neither sparta nor troy

stuff i’ve read

[when-the-pawnn]

The Women Achilles Loved

Deidamia

Bred at his court, Achilles had an intrigue with Deidamia, daughter of Lycomedes, and a son Pyrrhuswas born to him, who was afterwards called Neoptolemus.

Apollodorus, Library - 3.13.8 

Achilles married Deidameia, daughter of Lykomedes, and there was born to them Neoptolemos, who was named this because of Achilles' youth when he rushed forward into war.

Philostratus, Heroica - 732

Earlier, however, when he was living with the young women, he had seduced Deidameia, Lycomedes’ daughter. She bore him Pyrrhos, who later was named Neoptolemos.

D Scholia to the Iliad - 19.326

 "He says 'female' about the body": for it is reported to the younger ones that Achilles, hearing that Hector was brave and fearing him, pretended to be a girl and went to live in Skyros with the children of Lycomedes, where he also slept with Deidameia.

Tzetzes, Ad Lycophronem - 277

2. Iphigenia

After the passage of time, Artemis transferred Iphigenia to what is called the White Island [Leuke] to be with Achilles and changed her into an ageless immortal deity, calling her Orsilochia instead of Iphigenia. She became the companion of Achilles.

Antoninus Liberalis, Metamorphoses - 27

He calls Iphigenia the "first-born mother" because, according to some, Pyrrhus was born from her and Achilles.

Tzetzes, Ad Lycophronem - 183

Otherwise, this is the meaning: Achilles, her lover, seeking her, will live for a long time on the so-called White Island, also known as Spilos — this island is near the mouths of the rivers of the Celtic lake — longing for his bride, whom once a deer saved from the swords.

Tzetzes, Ad Lycophronem - 186

The Achilles' racecourse was named for such a reason: When Iphigenia was about to be sacrificed in Aulis to Artemis, Artemis snatched her away and sent her to Scythia. Then Achilles fell in love with her and pursued her to a certain place. And from there it was called Achilles' racecourse.

Tzetzes, Ad Lycophronem - 192

3. Briseis

Any decent man, a man with sense, loves his own, cares for his own as deeply as I, I loved that woman with all my heart, though I won her like a trophy with my spear... But now that he's torn my honor from my hands, robbed me, lied to me don't let him try me now. I know him too well-he'll never win me over!

Homer’s Iliad

but Achilles slept in the innermost part of the well-builded hut, and by his side lay fair-cheeked Briseis.

Homer’s Iliad

4. Penthesileia

Those who do not know say that Achilles, after killing Penthesilea, fell in love with her after her death, whose eyes Thersites secretly gouged out.

Tzetzes, Ad Lycophronem - 999

Then he would have felt desire for a lifeless corpse, as Achilles did — seeing a new Penthesileia on the ground, he would have kissed the cold lips of the girl, prostrate in the dust, had he not feared the weight of the threat of Deriades.

Nonnus, Dionysiaca - 35.20 5. Polyxena

When Achilles by chance turned his gaze on Polyxena, he was struck by the beauty of the girl. The longer he remained there, the deeper his passion grew.

Dictys Cretensis, Trojan War Chronicle - 3.2

Accordingly, Achilles promised that he would bring the whole war to an end if Polyxena were given to him. 

Dictys Cretensis, Trojan War Chronicle - 3.3

When Polyxene came out with Hecuba to the sanctuary, Achilles admired her when he saw her.

Malalas, Chronography Bks 1-7, 10-18 - 5.130

The sacrifice of Polyxena on his tomb and Achilles' passion for her, which you hear from the poets, happened like this: Achilles loved Polyxena and was negotiating this marriage for himself with the understanding that he would make the Achaeans withdraw from Ilion. Polyxena also loved Achilles; they had seen one another during the ransom negotiations for Hektor.

