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The Iliad - Blog Posts
“Go,” she said, “he waits for you”
Me when I don't know what to do with my hands
One of the most obvious arguments in favor of a romantic relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is simply that it makes sense from a writers perspective. Want to absolutely destroy your main character? Bring them to their breaking point? Punch your reader in the gut? Kill the love interest.
I mean, come on, the greeks were the inventors of the tragedy for a reason. What's more tragic? The death of cousin/comrade or the death of the person you are irrevocably and maddly in love with?
Don’t know if I trust the way Christopher Nolan writes women for him to be allowed to tackle anything Greek mythology related
Petition for a remake of Troy where they just let Achilles be gay
Chapters: 3/? Fandom: The Iliad - Homer, The Odyssey - Homer, EPIC - Jorge Rivera-Herrans (Albums), Ancient Greek Religion & Lore Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Hector/Odysseus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Diomedes/Odysseus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Diomedes & Odysseus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Andromache/Hector (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Hector & Paris (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Hector & Odysseus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Menelaus & Odysseus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Diomedes/Odysseus (EPIC: The Musical), Helen of Troy/Menelaus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore) Characters: Odysseus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Hector (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Priam (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Castor (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Pollux (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Diomedes (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Menelaus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Agamemnon (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Nestor (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore) Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Trojan War, Fluff and Angst, Domestic Fluff, Difficult Decisions, Friends to Lovers, Lovers To Enemies, References to Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Odysseus Needs A Hug (EPIC: The Musical), Odysseus is Not Okay (EPIC: The Musical), hector needs a hug, Slow Burn, english is not author's first language, Attempt at Humor, I'm Bad At Summaries, I'm Bad At Tagging, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Bittersweet, Female Odysseus (EPIC: The Musical) Summary:
In the shadows of war and duty, quiet bonds are hidden from prying eyes—some tender, some painful, and some worth breaking the rules for. This is the story of a forbidden love between Prince Hector of Troy and Queen Odysseus of Ithaca, how it all started and what the war will force them to do.
Chapters: 2/? Fandom: The Iliad - Homer, The Odyssey - Homer, EPIC - Jorge Rivera-Herrans (Albums), Ancient Greek Religion & Lore Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Hector/Odysseus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Diomedes/Odysseus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Diomedes & Odysseus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Andromache/Hector (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Hector & Paris (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Hector & Odysseus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Menelaus & Odysseus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore) Characters: Odysseus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Hector (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Priam (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Castor (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Pollux (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Diomedes (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Menelaus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Agamemnon (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Nestor (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore) Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Trojan War, Fluff and Angst, Domestic Fluff, Difficult Decisions, Friends to Lovers, Lovers To Enemies, References to Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Odysseus Needs A Hug (EPIC: The Musical), Odysseus is Not Okay (EPIC: The Musical), hector needs a hug, Slow Burn, english is not author's first language, Attempt at Humor, I'm Bad At Summaries, I'm Bad At Tagging, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Bittersweet, Female Odysseus (EPIC: The Musical) Summary:
In the shadows of war and duty, quiet bonds are hidden from prying eyes—some tender, some painful, and some worth breaking the rules for. This is the story of a forbidden love between Prince Hector of Troy and Queen Odysseus of Ithaca, how it all started and what the war will force them to do.
My thoughts are that I need to sit back and soak all this in. Ten times over. I knew there was a reason I liked Le Guin. Anyway, that's beside the point: I think now, perhaps more than ever, it is a crucial time to be reconsidering the lenses we place on history, fiction, and general media. How we even look at everyday life. I agree with Le Guin that Homer tends to take a very "middle ground" almost approach to telling The Iliad, which I like, and I think serves well in the telling of any story.
