antiquas exercet aranea telas

[pharsalianostra]

Rue | 23 | New York -> Oxford

Hello! I’m a Classics MA student focusing on Greek and Latin language and literature. I love Roman history as well, and am also currently inordinately obsessed with The Secret History

You can find my Secret History fics on Ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pharsalia_nostra/pseuds/pharsalia_nostra

Please say hi, I’m always down to meet people who share my passions!

[mommydgaf]

where is my government issued masochist ?

[pharsalianostra]

I took an exam this morning where I just translated a passage from the Symposium and then spent the afternoon reading the Ion. I can read Ancient Greek now. That’s crazy omfg.

[pharsalianostra]

I took an exam this morning where I just translated a passage from the Symposium and then spent the afternoon reading the Ion. I can read Ancient Greek now. That’s crazy omfg.

[pharsalianostra]

Studying Ancient Greek is genuinely so much I kind of understand how one might find oneself running drunk through the woods and tearing a man limb from limb after numbing the mind with all those principal parts

[apolloniansorrow]

HELLOOOO what’s ur fav the secret history quote and why??

hiiiii !!! thank you for the ask !! sorry i took so long i had to think on this one a lot, but i have to go with the classic “forgive me, for all the things i did but mostly for the ones i did not.” in francis’ suicide letter.

i think it is such a beautiful logline for the book and an excellent summary of many of the characters. often people are of the belief that simply because we do not do things ourselves, that we are not accomplice to them, or aren’t directly contributing to their success.

most of what led to the outcome of this book was not action, but rather apathy and inaction. a desire for someone to handle the situation for you, so that you may wash your hands of it while still holding no blame. but that simply isn’t how life works. and it’s interesting how their idolatry of julian foreshadows this: they’re so desperate for someone to tell them how to live and live right, that they are willing to let anything happen if it means what they think is peace.

but none of them are at peace. two of them are dead; the four left are in various degrees of a personal hell.

camilla, independent, ambitious camilla who snuck off from hangouts to read books and refused to clean up after anyone, but most especially not her brother, stuck home caring for her nana, not reading anymore, not pursuing the life she wanted, living with ghosts of her dead boyfriend and her living but effectively dead brother, and a mountain of guilt.

francis was always victimizing himself through inaction, and it’s curious that he talks down on bunny during the bacchanal conversation for being a leech when he quite literally refuses to live freely because he doesn’t want to lose his trust fund. money he didn’t make, didn’t earn, that he’s entitled to simply by virtue of someone else’s whims. even with his lovers. the cowardice of having them drunk, never standing up for himself or his desire. as long as he’s wanted it’s enough, even if it’s bad, upsetting, even through blurred vision and black spots in memory. it’s even more poetic that the one action he does take for himself fails. he’s never done anything for himself; why would he suddenly know how to now?

richard does, i suppose, have technically the best outcome of them all. i mean he’s a professor, he completes his degree, but i think it’s still hell for him. he’s back in california. but he’s lost his friends, the people he loved more than anything, he’s lost his sense of self to the home he swore he wanted to get away from. and he says in the end that he resents sophie for “making me move back to california” he can move anywhere else. he’s a professor. he has some sort of money now, and he proved he could do much more with a lot less. he chooses not to, and again resents someone else for it.

charles on the other hand, who was described as sensitive and considerate, does take meaningful action. he’s quite curiously a perfect double-sided coin to henry. as much as he hates henry he comes to the same conclusion as him: to be rid of his problems he should kill henry. that will fix it. he’ll be free. he never acknowledges the fact that it’s not killing henry that will save him, it’s taking the action he should have taken in the first place: telling the police. telling someone. a devout catholic refusing to repent for his own sake is such an excellent character choice. and then with camilla: he gripes about losing her, goes so far as to abuse her to keep her close, but had he just let her go, he would have never lost her. had he just stopped trying to remain in control of everything, she would still want him around. curiously (and this is my personal hc based on the implications of his character’s history with child sa in the church), it seems his lack of bodily autonomy in youth is directly pushed onto his sister, and somehow he doesn’t see the harm in that, or is too far gone to care. he didn’t get control, so no one around him does. it’s unfortunate.

[alyoshkas]

Francis said “I’m going the fuck to bed”.

[thenwearedecided]

judas and jesus could do "do not presume too much upon my love - i may do that i shall be sorry for / you have done that you should be sorry for" and brutus and cassius could do "i don't care why you do it / to think i admired you, well now i despise you"

[talkshowboyluvr]

sometimes henry wasn’t manipulating richard and was actually just trying to hit . stop assuming the worst out of him

[pharsalianostra]

These are not mutually exclusive goals. Perhaps most often he was trying to do both

[yuebeing]

commission for the lovely @ddeerslayer - henry winter and bunny corcoran - based off a leyendecker ref

[frodo-of-the-nine-fingers]

i wish you could study yaoi in college....

[nahmann]

I wonder y Henry doesn’t smoke a pipe, or cigars? Y cigarettes specifically? For practicality?