Philostratus, Heroica - 737

6. Helen

Otherwise: this is told in two ways. For some say that Achilles, having mingled with Helen in a dream, desired to see her, having erotic feelings from the dream, and asked her to come to the wall, so that he could see her; so the Trojans, being persuaded, brought her to the wall, and he, seeing her, felt even more love for her. Others say that, seeing her for the first time on the wall, he was seized with love and asked his mother to help him to have intercourse with her.

Tzetzes, Ad Lycophronem - 174

Helen was wedded to Achilles, and had bidden him sail to Stesichorus at Himera

Pausanias, Description of Greece - 3.19.13

It was there, my guest, and he tells the following sorts of stories about it. He says that it is one of the islands in the Pontus [=Black Sea] more toward its inhospitable side, which those sailing into the mouth of the Pontus put on their left. It is about thirty stades long, but not more than four stades wide; the trees growing on it are poplars and elms, some stand without order, but others already stand in good order around the sanctuary…There Achilles and Helen first saw and embraced one another, and Poseidon himself and Amphitritê hosted their wedding feast, along with all the Nereids and as many rivers and water-spirits as flow into the Sea of Maiôtis and the Pontus…Then Achilles and Helen are said to drink together and to be engaged in singing. They celebrate in song their desire for one another, Homer’s epics on the Trojan War, and Homer himself. Achilles still praises the gift of poetry which came to him from Calliope, and he pursues it more seriously, since he has ceased from military activities.

Philostratus, Heroica - 54.2–54.12

7. Medea

It is said that after death Achilles consorts with Medea in the Isles of the Blest.

Apollodorus, Library (epitome) - e5.5

Otherwise, the story about "Achilles' wife" is as follows: they say that Achilles, after death, married Medea, the daughter of Aietes.

Tzetzes, Ad Lycophronem - 798

[helenofnowhere]

Desire, in its narrative form, is generated by distance. According to one ancient etymology (false, it hardly need be said), desire (pothos) pertains not to that which is present, but to that which is elsewhere (allothi pou) and distant (apontos). We might think of Musaeus’s Hero and Leander, with its story of the separation of the two young lovers by the Hellespont. That narrow strait is the physical materialisation of the narrative requirement for distance. But such boundaries are not just physical: they are symbolic too. In Hero and Leander and Achilles’s Leucippe and Clitophon alike, the young female lover is kept separate from others by parental sequestering. It is a social norm, not brute geography, that interposes the gap between the inception and the consummation of desire. In Chariton’s Callirhoe, the fathers of the two lovers are political enemies, in the manner of Romeo and Juliet. In such cases there is no physical barrier, but there are barriers all the same.

[…] In erotic narratives, desire is usually dangerously dislocated: the Greeks spoke of an atopos pothos, an ‘out-of-place yearning.’ What is distinctive about novels, I submit, is that they resist succumbing to the temptation simply to judge and condemn this ‘dirty’ love, and offer instead something more complex, empathic and challenging. In a novel, a figure like the Iliad’s Helen would become a more rounded character than Homer’s ‘cold, evil-contriving dog’ whose union with Paris was responsible for the suffering of male warriors. Certainly, the poetic tradition could offer a more positive, even celebratory account of transgressive passions. Already in Sappho’s lyrics we find a Helen endowed with agency, will and purpose; her pursuit of her own desires is presented as an exemplum for the poet to follow, and thus implicitly legitimised according to the poem’s moral scheme. But the female poet is also aware of how outrageous she is being, and the male lyric tradition quickly reverts to aggressive condemnation of Helen. In tragedy, those experiencing transgressive desires are given room to express themselves, often with sensitivity (e.g., Phaedra in Euripides’s Hippolytus) but all the same, transgressive desires inevitably lead to disastrous outcomes.