At the end of the day, I think it's important that an author presents a problem or a theme - and does not quite comment on it. They allow the audience to draw their own conclusions. From that principle alone, as Le Guin points out, there is a lesson in objectiveness and rejecting the creation of limiting dichotomies of Good vs Evil, Deserving vs Undeserving. It makes you question whether your idea of what's right... is what's right. Which is fascinating. And something I think people could possibly stand to do more of. We should critically evaluate moral ideas - what even is moral, why, okay but why do we think that, all right now so why are morals even important? Are there good or bad morals or just morals? (Spoiler: just morals)
Because morals are, by definition, either a lesson that can be derived from a story or experience, or standards of behaviour; principles of right and wrong. But that's the thing, isn't it? There can be a dozen views on what is right and what is wrong, but they're all principles - morals - that can be held by someone. People often confuse morals with ethics, making the mistake of believing someone's morals to coincide with ethics, or that ethics perfectly reflect morals. Ethics are their own slippery slope, because they do source from morals, but on a broader scale and blah blah blah (cue one of my university professors prattling on about theories of ethics...) The moral of the story I'm essentially getting at is: there's even different kinds of ethics. Many of these philosophical concepts have come from Greek scholars (legendary and otherwise).
I cannot say for certain whether this objective approach to storytelling on themes as complex as war where there are sides but no sides are taken is necessarily "a Greek thing", since I did not grow up in Greek schools. But! I do know that Greeks value the sacred Middle. I have been taught this since I was a child. You never choose the lowest, smallest, least or the highest, biggest, most, but whatever sits in the middle, because that will have the best balance.
Homer strikes balance between Greece and Troy by presenting you with two sides of a war: both fighting for their own reasons, neither Good nor Bad, because the moment you take a side, you are falling prey to evaluating things on your personal moral basis and not the broader picture of what is simply war. War never changes. As outlined above, Homer illustrates the way war is wasteful and cruel in its entirety. I believe it is often the case that you can only tell a truly resounding tragedy when you consider all sides. Better yet, when you tell all sides objectively. Because it is up to the audience then to take this narrative's detachment to the tragedy unfolding and feel, not be guided into what to feel and by what degree.
The human mind and capacity for empathy is incredible. It is a waste to narrow that potential into a set path of what is Good and what is Bad. Who is the right side and who is the wrong side. All sides in a war hurt. The concept of war hurts. That is the nature of it and of tragedy.
"I think Homer outwits most writers who have written on the War [fantasy archetype], by not taking sides.
The Trojan war is not and you cannot make it be the War of Good vs. Evil. It’s just a war, a wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted, cruel mess full of individual acts of courage, cowardice, nobility, betrayal, limb-hacking-off, and disembowelment. Homer was a Greek and might have been partial to the Greek side, but he had a sense of justice or balance that seems characteristically Greek — maybe his people learned a good deal of it from him? His impartiality is far from dispassionate; the story is a torrent of passionate actions, generous, despicable, magnificent, trivial. But it is unprejudiced. It isn’t Satan vs. Angels. It isn’t Holy Warriors vs. Infidels. It isn’t hobbits vs. orcs. It’s just people vs. people.
Of course you can take sides, and almost everybody does. I try not to, but it’s no use; I just like the Trojans better than the Greeks. But Homer truly doesn’t take sides, and so he permits the story to be tragic. By tragedy, mind and soul are grieved, enlarged, and exalted.
Whether war itself can rise to tragedy, can enlarge and exalt the soul, I leave to those who have been more immediately part of a war than I have. I think some believe that it can, and might say that the opportunity for heroism and tragedy justifies war. I don’t know; all I know is what a poem about a war can do. In any case, war is something human beings do and show no signs of stopping doing, and so it may be less important to condemn it or to justify it than to be able to perceive it as tragic.
But once you take sides, you have lost that ability.
Is it our dominant religion that makes us want war to be between the good guys and the bad guys?
In the War of Good vs. Evil there can be divine or supernal justice but not human tragedy. It is by definition, technically, comic (as in The Divine Comedy): the good guys win. It has a happy ending. If the bad guys beat the good guys, unhappy ending, that’s mere reversal, flip side of the same coin. The author is not impartial. Dystopia is not tragedy.
Milton, a Christian, had to take sides, and couldn’t avoid comedy. He could approach tragedy only by making Evil, in the person of Lucifer, grand, heroic, and even sympathetic — which is faking it. He faked it very well.
