#classical reception

[kaitlin-writes]

1.26.26

It’s a snow day here, so I’m grading, studying, and contemplating writing poetry. Pictures are from class last week when we studied Aeschylus and Greek tragedy. We’re moving on next week to Aristotle’s Poetics.

[mervynbunter]

In the Iliad, too, the protracted duel between Hector and Achilles — running over several hundred lines — culminates in a brutal final exchange. When he realises there is no escape, Hector begs Achilles to return his body honorably to his family for burial, and not to allow it to be eaten by the dogs; but Achilles refuses him even this mercy and, before killing him, goes so far as to say that he wishes he could devour him himself.

αἲ γάρ πως αὐτόν με μένος καὶ θυμὸς ἀνήη ὤμʼ ἀποταμνόμενον κρέα ἔδμεναι, οἷα ἔοργας, ὡς οὐκ ἔσθʼ ὃς σῆς γε κύνας κεφαλῆς ἀπαλάλκοι, οὐδʼ εἴ κεν δεκάκις τε καὶ εἰκοσινήριτʼ ἄποινα στήσωσʼ ἐνθάδʼ ἄγοντες, ὑπόσχωνται δὲ καὶ ἄλλα, οὐδʼ εἴ κέν σʼ αὐτὸν χρυσῷ ἐρύσασθαι ἀνώγοι Δαρδανίδης Πρίαμος· οὐδʼ ὧς σέ γε πότνια μήτηρ ἐνθεμένη λεχέεσσι γοήσεται ὃν τέκεν αὐτή, ἀλλὰ κύνες τε καὶ οἰωνοὶ κατὰ πάντα δάσονται. I wish I could eat you myself, that the fury in my heart would drive me to cut you in pieces and eat your flesh raw, for all that you have done to me. So no man is going to keep the dogs away from your head, not even if they bring here and weigh out ten times or twenty times your ransom, not even if Dardanian Priam offers to pay your own weight in gold. Not even so will your honoured mother lay you on the bier and mourn for you, her own child, but the dogs and birds will share you for their feast and leave nothing.

Shakespeare’s hugely condensed version of their encounter is, as we have seen, entirely different, reducing many pages of exchanged speeches, sallies and divine intervention into an ignominious few lines. All the same, Achilles seems to echo remotely the Homeric original. Immediately after the speech quoted above, the retreat sounds, and Achilles speaks again:

The dragon wing of night o’erspreads the earth And, stickler-like, the armies separates. My half-supped sword, that frankly would have fed, Pleased with this dainty bait, thus goes to bed.

Both the sentiment and even the construction here (‘would have fed’) recalls Achilles’ final speech to Hector in Iliad 22, ‘I wish I could eat you myself’. The one element of the Homeric scene that is retained is the most monstrous.

Chapman did not publish his version of Iliad 22 until 1611, but I don’t think that means we need to assume that Shakespeare was looking directly at the Greek. It is much more likely that, when he decided to write a fashionably Homeric play, he consulted some kind of Latin edition. In fact, even a version as compressed as the Ilias Latina could have given him this particular detail, since this is one of the handful of passages that the Ilias Latina translates quite closely:

Quid mea supplicibus temptas inflectere dictis pectora, quem possem direptum more ferarum, si sineret natura, meis absumere malis? Te uero tristesque ferae cunctaeque uolucres diripient, auidosque canes tua uiscera pascent. “Why do you try with your words of supplication to bend my heart, you whom I could, like wild beasts their prey, consume, if nature allowed it, in return for all my suffering? For sure, the grim beasts and all the birds will tear you apart, and the hungry dogs feast on your entrails.”

Bifold authority: Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida”

[pspsappho]

i do think the pepsi superbowl halftime ad where beyonce britney and pink are all gladiators and enrique iglesias is there as the emperor (unspecified) and the girls get the whole colosseum singing we will rock you and then a lion eats imperator enrique might be one of my favourite bits of pop culture ephemera. possibly nothing has ever been so deeply 2004

[honorthegods]

Who is Artemis? NASA’s latest mission to the Moon is named after an ancient lunar goddess turned feminist icon

A scholar of Greek mythology explains the naming of NASA’s missions after mythological figures and why the name Artemis is indicative of a m

This article from 2022 about the Artemis I mission, women at NASA, and the reception of Artemis in the modern world is by Marie-Claire Beaulieu, associate professor of Classical Studies at Tufts University.

[dilutedh2so4]

Cuntiest Paris?

The Fall of Troy 1911

Helena 1924

The Private Life of Helen of Troy 1927

Sköna Helena 1951

Helen of Troy 1956

The Trojan Horse 1961

The Fury of Achilles 1962

Doctor Who 1965

Paris the Musical 1990

Helen of Troy 2003

Troy 2004

Troy Fall of a City 2018

Voting ended onAug 13, 2025

[pathos-bathos]

Sitting on campus to do some reading!

Thank you miss kitty cat who joined and color matched my stuff 😊

[uritur-infelix]

One positive thing I'm hoping for with Nolan's Odyssey is that more people will engage with Homer by reading the epics themselves or learning about the ancient world more generally (whether out of love for the film or in utter disgust at it, I don't really care).

At a classics conference yesterday, I heard one speaker familiar with a Belfast-based classics institute say that they've been experiencing higher enrolments than normal in recent months, a observation that the speaker linked to the publicity of the new film.

Also just now, I saw a FB post by a secondhand bookstore in my area that was saying their Odyssey translations have been selling out and they've been struggling to get enough replacement copies.

I mean, we've certainly seen this phenomenon before, because, like, blockbuster films are essentially giant adverts for the classics, *even* when they have all kinds of inaccuracies and the like. Following the first Gladiator film (a problematic film on historical grounds), enrolments in high-school ancient history subjects increased considerably in Australia. I was reading that, in one state (New South Wales), the number of enrolments had more than doubled by 2008 compared to 1998.

At the end of the day, I don't know for sure what'll happen, but I honestly think it's possible we might see greater engagement with Classics education (or even just more ppl reading the source texts) as a result of Nolan's Odyssey and all its controversies.

[loltheirscience]

Women in the early church really liked this one badass saint, and it made the guys in charge super uncomfortable.

The Cult of Saint Thecla: A Tradition of Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2001; online edn, Oxford Academic, 31 Oct. 2023)