— Tim Whitmarsh, “Dirty Love: The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel” (2018)

[helenofnowhere]

Love stories are dangerous in part because they can corrupt the souls of their listeners. Erotic stories fuel the appetite, says Achilles Tatius’s Clitophon, explaining why a song about Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne stimulated his desire for Leucippe. A whole tranche of Stoic philosophy, to which Plutarch’s How to Listen to Poetry is the heir, was dedicated to teaching young men how to listen to fanciful stories without corroding their souls through psykhagōgia, ‘spiritual distraction.’ It took a lot of careful instruction to teach the young not to take such tales at face value, and to see the moral truths that lay beneath the superficially titillating surface. Constantine’s law makes it very clear that the souls of the young were held to be particularly vulnerable to such distractions.

Yet they threaten also because of their content. Erotic stories often involve dislocation and disruption. Dirt, as Mary Douglas has shown, offends because it disturbs the taxonomy of social order. Shoes are not dirty in themselves, but they are when placed on a table. Food is not dirty, but it is when it is on one’s clothing. Stories, similarly, become (as we say) ‘dirty’ when they involve desires that are deemed socially inappropriate and threaten the crossing of established Social boundaries. The Greeks did not think of eroticism itself as foul, at least until the arrival of Christianity (at which point stories began to be called impure simply because they contained sex). Individuals were not dirty, nor were their genitalia. Problems only arose when they (the individuals or the genitals) met in improper combinations: it was this that made the stories about them aiskhra (‘disgraceful’) or akolasta (‘licentious’).

— Tim Whitmarsh, “Dirty Love: The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel” (2018)

[helenofnowhere]

But the law also contains an unexpected provision. ‘Since it is often the case that parents’ stewardship of girls is played false by the stories (fabulis) and depraved exhortations (pravis suasionibus) of nurses, the law decreed, any nurse found to have acted in this way was to have molten lead poured into her mouth and throat.’ Since seduction and rape (from this perspective) are different in degree, not in kind, anything and anyone that inveigles unwanted erotic thoughts into the souls of young girls is complicit. Love stories, therefore, have their own parlous, corrupting power. The fear here is not that the young woman will be seized by force, but that erotic narrative will turn them into willing participants—which is, of course, just as bad from the parents’ point of view (which is all that counts). And could there be a more symbolic, or indeed more gruesome, way of silencing the dangerous voice of the storyteller than this?

The law’s provision partly reflects an anxiety about nurses, who had a singular power within the Greco-Roman household: entrusted with the care of the young and privy to their most intimate secrets yet not part of the bidogical family and so not fully trusted, they provoked a very particular kind of fear.

(…) Greco-Roman antiquity seems to have associated the telling of stories of romance, excitement and adventure with old women. In Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, the inset tale of Cupid and Psyche is told by a ‘crazy, drunken old woman’ to the captive Charite, to try to ease her fears. The Latin phrase anilis fabula—an old woman's tale—suggests a story that could be as suspect, both factually and morally. It is possible that this link tells us something substantial about the samizdat origins of such stories; after all, there is evidence from Homeric times onwards that the women of Greek households were the stewards of family narratives in other contexts (notably through lamentation). Stephanie West, indeed, has argued that elaborate, sophisticated romances like Chariton’s Callirhoe had their origins in stories told around the loom by spinning women. Whatever the truth of this, it is likely that the attribution of such stories to women was also a patriarchal strategy designed to discredit, simultaneously, both these dangerous stories and the old women who, now that they could no longer be subordinated to the function of child production, excited fear in authoritarian males.

— Tim Whitmarsh, “Dirty Love: The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel” (2018)

[helenofnowhere]

Saw your posts on Achilles. Have you read Marguerite Yourcenar's poem on Achilles? It's in a collection called "Fires." It is a curious examination of Achilles, gender, and cross-dressing.

i have not, though i’m familiar with the author! thanks for the rec.

