LGBT Meets SPQR is a collection of authentic Latin texts on LGBTQIA+ topics for middle and high school Latin classes (appropriate for ages 1
LGBT Meets SPQR includes:
a blog featuring Greek and Latin texts highlighting LGBTQIA+ topics
resources and lesson plans for teachers, including Pride activities, quotes from Roman authors from Africa for Black History month, printable coloring books, and lesson plans for Latin language classes
Lists of classical-themed novels and non-fiction in English for young adult readers ages 14 -17
ABCs of LGBTQIA+ Representation in the Greek and Roman World: 101 People from Mythology and History to Know
I think it is extremely important for everyone in the Greek mythology community to know that even though Greeks can have light skin and light hair, and that white supremacists like talking about Ancient Greece and using statues as their profile pictures, it doesn't mean white supremacists actually like Greek people.
White supremacists use Ancient Greece to insert themselves and their beliefs, completely erasing an accurate Ancient Greece and actual Greek people and culture from the narrative. There's a reason why when discussing the casting of Helen in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, they only show pictures of blonde, blue-eyed, Germanic, or Anglo-Saxon women, and never actresses who are actually Greek or of Greek descent. Just like how a black woman playing Helen is an issue to them, a Greek woman playing Helen is also an issue to them.
Since the very beginning of the concept of whiteness, beginning in the 19th century, white supremacists have excluded Greek people from whiteness, like they did for other ethnicities that you may now consider white, such as the Irish and Italians. Whiteness did not exist before the 19th century. When whiteness was conceptualized, it was purposefully created to not just view people native to the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania as lesser than, but to also view other Europeans as lesser than.
Even if Greeks are viewed as white today, white supremacists still won't accept them because their culture does not fit into their vision of whiteness, and they don't accept them as descendants of the Ancient Greeks because they think it is impossible for them to be related to a past where they've inserted their perfect image of white society onto.
Adding onto this: Nazis and other white supremacists love an imagined version of Ancient Greece, not actual Greeks at all. Nazis literally tried to frame themselves as the rightful heirs of Ancient Greece during World War II while treating modern Greeks as racially “polluted” because of centuries of contact with Turks via Ottoman occupation (obviously this is racist pseudoscience). They were doing this WHILE invading Greece and slaughtering her people.
A lot of Western idealization of Greece was built around a fantasy of Greece, not Greece as a real place with real people, language, history, occupation, displacement, and survival (this part is important to me, because we survived over 1,000 years of occupation).
The idealized version of Ancient Greece that white supremacists (and many non-Greeks more broadly) love to fetishize and fixate on is largely a fantasy constructed by European powers and intellectual movements, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was used as an imperial and racial ideology at a time when Greece itself had been under foreign rule for centuries and had very little control over how it was being represented.
In fact, European travellers who journeyed to Greece in the wake of Greece's War of Independence frequently reported disappointment because they did not match the idealized image of “ancient” Greeks that existed in their imagination.
Anyways, this is why Greek people care about Greek representation: because Greek history and culture have been so thoroughly co-opted by non-Greeks that actual Greek people are often treated as secondary to the fantasy others have built around them.
It actually kinda pisses me off that every time there’s an adaptation of some classic work coming out, there are takes like “maybe we should not judge the adaptation compared to the original”… I think if the creator doesn’t want their work to be compared and judged on comparison, they can make literally any other type of piece. I’m not arguing for a word for word adaptation - I think those are impossible, first of all, and just not fun to strive for. But slapping a recognisable title, names and plots into your work, and then turning around and asking people not to compare your work to the original is simply absurd lol
"free my girl helen, she did all of that but i forgive her," i say into the mic. the crowd boos. i begin to walk off in shame, when a voice speaks and commands silence from the room.
"they're right," it says. i look for the owner of the voice. there, in the fifth row stands: king menelaus of sparta
"unalive" should just mean the opposite of undead. if undead means a dead thing thats alive, unalive shuld mean an alive things thats dead. no i dont have any examples. ☝️yet
#oh i have an easy one. aeneas son of venus#and achilles son of thetis#and hektor son of hekuba#and ME#oh and the late roman republic in ciceros letters
Honestly, reading Cicero's letters via @e-pistulae gives me the greatest sense of what unalive should be.