Maybe it’s not only Christian habits of thought but the difficulty we all have in growing up that makes us insist justice must favor the good.
After all, 'Let the best man win' doesn’t mean the good man will win. It means, 'This will be a fair fight, no prejudice, no interference — so the best fighter will win it.' If the treacherous bully fairly defeats the nice guy, the treacherous bully is declared champion. This is justice. But it’s the kind of justice that children can’t bear. They rage against it. It’s not fair!
But if children never learn to bear it, they can’t go on to learn that a victory or a defeat in battle, or in any competition other than a purely moral one (whatever that might be), has nothing to do with who is morally better.
Might does not make right — right?
Therefore right does not make might. Right?
But we want it to. 'My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.'
If we insist that in the real world the ultimate victor must be the good guy, we’ve sacrificed right to might. (That’s what History does after most wars, when it applauds the victors for their superior virtue as well as their superior firepower.) If we falsify the terms of the competition, handicapping it, so that the good guys may lose the battle but always win the war, we’ve left the real world, we’re in fantasy land — wishful thinking country.
Homer didn’t do wishful thinking.
Homer’s Achilles is a disobedient officer, a sulky, self-pitying teenager who gets his nose out of joint and won’t fight for his own side. A sign that Achilles might grow up someday, if given time, is his love for his friend Patroclus. But his big snit is over a girl he was given to rape but has to give back to his superior officer, which to me rather dims the love story. To me Achilles is not a good guy. But he is a good warrior, a great fighter — even better than the Trojan prime warrior, Hector. Hector is a good guy on any terms — kind husband, kind father, responsible on all counts — a mensch. But right does not make might. Achilles kills him.
The famous Helen plays a quite small part in The Iliad. Because I know that she’ll come through the whole war with not a hair in her blond blow-dry out of place, I see her as opportunistic, immoral, emotionally about as deep as a cookie sheet. But if I believed that the good guys win, that the reward goes to the virtuous, I’d have to see her as an innocent beauty wronged by Fate and saved by the Greeks.
And people do see her that way. Homer lets us each make our own Helen; and so she is immortal.
I don’t know if such nobility of mind (in the sense of the impartial 'noble' gases) is possible to a modern writer of fantasy. Since we have worked so hard to separate History from Fiction, our fantasies are dire warnings, or mere nightmares, or else they are wish fulfillments."
- Ursula K. Le Guin, from No Time to Spare, 2013.
AITA for building a giant wooden horse, consequently bringing about the fall of a nation?
The horse has already been built, so I'm just looking for a second opinion. I (35m) have been at war for 10 years now. Our greatest soldier is dead. Our commander wants to go home. I want to go home. The enemy would also want to go home but they're already home so really I envy them, even if we did kind of kill their greatest soldier too. Technically, we're also taking their home so maybe I don't envy them. As I'm typing this inside the horse, they're bringing us into the city gates,
i want to see an adaptation of the iliad that accurately portrays achilles’ grief over the death of patroclus.
i don’t want to see achilles act out in anger and violence as he realizes that patroclus died in his armor.
i don’t want to see achilles remain stoic and emotionless as he carries patroclus’ body back to camp.
show me achilles collapse to the ground when he hears the news. show me achilles sob so loudly that his mother on the bottom of the sea hears him and thinks him dead. show me how another warrior must hold down achilles’ hands so that he does not cut open his own throat to join patroclus in death.
show me achilles carrying back patroclus’ body and sobbing into his chest. show me achilles refusing to leave patroclus’ side to eat or sleep because he can do nothing but cry. show me how achilles looks his mother in the eye and say how he no longer cares if he dies when only a few days prior he said that nothing is worth his life.
i want to see achilles, the most powerful warrior of the greeks, to be completely undone by grief.
