the waves clasp one another

just visiting this planet

[thefairestknightofall]

Ah finally, my type of “meme”

I do enjoy a good cup of tea

[woozapooza]

I’m reading the History of the Fall of Troy by “Dares the Phrygian” and I’m laughing at this quote (context: Andromache has a bad prophetic dream and gets Priam to keep Hector at home):

Hector, on learning of this, bitterly blamed Andromache and told her to bring forth his armor; nothing, he said, could keep him from battle. She tried in vain to make him relent…

Because I’m picturing this:

[theodysseyofhomer]

odysseus absolutely does present a threat to penelope if he perceives her as at all unfaithful, and i feel the unfairness of this, and i think people tend to undersell how much tension at least potentially exists between odysseus and penelope. but i'm also like. his reaction, all speculation aside, his actual reaction in the odyssey to her flirting with the suitors is delight, because he immediately ascertains that she is running a con. sorry that they're so in-sync in spite of the forces that try to drive a wedge between them, including their own misgiving hearts. sorry that they invented homophrosyne ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[strinak]

oh, you meant they literally did, ok

[theodysseyofhomer]

would i, tumblr user thee odysseyofhomer, lie to you?

[polyphemusthecylcops]

...

[thoodleoo]

between odysseus carving his marital bed from a tree trunk and penelope weaving and un-weaving a funeral shroud to stave off her suitors, i think what homer is telling us is that the foundation of a good relationship is arts and crafts

[ruspacalafiori]

[mariasparrow]

Favorite Actress for Penelope?

I was thinking and I started to wonder, which actresses so far do you think portrayed Penelope the best?

In order of my favorites:

Silvana Mangano in the 1954 film Ulysses: I've talked about her before, but again, her almost aristocratic, delicate beauty, expressive eyes, and excellent portrayal of cautiously walking on eggshells in her own house and subtle defiance and sorrow was masterful. Her best scene was when she was talking to Odysseus when he was disguised as a beggar - at first she is cautious, almost scornful/angry at another person coming in, claiming to know her husband. But the more they talk, the more she opens up, suspects the truth but can't say, and subtly challenges him by declaring her faithfulness "But Penelope is faithful. It's SO easy for Penelope to be faithful". And together they come up with the challenge of the bow. There is so much the script said without saying in that scene.

Pros: Has close to the level of beauty described in the Odyssey. "Looking like Artemis or Golden Aphrodite", "White as sawed Ivory", Something in her beauty reminds me of a Mermaid, which fits as the daughter of a Naiad.

Great at displaying both Penelope's stonewall front to the suitors and her unraveling/longing in private.

Is shown occasional sweet-talking some suitors to keep the balance of the house/buy time.

Has great chemistry with her Odysseus, played by Douglass Kirk.

Irene Papas,The Odyssey (1968): what can I say about her that hasn't already? Fantastic, legendary actress. Not my number one spot, as I think her face has a slightly fiercer beauty than I picture Penelope to have, better suite to play Clytemnestra, which she also so well. She is the most Greek of the famous actresses to play Penelope, bringing little details to the role others couldn't. Her regal face when facing the suitors and her doting face with Telemachus are so, so good. Her best scene is when she demands Odysseus let HER test HIM now, after all is said and done, and melts when he passes the bed test.

Pros: Greek actress in a Greek role.

Is always secretly watching what is around her, taking it all in, observing to stay afloat.

Her soft face in private for her son and memories is wonderful acting.

During the slaughter of the suitors, she is show trying not to panic, to keep it together. But she's scared and vulnerable.

Greta Scacchi The Odyssey (1997): Good actress but not my favorite. While it shows the dignified wife well, she just doesn't carry the same charm that Mangano and Papas bring - the sort of spark that gives their Penelopes uniqueness. But Scacchi still has great moments - her subtle "oh crap" look when she realizes the suitors will not be leaving and then her best scene is the zinger at the challenge of the bow - when she leaves the suitors asks should she stay to see the winner, she answers "You're all the same to me." And of course she is lovely - Golden Aphrodite indeed.

Pros: Her human side is shown more easily.

She feels like such a mom to everyone around her. She gives a great "I'm disappointed" look to Menetho when she betrays her.

Is shown to be considering what her defiance is costing her household, kingdom.

What do you think? which of the three are your favorite?

Who is your favorite Penelope?

Silvana Mangano, Ulysses (1954)

Irene Papas,The Odyssey (1968)

Greta Scacchi, The Odyssey (1997)

Voting ended onJun 7

[hatosyscurls]

Out of curiosity, what are your thoughts on fics turned into published books in general?

1. I think it's indicative of a capitalist mindset to feel the need to take material you write for fun and try to twist it into something that earns you profit. It's a shame.

2. I think writing good fanfic doesn't always translate to writing good standalone fiction. I've heard mixed feedback about other recently published former-fanfics but there is a level of world and character-building that fanfic doesn't require that is crucial to original fiction.

3. I think it's borderline exploitative of your fanfic readers to put out a fanfic, garner free feedback on it, and use that feedback to develop a manuscript that you sell.