[helenofnowhere]

Achilles describes his experience as a metamorphosis as much as a disguise, and he weighs the pleasure of being a woman against that of being a man. This recalls Ovid's Tiresias, who, not a transvestite but rather a transsexual, transformed himself into a woman and then back into a man, gaining the benefit of experiencing the pleasures of both sexes, and pronouncing on the difference. Achilles' joking reflection on his sexual "transformation" takes on particular poignancy given the nature of the singer who interpreted the role in the Venetian premiere. Achilles was played by "a young castrato of alluring appearance.., who combined a warlike spirit with feminine softness such that he seemed an Amazon." As if to make clear the connection between the gender metamorphosis in the drama and the castration of performers in it, [Giulio Strozzi, libretto] introduces a eunuch as a character in the drama. He is a singer and a member of Lycomedes court who entertains the rest of the company, and even makes jokes about his own castration.

La finta pazza leaves a great deal to be desired as a depiction of the Achilles-on-Scyros myth, since the final two-thirds of it diverge into the idiosyncratic story of Deidamia's feigned madness. Nevertheless, it demonstrates the ability of the myth to celebrate the sexual masquerade inherent in early opera, depicting gender itself as carnivalesque, both in the pretended femininity of Achilles and in the pretended "female" hysteria of Deidamia.

— P.J. Heslin on La finta pazza, “The Transvestite Achilles: Gender and Genre in Statius’ Achilleid” (2005)

[helenofnowhere]

The infatuation of Polycastes highlights Achilles' feminine beauty, even as he angrily tries to ward off this unwelcome attention. The comic nurse, when confronted with the prospect of Pyrrha supposedly cross-dressed as the male Achilles, notes the convenience of playing both sexes in terms similar to those used by [Giulio Strozzi's] Achilles:

Con questa somiglianza Pirra tù puoi pigliarti un gran placere Nel far l'huomo, e la donna a tuo volere.

Pyrrha, with this likeness you can obtain great pleasure for yourself, playing the man and the woman at your whim.

The feminization of Achilles is presented most starkly in a sequence of scenes in which the sleeping hero is surveyed as a passive sexual object by a stream of people, both male and female. In Act I, Scene 17, Achilles wanders alone in the royal gardens, where he waits for Deidamia, praising the beauty of the flowers and surroundings. He falls asleep, and when in the next scene Deidamia arrives, she decides to let him sleep and departs off-stage. In the following scene Polycastes arrives and admires the beauty of the sleeping Pyrrha. He praises the beauty of Achilles' lips, but Lycomedes approaches before he can proceed further. Polycastes hides in the bushes and in the next scene Lycomedes likewise remarks on the beauty of the sleeping figure. The king masters his desires with some difficulty and withdraws to avoid tempta-tion. Then in Scene 21, Cyrene arrives and attempts to murder her sleeping rival; at this the others all leap out from where they have been lurking to stop her. The reactions of the four characters who encounter the sleeping Achilles are strongly stereotyped by gender. The two males are provoked to a predatory sexual desire; one woman is kind and considerate while the other is irrationally jealous. Achilles meanwhile plays a stereotypically feminine role: in a passive posture and surrounded by flowers, he is feminized by the gazes that pass over him.

— P.J. Heslin, “The Transvestite Achilles: Gender and Genre in Statius’ Achilleid” (2005)

[helenofnowhere]

This theme of latent same-sex attraction was [Ippolito Bentivoglio's] most important innovation; particularly significant is the first appearance here of Lycomedes as susceptible to the beauty of the disguised Achilles. Bentivoglio's king retains his dignity because he obeys his own "wise counsel" (saggio consiglio, Act I, Scene 20) and flees temptation. As we shall see, in several subsequent versions, Lycomedes does not emerge from this situation so well. There is further homoerotic innuendo provided by the peculiarly close "friendship" between Deidamia and Pyrrha, which is the object of sarcastic comment by the nurse. Bentivoglio blurs the distinction between passionate female friendship and romantic love by having Deidamia call her lover by the female name Pyrrha even when they are alone (Act I, Scene 12). When the furious Deidamia attempts to reveal her relationship with Achilles to her father, Achilles explains that her outburst was merely the result of her concern that her excessive attachment to "Pyrrha" may have been detrimental to her vows of chastity (Act 2, Scene 14). As we shall see, the homoerotic potential offered by cross-dressing was employed by the subsequent librettists who dramatized this myth, as light comic relief for some, and as a major theme for others.