“Why have you come to me here, dear heart, with all these instructions? I promise you I will do everything just as you ask. But come closer. Let us give in to grief, however briefly, in each other’s arms.” - Homer
trojan war tumblr simulator
🌊 is-the-sea-wine-dark-today
YOU BET IT IS
#the wine dark sea!!!!!!!!!!!! #wine dark sea #wine dark sea posting
108 notes
✌🏻 ajax2electricboogaloo follow
why is achilles the only demigod who's Like That? like he's my boy but u don't see memnon or aeneas or sarpedon acting like him on the reg. why is he so maladjusted? like specifically? I saw his mother once and was so terrified by the sight of a goddess I flung myself to the ground and hid my face in the dirt til she left but I still don't think that accounts for it idk
🏘️ nobody1020
it's blonde man syndrome hope this helps
340 notes
⚔️ sonoftydeus
opening my askbox so that we can discuss strategies on taking troy!
3 notes
anonymous asked: we should all go home :)
⚔️ sonoftydeus answered:
FUCK OFF AGAMEMNON I WANT REAL SUGGESTIONS
50 notes
nobody1020 asked: do u like..... horses
⚔️ sonoftydeus answered:
odysseus do I even wanna know where this is going
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⌛ isthetrojanwaroveryet?
year 9, day 234: still no....
#all our admins keep DYING
500 notes
‼️ trojan-confessions follow
I think my wife might be sending me anon hate :/ keep getting asks like 'hope u die on the battlefield tomorrow silly slag' and 'menelaus should have curbstomped you' and in her big tapestry of warriors she made me look stupid
🐴 horsetaminghector follow
lmaooo is this paris??
🔮 cryinglikecassandra follow
kinda think helen should send MORE anon hate idk
600 notes
❓ myrmidons-confessions
I was the one who wrote the achilles/agamemnon 100k slowburn enemies to lovers rpf and put it on the group chat but now patroclus is calling me 'agachilles boy' and laughing about it and asking if I can proofread his mock bardic epic where all his dogs are heroes and killing people, so I fear I've made a mistake. I also can't look achilles in the eye anymore... but honestly I've never seen proof he can read so I might be safe
❓ myrmidons-confessions
5000 notes
👑 kingofmycenae
👍🏻 ajaxthegreat
achilles is DEAD and ur posting CRAB RAVE?????
🏘️ nobody1020
I think that's why he's posting it ngl
300 notes
😹 deiphobus42069
imagine being the achaeans and your best warrior gets killed by PARIS, after everyone else had awesome deaths at the hands of sarpedon or hector or memnon... like that's literally so embarassing I just know achilles is fucking fuming down in hades rn. I bet the achaeans are gonna put around that paris was guided by apollo, or that paris happened to hit his only weak spot..... anything 2 try and make it less cringe.... lol lol we're popping the biggest bottles tonight. hope helen's there
🐆 leopardskiniscool
???????????????
#I mean. yeah. but also. #deiphobus wtf I thought we were chill
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#hope everyone can be normal about the outcome!!! :)
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🧑🏻 randotrojansoldier-deactivated-8578543
so excited to go back onto the field of battle tomorrow! sure hope I don't encounter any of the big-name heroes
🗣️ homer follow
I hope you don't too! I'm sure you'll do great!
🐎 antilochussss
not the direct address????
✌🏻 ajax2electricboogaloo
direct address got him :(
3000 notes
💂🏻 trojanguardtales follow
fuck my job so much I hope that this wooden horse tribute to the gods turns out to have some guys inside or something just so I can DO something rather than standing here like a twat with my spear
💂🏻 trojanguardtales follow
by ares this can't be happening
345 notes
⚔️ sonoftydeus reblogged menelauskingofsparta
do NOT order achilles from shein!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
#oh yeah #I was stuck with temu achilles in the trojan horse for six hours #and by hour two agamemnon had suggested killing and eating him #and odysseus was threatening to 'send him to meet his father' #and it's not even like there's any kleos in killing priam!!! #anti neoptolemus #neoptolemus defenders dni #vent tags
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Maybe Apollo. They have a few similarities. Aphrodite might, too, and she and Apollo are both on the Trojan side.