4. I think if you're truly a good writer, you can write independent works of original fiction that hold up as "good" fiction because they have solid world building and multidimensional characters and have a well crafted plot to tie everything together. I do sincerely wonder if authors who are publishing their fanfics are truly capable of writing actual good fiction beyond just cramming their fanfic into an original fic mold to varying success.

[nonlynear]

my high horse is actually awesome and fast like the wind

[pure]

leftists are well aware that male supremacy is the original form of exploitation. that it existed in classless societies, that it existed in societies without private property, and that it will exist in their ideal world, too. that it arose globally and independently of cross-cultural exposure. leftists have to lie about this historical fact, because they need women to participate in leftist organizing if they want to defeat their fascist rivals (not enemies—communists and fascists are mere rivals).

the right can afford to be openly male supremacist and still garner the support of women who comply, such as “trad wives.” the left cannot do this. the left cannot successfully pontificate about freedom and liberation while being honest about the fact that they too want women to remain in a subservient set of chains like their rivals do. only the orientation of the chains differ between the two rivals. so, the left has to obfuscate their male supremacist aims so women will still participate in organizing and building the left’s preferred utopia, a utopia that is bereft of social injury to men.

leftists generally don’t say “men ought to lead and dominate,” “women are inferior,” like their rivals do. leftists prefer to be wolves masked as sheep. instead, they’ll say “abolishing capitalism will put an end to patriarchy,” (translation: solve the problems that oppress men first, ignore misogyny, and we pinky swear we’ll help you after we get what we want at your expense), or “feminism is bourgeois” (translation: feminism is the enemy to working class men who want to keep their porn, wives, surrogates and prostitutes).

leftists are not uneducated. leftists do not need to be convinced of 12,000+ years of female subjugation. leftists simply need YOU 🫵🏿 to comply with their preferred brand of male supremacy, so they’ll placate you with falsehoods and platitudes about how feminism must wait, so you’ll be complacent. the reality is they want feminism to wait, indefinitely. men and their apologists are simply acting in the self interests of men. in our society, the only injury is male injury, which is why they will support every movement that improves men’s social status and reject the one thing that will abolish it.

ideally, men must never ever have their sexual access to women be compromised. this contempt for female sexual boundaries and contempt for female freedom from male supremacy animates our entire concept of morality. left, right, center, diagonal, up, down, no matter the political perspective—every movement is a male grievance movement first. only the aesthetics differ, never the result.

my type of carrying on, radical feminism, emerged when an increasing number of leftist women realized these facts of male supremacy—that the right was not our only enemy as women. this is the ultimate rupture of “left-right” liberalism. leftists resist feminism as much as the right, possibly even more, because our refusal to comply with their misogyny is extremely dangerous to the success of their movement. any sort of popularity or sympathy towards real feminism is extremely dangerous to the status quo. leftist men have no choice but to oppose it if they want to keep their wives, their porn, their prostitutes, and their sexual control. the rise of feminism in leftist movements has consistently, globally, led to defections, enabling us to create movements that dared to acknowledge the injuries committed against women. our ability to opt out of their political project after unraveling their trickery has always made us public enemy number 1. tee hee.

this cycle will continue until we as women remember the political bravery and political risk we once exhibited on a global scale. to stop allowing ourselves to be controlled and suppressed by these various male grievance movements. and they are all male grievance movements. even the ones you like!

[ruspacalafiori]

Paolo Rossi, The Heart of a Champion (2021)

[ruspacalafiori]

1998 FIFA World Cup

[fieropasto-deactivated20210613]

me studying anything in history

[fieropasto-deactivated20210613]

[nineherbscharm]

is there anything funnier than somebody who has a tumblr account trying to seem like theyre above fandom

[bisexual-cyborg]

via @coniello

[marietheidiot]

We always talk about Achilles' "eat [him] raw" line in book 22, but I find Hecuba's later, similarly cannibalistic, line to be equally (if not more) compelling

In book 24, right before Priam goes out to retrieve Hector's body, he speaks with Hecuba, telling her where he's going and what he's doing. In response, Hecuba freaks out, telling Priam to stay and mourn Hector within the walls of Troy. During this exchange she says, "Oh would to god that I could sink my teeth in his liver, eat him [Achilles] raw! That would avenge what he has done to Hector--"

What I find most interesting about Hecuba's line is that it is so much more direct than that of Achilles in book 22. In his speech, Achilles adds a few degrees of separation between himself and the act of cannibalism: "Would to god my rage, my fury would drive me now to ... eat you raw." In Ancient Greece, mortal cannibalism was a serious taboo (duh), seen as the ultimate act of barbarity, one which fundamentally separated a person from their humanity. Cannibalism is an act so disturbing, so inhuman, that even Achilles, in all his rage, cannot bring himself to desire it (let alone commit the act!).

