve the state to the same capability as these men, you get put under their 'protection' (i.e. your rights are inherently linked to theirs... which is how women were treated like children in Athens) Now, that's all just Athens... but you see how that isn't full of vitriol and hatred, it's literally just based on "women are different than men, namely in their rationality and physical strength, thus they can't serve in wars (the elite classes were also the main heavy-armed troops - hoplites; we're talking like 30kg of armour - it's HEAVY) and can't serve in politics... thus they don't serve the state publicly and must be put under protection of those who can."

I happen to specialise in Sparta, where women took an active part in athletics publicly, where they were well educated and took a key role in their sons' educations; certainly a place they weren't "hated" - but again they weren't in government... because the Spartan government was made up of the warrior classes yet again, and frankly the women were too busy running everything else to be able to train and serve too!

Just to parrot your own phrasing.... "Minimising the multitudinous and important roles of women in antiquity to just 'they were hated on' because you're misinformed about it, isn't the take you think it is." It's actually quite a dismissive one.

The treatment of women in antiquity is inherently linked to the formation of the state, and with that, the military history of the state and the associated practicalities. They were not hated, they were treated as 'other' based on those grounds. That does not mean we have to approve of how they were treated, or that we agree it was right... it simply means that their treatment was not because of hatred.

[xenophonissad]

“Xenophon, of course, was an enemy of democracy”

— D. Kagan

[cacaesar]

Kagan (derogatory)

[sunrise94]

i hate seeing like healer patroclus/warrior achilles in shit omg. give me achilles and patroclus fighting together back to back slaughtering men and acting as an additional pair of eyes and arms for the other when someone comes charging at them. give me achilles and patroclus going home drenched in blood and cleaning each other off with this immense tenderness that contrasts the brutality of their actions and the war.

[cacaesar]

Even in antiquity we got healer Achilles and warlord Patroklos - miss those interpretations dearly.

[maggie44paint]

*giggles and bites your arm off affectionately*