— P.J. Heslin on Ippolito Bentivoglio’s portrayal of Achilles in Skyros, “The Transvestite Achilles: Gender and Genre in Statius’ Achilleid” (2005)

[helenofnowhere]

Despite its avowed novelty, Achilles does have points in common with [John Gay's] earlier work. In Polly, the heroine spends much of the play dressed as a man in order to avoid harassment, and finds herself running from the unwanted attentions of Jenny Diver. In an inverse situation, the hero of Achilles, dressed as a girl to avoid the Trojan War, spends most of the drama trying to flee from the attentions of Lycomedes. In both cases, the cross-dressing disguise serves to introduce a theme of predatory lust that comically transgresses sexual norms. A female homoerotic charge is present in the kiss that Jenny gives to the heroine in Polly and is likewise hinted at in Achilles' response to Deidamia's fears that her sisters are suspicious of the looks "she" has been giving her: "May not one Woman look kindly upon another without Scandal?" A male homoerotic element is implicit throughout Achilles, first when Lycomedes attempts to rape Achilles in his disguise as a girl; then when Periphas is set up as his intended husband; and finally when Ajax fights Periphas in a duel over the affections of "Pyrrha." Masquerade opens the possibility of other kinds of sexual transgressions. Ulysses and Diomedes present themselves as tradesmen plying their wares, and in this lower-class disguise, they flirt outrageously with the noble sisters of Deidamia.

The most striking scene in Gay's drama is the one in which Lycomedes finally corners the disguised Achilles (Act 2, Scene 4). Achilles behaves just as a proper young lady should: he is firm but respectful in his refusal of the king's advances. In Capece's drama the innocent and guileless Deidamia was a foil for the unmastered passions of the other characters, but for Gay it is Pyrrha, the female guise of Achilles, who provides this contrast. This provides the humor, not appreciated by the Daily Courant's reviewer, of seeing Achilles not, as Horace had insisted, angry, implacable and fierce, but rather as a fundamentally modest if somewhat fiery maiden faced with the sexual violence of a more powerful male, and handling it just as any heroine of Richardson's might do. Gay could have gotten even more physical humor out of the scene if he had made Achilles' reaction less temperate; but he would have compromised the stark moral contrast between the licentious man of power and his innocent victim. Furthermore, by making Achilles rather than Deidamia the victim Gay was able to put rape, an element originally central to the myth, but suppressed by all the other librettists, back into the story, albeit in a comic guise. Both Ovid in his Ars amatoria (1.699f) and Statius (1.642f) had described how Achilles had raped Deidamia while pretending to be her female companion. In Gay's version, the victim is well able to defend "herself," and so the rape ends comically; but by appropriating the "female" narrative of rape and resistance and making a man the potential victim, Gay highlights the fact that it is power, rather than gender per se, that creates victims of sexual violence.

— P.J. Heslin on John Gay’s portrayal of Achilles in Skyros, “The Transvestite Achilles: Gender and Genre in Statius’ Achilleid” (2005)

[helenofnowhere]

Muslim chroniclers, and historians writing about al-Andalus, generally identify five main social groups in Andalusī society under the Umayyads: (1) Arab Muslims, who occupied the highest social rank and included the Umayyads and their Arab allies and their clients or mawālī (singular “mawlā”); the Arabic term for this elite group as a whole was “al-khāṣṣah,” the special ones. (2) Muslims of Iberian or Berber origin who had become honorary Arabs and part of the khāṣṣah through the study and acquisition of Arabic language and Arab culture. (3) Muwallads, which is a catch-all term for Muslims who were descendants of Iberian converts […] Muslims fell into this category if they had not broken into the “Arab” elite through ties of clientage or by being recognized as distinguished in their education and knowledge of Arabic. (4) Muslims of Berber origin, most of whose families came from North Africa in the 700s. They, like Iberian Muslims, could gain elite status, but most did not. (5) Dhimmīs, that is, Christians and Jews living under Islamic rule.