But Hecuba, Hecuba doesn't dance around it. "Oh would to god that I could sink my teeth in his liver, eat him raw!" This is a direct wish; were she were given the opportunity and the power, she would eat Achilles. At this point, what does she have to lose? She's already lost so many sons, Troy is in a state of constant distress, and now Hector is gone. Hector, her very own son. Hector, the protector of Troy. All Hecuba has left is rage, a hunger for vengeance. A Rage so potent that it can only be expressed through the most sinful and visceral act of devouring your enemy.

But Hecuba never actually eats Achilles. She doesn't have the outlet that he does; she can't go into battle, can't actually do anything to the man who has killed her son. And so Hecuba's rage, so intensely inhuman, stews within her. And maybe it's because of this festering anger that, in many versions of her story, Hecuba becomes a dog. A beast which, in the Iliad specifically, is so often used as a threat to soldiers and their bodies: "Sooner the racing dogs will eat him raw".

[theodysseyofhomer]

what’s funny about odysseus being portrayed as a pacifist in any trojan war retelling is that yes i hold the draft dodger myth very close to my heart but once he went to war he made himself an expert at it. the war haunts him, the war follows him home, songs of war are said to make him weep like a woman whose husband is killed and who is about to be taken captive [which is, btw, the most loaded imagery i could imagine homer using], and all of that matters because he was very, very good at it

[theodysseyofhomer]

#there are also just so many reasons to dodge the draft beyond ideological objection to violence#odysseus’ devotion to his family is DEEPLY selfish#(positive. to me)#he’s not the moral centre of anything#he’s the fruit flavoured centre of a gusher also the fruit thing was a lie it’s blood via @gladiolus—amicitia

[agreekmythologywriter]

he just wanted everybody else to go to hell and let him go home

[theodysseyofhomer]

i just don’t think that’s true. in pretty much every story there is, whenever the achaean armies hit a roadblock of any kind, he doesn’t turn around. he moves it. need achilles? i’ll fetch him. no winds at aulis? sacrifice iphigenia. agamemnon just told everyone to go home because of a dream he had? i’ll make sure they stay put, and beat them into submission if necessary. need the bow of hercules? i’ll steal it from philoctetes. and on. and on. and on.

if he wanted to leave, the war could have been over before it began. he wants to win it. and he doesn’t try to go home until he has.

[littlesparklight]

Even though much of Homeric epic communicates the martial rape of a coerced spear-conquest bedmate as though it were sexual copulation in legitimate marriage, Priam cuts through this Homeric euphemism about sleeping and bedding with Trojan wives to acknowledge the impending mass rape on site once Troy is conquered. Unless the doomed Hector survives to continue defending the city, Priam will see “his daughters and daughters-in-law mauled (ἑλκηθείσας θύγατρας, ἑλκομένας νυούς) by the destructive hands of the Achaeans” (Il. 22.62–5). The mauling is sexual, for ἕλκειν (or ἑλκεῖν) here signifies aggravated rape, just as it does when Tityus “raped (ἕλκησε)” Zeus’ consort Leto (Od. 11.580). The sense of ἕλκειν specific to heterosexual rape is synonymous with the Homeric ῥυστάζειν, which is a frequentative of ἐρύειν, “drag along,” and, like ἕλκειν, stresses the dragging or mauling involved in attacking and subjecting female persons to aggravated rape. The Odyssey uses ῥυστάζειν to convey what Penelope’s suitors are doing to the female slaves in Odysseus’ house (Od. 16.108–9 = 20.318–19). A definition of ῥυστάζειν presented in the Etymologicum magnum (Gaisford) thus further illuminates the sexual nature of the impending violence against Priam’s daughters and daughters-in-law by Achaean and allied fighters, for ῥυστάζειν means “to sexually maul (ἕλκειν) and to copulate with a woman through force and compulsion (τὸ μετὰ βίας καὶ ἀνάγκης ἕλκειν καὶ μίγνυσθαι γυναικί).”49 This is a concise and apt definition of aggravated heterosexual rape. As Porphyry puts it more succinctly, ἕλκειν meaning “sexually maul” is ἕλκειν εἰς ὕβριν in the sexually specific legal sense of ὕβρις as rape.50 This succinct definition likewise indicates the salient aspects of aggravated rape–sexually penetrative mauling through sheer force. This is what Nestor and the Homeric narrator call “sleeping or bedding down with” and what Priam refuses to hide under these covers.

(Ancient Warfare and the Ravaging Martial Rape of Women and Girls : Evidence from Homeric Epic and Greek Drama by Kathy Gaca in Sex in Antiquity, Masterson, Rabinowitz)

The word Priam uses mentioned/quoted up there is the same Hektor uses in this line "[...]May I lie dead under the barrow that is heaped over my body ere I hear your cry as they carry you into bondage."" He's just as likely/probably more to be talking about hearing her being sexually assaulted as "just" being dragged off into slavery.

This chapter/essay is rather tough reading, but it's really interesting if you're at all interested in the captive and enslaved women in the Iliad.

[kuutamosonaatti]

MARIA BY CALLAS (2017) | dir. Tom Volf