My thoughts on Nolans Odyssey no one asked for lol.
Technicals:
The coloring and costuming weren't as bad as the trailers made it out to be, but still way more drab and hollywood than I would've liked. The horse looked too polished, the ship didnt have character, the city of troy felt small (and square columns??), Troy (2004) and The Return (2024) both did this much better (not saying 100% historically accurate but at least more colorful and interesting)
The pacing was off in the first half, none of the scenes really evoked a lot of emotion bc you didnt spend enough time in them, the cuts were fast and often and less impactful than they couldve been. The movie doesnt let you sit with the feelings its trying to evoke in you. This changed around the time they visited circe, and the second half definitely got better.
The American accents and modern dialogue didnt fit at all, it was jarring and took you out of the scene to hear telemachus say dad, and one of the suitors say “fuck off.” (Not getting into the whole big name american actors in a Greek story in a Mediterranean setting bc i feel like thats been talked about already by people more succinct than me).
Things i liked:
Scyla's design was very cool! The way the necks were bent, and the way she grabbed people was terrifying. Plus im a sucker for practical effects, and Nolans sets were all real and the creatures were all practical which is cool to see in the age of cgi and marvel green screens.
I liked the way the shades crawled out of the dirt in the underworld scene, and the way they poured blood into the shield for them to drink was cool.
Circe just had Medea in a cage as a bird??? “We get on better this way” lmao i was dying
I kind of liked that he gave Penelope some anger as well, it rang pretty true and anne hathaway delivered it well.
Things i disliked:
To start off on a minor gripe with the movie itself - right off the bat i want to point out that the bard that Nolan bragged about “rapping” wasnt rapping or really singing at all, which was disappointing as someone lucky enough to see Dr. Brandon Bourgeois perform part of his Iliad when he visited my undergrad university
Also the first word the bard said was “face” not man, not andra. One of the most well known things about epic poetry is the first word tells you what the story is going to be about, and in the Odyssey its “man” bc the poem is a character study of a man returning home after being away at war. This wouldve been a good way for nolan to show that he did his research and that he has respect for the genre and i think it was kind of telling that he chose to change it.
Tbf ig, Nolans Odyssey isnt really about Odysseus’ internal struggles (I talk more about his overarching narrative at the end of my rant), and this ends up removing a lot of Odysseus’ depth as a character. Hes meant to be a little morally gray, youre meant to watch him fuck up bc it makes his internal struggle more impactful after you watch him violate xenia in the cyclops cave and be hubristic in shouting his name after escaping etc. Nolans Odysseus is a very straightforward stoic hero, and youre very obviously meant to root for him unambiguously.
He also doesnt feel very clever. He's depicted as smart for sure, but you dont get the same trickiness, the polytropos, the man of many turns. He doesnt tell the cyclops his name is nobody, or have a back and forth banter with him. Which ties into another thing the movie lacks which is whimsy.
The Odyssey as a poem balances humor and lightheartedness with serious themes in the same way LOTR does, and i think making the movie very serious and grim the whole time is a little emotionally tiring and the serious beats dont hit as hard without any contrasting lightness (Oppenheimer also had this problem).
Moving onto other parts, this might be an unpopular opinion but I kinda liked Circe having to use her hands to change the men into pigs, even though Nolan's Circe is a much more ancient Roman take on witches than a Greek one, i might give him the rule of cool on it bc it reminds me of Erictho ripping bodies with her teeth in Lucan or the witches in Apuleius shoving a sponge down a guys throat.
That being said Mary Beard had a good point in her instant reaction podcast video that a lot of the women lack the sexiness from the poem and Circe is for sure one of them, her and Odysseus dont sleep together and theres no sexual tension, and therefore no temptation. Part of the Odyssey is Odysseus being genuinely tempted to abandon the home journey and stay on these islands and there was none of that in this movie. He says, very defeatedly, that maybe he doesnt want to go home before they sail into Charybdis and Scylla, but you never see a desire to stay somewhere else, not even with Calypso who is supposed to be feeding him happy drugs in the movie.
Which, i do think was an okay choice on Nolans part. Not a great one, but in turning the Odyssey into a movie you cant include everything and the lotus flowers being used as a drug to alleviate (essentially) PTSD i thought was a cool way to still include them without dedicating a whole island to the lotus eaters. I do think a better way to have done that though wouldve been to give them to Hellen and included the scene where she adds a drug to the wine when telemachus is visiting sparta to relieve the melancholy of the party goers after her and menelaus tell war stories.