It looks like Gawain is standing by Hector. Then again, if Hector is de Maris, that would make Lancelot Paris, Guinevere Helen, and Arthur Menelaus, so it makes more sense for Gawain to be an Achaean on Arthur/Menelaus' side.
In that case, Gawain probably has the best Achilles parallel: fighting out of a furious desire for revenge, sometimes at odds with his commander (though Arthur is the opposite of Agamemnon, at least in Morte, since he doesn't want to be fighting the war), and killed due to an injury in a specifically vulnerable place (Gawain's re-wounded head, Achilles' heel). That being said, I think the gods on the Trojan side are a better fit for Gawain than the gods on the Greek side.
If Sir Gawain could time travel and dropped into the Trojan War, which Greek God(s) would start supporting him?
trying to prove a point to my homophobic parents!!
reblog if you think it's okay to drag the corpse of your rival around the walls of his home city on account of your unrelenting rage
read thru diomedes' wiki page today and these two are so funny to me
tbh my favourite quality about Odysseus towards the end of the Odyssey is that he'll swear to be honest and immediately spit out two pages of nothing but lies about who he is and where he comes from and whose son he is and how he's suffered terribly to get where he is now
compare that to him giving polyphemus his full name, his postal address, his social security number, and his birth certificate in earlier chapters
that's what we call ✨personal growth✨
But never let me die without a struggle and without acclaim
reading the Iliad. kind of sad how Odysseus keeps identifying himself as "Telemachus's father." Like it's always on his mind. his loved ones, his home. he never got to see his son grow up but he's already desperately proud of him.
So I was trying to explain the events of the Iliad to my dad and I was at the part where Achilles ragequits and goes to sulk in his tent with Patroclus and my dad literally went,
“Wow they seem like such good friends!”
Like what are you dad, a historian?
It is right to seek peace for the dead. You and I both know there is no peace for those who live after.
-TSOA, Madeline Miller
We were like gods at the dawning of the world, and our joy was so bright we could see nothing else but each other.
TSOA, Madeline Miller
Someone today will read Shakespeare’s hamlet and say omg he’s just like me fr. Another person will read moby dick and proclaim Ishmael as an adhd king.
A person grieving for their recently deceased lover reads the iliad and they watch as Achilles rages and rages and god how righteous anger fueld by love is so devastating that it’s ramifications still affect the world several thousand years later.
We might one day settle down and read the epic of gilgamesh and watch as a king has to accept the death of the person he loved the most. One of the very first stories ever written and it was about coping with death, and how to grieve.
We don’t read classics because they’re old, we read them because they remind us that we are never alone. That a character created over 500 years ago struggled with the exact same problems we all still have today. That even a king from centuries past had to deal with death just like me. That’s what makes stories so powerful–they prove to us that we are never truly alone in what we are feeling.
Historians, about the relationship of Achilles and Patroclus: They were just good friends! Good bros! Nothing really gay about it!
Achilles: "My Patroclus"
Achilles: *sleeps with Patroclus*
Achilles: *the person he is closest to is Patroclus*
Achilles when his bedwife gets taken: *merely refuses to fight* Achilles when Patroclus is killed: *goes on a slaughter spree*
Achilles, when he finds out about Patroclus' death: *screams so loud he can be heard from the underworld*
Achilles: *demands his ashes be mingled with Patroclus'*
Achilles: *kills a fucking river/ defeats a river god when said god is trying to stop him from murdering Patroclus' killer*
Achilles: *murders Patroclus' killer knowing full well it will result in his death, although he wanted to live in glory*
Achilles: *drags Patroclus' killer around the city of Troy, in the dirt, three times, dishonouring him although he partly admired Hector before Patroclus' murder*
Achilles: *refuses to have Hector buried/sent for burial*
Achilles: *has to have Priam come to him and beg for his son's body for him to return Hector for burial*
Achilles: *prowls the battlefield, wanting death, so that he can be reunited with Patroclus*
Achilles: *smiles when he dies because he's going to be reunited with Patroclus*
odydio art again hi tumblr ‼️
eeby weeby little guys eyeyeyeejsjsjs eueue they’re so small