(…) The sources apply the above categories almost exclusively to men. Of course there were women who were non-Arab Muslims, or who were Jews or Christians living under Muslim rule, but their status had more to do with the identity of the men in their family than with their own attributes.

The Most Noble of People: Religious, Ethnic, and Gender Identity In Muslim Spain (2017) by Jessica A. Coope, Introduction, pages 7–8

[helenofnowhere]

[The tomb] of Eucharis, freedwoman of Licinia, an unmarried girl who was educated and learned in every skill. She lived 14 years.

Ah, as you look with wandering eye at the house of death, stay your foot and read what is inscribed here. This is what a father’s love gave his daughter, where the remains of her body lie gathered. ‘Just as my life with its young skills and growing years brought me fame, the sad hour of death rushed on me and forbade me to draw another breath in life. I was educated and taught as if by the Muses’ hands. I adorned the nobility’s festivals with my dancing, and first appeared before the common people in a Greek play.

‘But now here in this tomb my enemies the Fates have placed my body’s ashes. The patrons of learning-devotion, passion, praise, honour-are silenced by my burnt corpse and by my death.

‘His child, I left lamentation to my father, though born after him, I preceded him in the day of my death. Now I observe my fourteenth birthday here among the shadows in Death’s ageless home.

‘I beg you when you leave, ask that the earth lie light upon me.’

— 40. Eucharis, Rome, 1st century B.C. (ILLRP 803=ILS 5213=CIL I2.1214. L) translation from Diotíma

[helenofnowhere]

Pornhub prides itself on being the cheery, winking face of naughty, the website that buys a billboard in Times Square and provides snow plows to clear Boston streets. It donates to organizations fighting for racial equality and offers steamy content free to get people through Covid-19 shutdowns.

That supposedly “wholesome Pornhub” attracts 3.5 billion visits a month, more than Netflix, Yahoo or Amazon. Pornhub rakes in money from almost three billion ad impressions a day. One ranking lists Pornhub as the 10th-most-visited website in the world.

Yet there’s another side of the company: Its site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for “girls under18” (no space) or “14yo” leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.

After a 15-year-old girl went missing in Florida, her mother found her on Pornhub — in 58 sex videos. Sexual assaults on a 14-year-old California girl were posted on Pornhub and were reported to the authorities not by the company but by a classmate who saw the videos. In each case, offenders were arrested for the assaults, but Pornhub escaped responsibility for sharing the videos and profiting from them.In each case, offenders were arrested for the assaults, but Pornhub escaped responsibility for sharing the videos and profiting from them.

[…]

I came across many videos on Pornhub that were recordings of assaults on unconscious women and girls. The rapists would open the eyelids of the victims and touch their eyeballs to show that they were nonresponsive.

Pornhub profited this fall from a video of a naked woman being tortured by a gang of men in China. It is monetizing video compilations with titles like “Screaming Teen,” “Degraded Teen” and “Extreme Choking.” Look at a choking video and it may suggest also searching for “She Can’t Breathe.”

— Nicholas Kristof, “The Children of Pornhub: Why does Canada allow this company to profit off videos of exploitation and assault?” (2020)

[helenofnowhere]

Persephone is doomed to forever vacillate between her abductor/husband in the Underworld and her mother on the fertile earth; there is no escape for her without upsetting the very balance of the seasons. Medusa is fated always to die, a second punishment inflicted by her victim-blamer. Restoring agency to these women doesn’t happen by denying them their trauma, or by removing the label of victim. They enjoy true agency when their authors allow them to rise above their victimhood and become survivors, or at the very least become women who deal with the world on their own terms. True feminist retellings recognize and don’t repress their characters’ liminality.

— Aimee Hinds Scott, “Rape or Romance? Bad Feminism in Mythical Retellings” (2019) on Eidolon Publication