[apolloniansorrow]

it’s probably ease of access but i have an evil take and it’s that his dad smoked pipes and cigars. and not only does he hate the smell of them specifically because they used to give him headaches as a child (he only likes the smell of his lucky strikes, really), one day bunny got them cigars at lunch (like he does with richard), and henry catches sight of himself in the mirror across their table and he looks so much like his father when he was young that it puts him off them for good

[pharsalianostra]

Random question for TSH people, but is there ever a point in the novel where we officially learn the color of Francis’s eyes and if so where? I have tried to find this and never have. It stands out to me bc the other members of the Greek Class get their eye colors described quite a lot. Anyways, most people seem to assume green or blue but I want to know if I can claim brown-eyed Francis as equally possible bc I want him to have brown eyes.

[willothewispwisteriadawn]

A thought about the end of The Secret History.

Earlier in the book, Julian and the Greek class are basically going euphoric over the Death of Agamemnon from the Oresteia. They go over this violent scene of Agamemnon dying in a bathtub. They have Camilla read for Clytemnestra, and Julian is teaching on this scene’s beauty like it’s what life is about. At this point, Henry believes Julian’s words are truth and law.

At the end, Francis tries to kill himself in the bathtub and Henry appears to him to show how disgusted in him he is.

[pharsalianostra]

I've been wanting to make a post about Richard's idea about "the fatal flaw," for a while now.He opens asking" "Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that shadowy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside of literature?" Now, the thing is, the term fatal flaw largely ties back to Aristotle's Poetics, translating the Greek word ἁμαρτία. But ἁμαρτία doesn't really mean "fatal flaw," it means "mistake." Richard is really desperate to portray the events of the novel as fated. He ended up at Hampden because a flyer dropping out of his closet, Bunny's death caused the trouble it did because of the snow, etc. The term "fatal flaw" evokes this sense of fate, too. It removes agency, implies that everyone is born with some predetermined singular fault. But really, tragedy happens––fortunes switch from good to bad, as Aristotle says––not because of some inherent, fated evil, but because of human mistakes. This is far less romantic, but it's far more tragic. And of course, it's far more true.

(If ya'll want to read more about misunderstanding ἁμαρτία in tragedy, "Misunderstanding Oedipus Rex," by ER Dodds is a really interesting read that partially inspired this post.)

[nahmann]

I was reading a paper from my school’s database critiquing Donna Tartt’s novels, and the author pointed out how, in tsh, for such an important figure—the catalyst of the Greek class’s folly, the authority on which their world views rests—Julian Morrow isn’t a very fleshed-out character…

I hadn’t really considered it before, but I think I agree. Now…could this have been intentional?? A deliberate decision to play up his seemingly ambient, yet thematically load-bearing nature as a narrative trap? I’m not sure. But Donna seems to have banked heavily on us taking his presence for granted.

For example, note that Julian is almost always filtered through Richard or Henry’s reverence, and rarely to never does he receive interiority or independent scenes, making him feel like a part of the novel’s architecture; an entity that exists primarily as a circumstantial influence (to fulfill the mentor archetype) rather than a character that acts as an independent agent (with the capacity to be subversive).

This makes his departure all the more devastating, as by having Julian abandon Henry (at such a fraught juncture where the Greek class is already all but fallen apart too), rather than condemn him as we might have expected, the final blow that is the climax (Henry’s suicide), is sharpened by shattering the assumption that Julian’s principles, and, by extension, Henry’s resolve, were infallible.

(Also just curious: is there anyone out there that anticipated Henry’s suicide and saw it coming upon their first read? I certainly didn’t.)

[pharsalianostra]

Yes, yes, this is really interesting and all wonderful points. Regarding Julian's absence from the narrative, I definitely think it’s important to remember that everything is filtered through Richard’s bias. Towards the end, Richard says, “in many ways, I loved him the most of all; and it is with him that I am most tempted to embroider, to flatter, to basically reinvent,” (510). In the same way that Richard goes on and on about how annoying Bunny was right because they kill him, and how he focuses far more on Charles’s positive traits and brushes over his “moodiness” for the first 3/4 of the novel, Richard choosing not to discuss Julian much shapes how the reader sees and (more importantly) doesn’t see him. In his absence, Julian can be protected. He doesn’t seem responsible for much when he isn’t around much. He floats above the nastier realities that have sunk the rest of the characters, and in that way, he seems somewhat absolved from it all. Perhaps Richard couldn’t bring himself to portray it any other way.

When Julian is forced to face the truth, when he enters the space the rest of the characters have existed in this whole time, everything falls apart, culminating in Henry’s suicide.

Also, I did actually see Henry’s suicide coming. The way he acted in the scene in his garden where he says to Richard that after killing the farmer, he can now “do what he always wanted” and “live without thinking,” and goes on to talk about “that surge of power and delight, of confidence, of control. That sudden sense of the richness of the world,” (493), struck me as very typical of how people often act before attempting suicide. It’s really common for people to have these strong sensations of relief, determination, and separation from reality when they decide to attempt suicide. It’s very notable because it usually comes after a really long intense period of depression, which certainly seems the case for Henry. That scene really, really evoked that for me, and definitely made me wonder if Henry was suicidal.

[betryl]

They