The changes to Hellens character as well were a little jarring, and personally i dont think turning such a nuanced figure into a battered wife trope was a plus to her character. Hellen is very complicated bc while she has very little physical autonomy in myth, shes often shown as having a lot of authority and cleverness. She's the hostess with the mostest (quote i believe mary beard and charlotte higgins) in sparta, and in Troy shes seen berating Paris, and arguing with aphrodite, and shes the only one who recognizes Odysseus dressed as a beggar (in Troy) and almost foils the wooden horse plan by imitating the mens wives voices to lure them out early.
I did like Clytemnestra sharing her face. I think i saw someone comment on how the face of hellen, the one Agamemnon used to justify war, being the last one he sees is very poetic.
I dont think i need to say much about agamemnons darth vader costume and aura farming lol
Throwing it back to calypso, i also think it was a weird choice to pick her and not nausicaa to have Odysseus tell his travels to. I think it wouldve been better and given odysseus more depth of character to show at least a little temptation to settle down somewhere else, with a wife who didnt know him Before and a people who are happy and blessed by the gods and are free from trouble.
Overall Nolan decreased both the impact and the presence of a lot of women in the narrative (though the actresses all knocked it out of the park with the scraps they were given), and the worst one by far was Athena. She has some of the most lines of any character in the poem, shes present throughout, shes a mentor to both Odysseus and his son who is also trying to figure out his place in the world (dont get me started on Nolan making Mentor some random guy to replace Athenas role in telemachus’ journey). She has opinions, and arrogance, and is one of the key figures that moves the plot, and turning her into a figment of odysseus’ imagination that only serves to further his man-pain and guilt is so incredibly misogynistic.
Which brings me to Nolans biggest change: making the message of the movie that if you commit war crimes the gods will punish you and civilization will fall, which is a little too sanctimonious of him imo (and also to quote mary beard again). The Odyssey being a character study and having something to say about the nature of man is enough, it doesnt need a heavy handed “war, and denying each other hospitality is bad” message to make the story impactful. It felt like Nolan wanted to make his mark on the story and he didnt need to, the odyssey already tells you war is bad when you see menalaus’ depression, and penelope being forced to remarry, and telemachus’ struggle of growing up without a father etc etc it already tells you that violating hospitality is bad when the cyclops starts eating them bc odysseus let his men eat a bunch of his wine, cheese, and sheep, and ofc with the suitors etc. (There also are ancient anti war stories like Euripides Trojan Women, but tbh we all know Nolan picked the Odyssey bc he wanted the name recognition, not necessarily the story)
And to be frank one of the most horrifying parts of war imo is that there often are no consequences for the victors. If this is supposed to be a middle finger to the US it falls massively flat, bc the US isnt collapsing into a dark age or suffering godly retribution (also, very christian of him but we dont need to get into that) for its actions. It cheapens the Odyssey into a weak finger wagging lecture aimed at the empire that funded it, while it was filmed on occupied land, the cast was full of Americans, they dumped plastic skeletons into protected waters, and one of its major actors wore stolen antiquities from the very region Nolan is self righteously critiquing the war against.
So yeah, i dont really have a closing statement, but something im realizing as i write this is that I walked out of the theater thinking “wow i liked this movie way more than i thought” but every time i discuss it with someone or write down my feelings i start finding more and more things i didnt like. I think it is very much a Summer Blockbuster in that it is good at being captivating while youre in the seat, but it falls apart once youve had time to think about it.
The Phoenicia, built in 2007–2008, is a modern replica of a 600 BC Phoenician merchant ship.
Inspired by ancient shipwreck discoveries near Marseille, the vessel was constructed using traditional methods to recreate the maritime achievements of the Phoenicians—master seafarers who once transported gold from Africa, tin from Britain, and linen from Egypt across the ancient world.
since the 2004 spongebob squarepants movie can be considered a retelling of the odyssey, this means that the climax, in which spongebob returns to the krusty krab to fight off the mind controlled bikini bottom denizens and sings goofy goober rock, can be considered a retelling of the scene in which odysseus slaughters penelope’s suitors.
