#homer thoughts

[flaviafulvia]

I feel like Achilles and Patroclus chew on each other recreationally, or out of stress of boredom

[aussieweasel]

i am against violence against children but I want to shoot the cocomelon baby.

[flaviafulvia]

I like to think that Patroclus as a teenager was what we would call "troubled." He kept his shit together around Achilles, but servants would find empty wineskins under his bed, he would occasionally sneak out at night to hang with shady characters outside of the palace, and risk a little too much too often. The adults in his life noticed and were concerned and did their best, but none of them were quite equipped to handle it, even if similar stuff happened to them. He kinda grew out of it once he and Achilles hooked up and he started getting adult responsibilities and felt like he had agency over his life again.

[flaviafulvia]

Achilles is the love of Patroclus’s life and he loves him and whole lot and always will, but if only Achilles dies and Patroclus survives the Trojan War, I think Patroclus is eventually able to move to some extent. Achilles will always be his first love and no one else is going to compare, but the limits of his love are bound by his own humanity, unlike Achilles whose emotions reach those of the gods but are contained to a human’s body and a mortal’s lifespan, a particularly unstable combination. Maybe Patroclus does help raise Pyrrhus, maybe he gets a wife and has a few children for the novelty, maybe he starts a cult for Achilles, but I don’t think he ends his own life when Achilles dies.

Achilles’s bargain is death for eternal glory, and Patroclus as a witness to his deeds would want to help spread his fame. He also seems to be part of the younger generation of princes and nobility at Troy and would in all likelihood outlive Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Menelaus and get the last say.

[flaviafulvia]

I love thinking about Achilles and Patroclus being teenage boys at the start of the war and all that entails. They sleep a lot and eat even more. Achilles has a growth spurt or two in him. At their camp there is a smell. They keep trying to grow beards and the results are risible. They are disgusting, living in a Bronze Age-frat house.

[flaviafulvia]

Hades and TSOA both kept Achilles and Patroclus apart after death, and I want to be a contrarian and unite them immediately. Not even however many months passed for Patroclus, but they are both united at the second of each of their deaths, so Achilles is this mess and sobbing because waiting was so hard and Patroclus, who had a hell of an afternoon, mind you, is trying to comfort him but is thinking to himself “we had breakfast together” because that is how he would perceive the passage of time.

I don’t have anything to add to this, however.

[flaviafulvia]

Sometimes there’s this tendency to portray Achilles and Patroclus as, like, sad sacks at Troy but I’m convinced prophecy aside they were happy and thriving until year 9. There’s some textual support in Homer because the Iliad makes it extremely clear that the Achilles we see there is unlike the one from before Patroclus’s death (like the scene where he killed someone he had ransomed earlier), but I dunno I feel like if anything they would just enjoy the lack of real adult supervision and being the best of the best for decades. Also Achilles is notable for always seeming to have a bunch of male companions around him and I think he enjoyed that environment in a homosocial way. Furthermore, I think being kids together means that there wasn’t enough of a gap for Achilles and Patroclus to be in a traditional eronomous/erastes relationship, and even if they were Achilles would have been too old for a passive role even in his mid-twenties at the end of the war. At court there would be whispers but at Troy Achilles got to keep Patroclus, party with his boys, and generally be praised as the best of the best for a decade.

[flaviafulvia]

9/10 I would advocate for more age appropriate couples in media, but I honestly like the idea of a pretty young Penelope.

First, I don’t have any Macedonian marriage certificates in front of me, but historically among nobles a hirl marrying in her teens was pretty normal. Gross, but ordinary. Marriage at that level was about the production of an heir and you don’t want to waste too many child-bearing years.

But what I actually like is how dynamic Penelope’s life would be while Odysseus is gone. She’s basically a kid when he leaves—a smart one, probably mature and someone Odysseus can appreciate—but still not entirely grown into herself. Also her mother-in-law was still alive. Women controlled important aspects of the household, and even if the two got along it was probably more her MIL’s house than hers. At the very least it was at first; maybe some things change under the eye of Penelope—when laundry is done, maybe some old handmaidens have to leave the room with the looms to make way for new ones, there’s a baby—but it’s not hard to imagine how that would be awkward when Anticlea had been running the women’s share of the oikos for decades. Various comedies and lawsuits seem to hint at the fact that rivalries were thought to exist between mothers and the wives sons brought into the oikos. There are no accounts from the women themselves, of course.

(Also, I want to emphasize that women’s work was no small thing and worth respecting. In some societies women spent the majority of daylight hours making or altering textiles because it was *that* labor intensive. Laundry was an all-day group project. Rich women, even ones who were largely sequestered away from men, often had dozens of staff, slave or free, to manage. I can’t speak much on Mycenaean women, but Homeric ones seem to have quite a few attendants, interact with male guests, and spend a lot of time at the loom. They had shit to do and even some choices to make.)

Anyway, flash forward 20 years. Anticlea is dead and Penelope is older. “Freedom” is probably too grand a term, but Penelope has agency in the things women should have agency over in her home, exerting power as a woman can with her trick of unraveling Laertes’s shroud. She might have a little too much, actually—she is overextended without a patriarch to take up his share. Yet now there is a new fear—that her husband, whether it is Odysseus returning or a new suitor, might infringe on what she’s gained. Maybe they will want xyz room for a different purpose, maybe they will want to keep her solely in the women’s quarters, or maybe they don’t like an aspect of she runs things and asks her to change it.

Maybe Odysseus doesn’t like who she became.

Anyway, just a hc for someone who hasn’t ever featured in my writings lol