perhapsitisthegreatergrief

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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,

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"and historians said they were bestest of friends" they were. they were both aro/ace and in a qpr

#aristos. in my understanding

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emily your translations are fucking insane. yeah Hector’s warhorses Swiftfoot, Blondie, Flame and godlike Sparkle. i love you.

#emily wilson

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god i love it when homer speaks directly to the characters

#the iliad #homer #emily wilson #pyrrhambles #“but menelaus you were not forgotten by the deathless gods” #i am chomping!

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for a tragedy the iliad is pretty funny. compiled some of my favorite things about it (not in chronological order)

- patroclus barely speaks for most of the book but EVERYBODY loves him. like he’s literally the entire greek camp’s precious meow meow. the ORIGINAL sweet little meow meow. even the GODS are sad and feel bad when he dies. even HOMER loves patroclus, always calling him “faultless patroclus” “my patroclus” “gentle patroclus” “sweet patroclus” WE GET IT. achilles, briseis, menelaus, ajax, literally every member of the greek camp is down ATROCIOUS for patroclus all bc he’s just one Really Nice Dude. just one very Sweet and Polite Fella. one Extra Special Guy <3 his whole narrative purpose is simply to be everyone’s special little scrunkly

- in one of the MANY passages where achilles is lamenting about how sad it is that patroclus is dead he promises patroclus’ corpse that he will have many deep-bosomed trojan and dardanian women weep for him. he tells his dead buddy “i will get the absolute THICKEST hoes with the BIGGEST mommy milkers for your funeral” honestly? id be honored

- all the arguments escalate so quickly. an old man very politely appeals to agamemnon to pretty please give his daughter back and offers him a huge fortune for her and agamemnon calls him a crotchety old bitch and tells him he’ll fucking kill him if he ever sees him again

- that same old man is a priest of apollo. you know, the plague god? anyway priest calls in a favor and apollo curses the greeks with a plague

- to address this, achilles decides to resolve it by calling all the greeks together and passive aggressively going “HM! i WONDER what could have caused a PLAGUE! it’s almost like we OFFENDED the PLAGUE GOD somehow. now WHAT could WE (cough agamemnon) done to offend the PLAGUE GOD?????” all in front of agamemnon

- zeus spends most of the book desperately trying to keep the gods OUT of the war. then once he’s finally had enough he just calls them all together and says “go nuts” and then they do

- artemis talks shit on the battlefield so hera calls her a bitch, steals her bow, and beats her with it. artemis then goes back to zeus and cries

- polydamas says to hector “hey you killed patroclus and achilles is gonna be fucking pissed. we should probably go back to the city while we can” and hector calls him a bitch and tells him to stfu. achilles then chases them back to the city and hector decides to stay outside and get killed by achilles instead of going in with the rest of the army bc he didn’t wanna hear polydamas say “i told you so”

- diomedes is about to fight with a guy called glaucus but then they realize their ancestors were friends or something so they decide not to kill each other, and diomedes says “hey! why don’t we even trade armor! :) just as a show of friendship! :))” and glaucus is like “yeah sure!” and gives diomedes his really nice gold plated armor while glaucus gets diomedes’ shitty plain bronze armor

- achilles makes a bitchy comment to his horses about leaving patroclus to die and the horse momentarily gains the ability to talk just to tell achilles it wasn’t THEIR goddamn fault, tells achilles he’s gonna die soon, and then goes back to being a normal horse.

- zeus with his daughters: oh child ❤️ oh my dear ❤️ oh there there i didn’t really mean it ❤️ sweetie why don’t you go help the greeks?❤️

- zeus with his sons: “ares you fucking donkey”

- everyone calling paris a stupid coward bitch every time they see him. all of troy fucking hates him. hector fucking hates him. helen fucking hates him.

- paris getting dressed up in fancy armor and prancing to the front lines going “i’ll fight ANY of you greeks!” and menelaus (the guy whose wife he stole) goes “alright bet” and paris nearly pisses his pants and tries to hide but then his brother hector calls him a piece of shit and tells him he hopes he dies and makes him fight menelaus. menelaus promptly ROCKS HIS SHIT. literally starts dragging him by his helmet like a rag doll, would’ve killed him if aphrodite hadn’t teleported paris outta there (BOO)

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[perhapsitisthegreatergrief]

you may have seen achilles in his miserable blanket burrito but have you seen odysseus Sitting Like That while appealing to achilles in his miserable blanket burrito

achilles looking very "make him stop make him stop make him stop"

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made this a while back and today feels like a good way to post this

#i post this as if aristos isn’t fairly niche #or perhaps my perception of all of this is wildly skewed #epic the musical #hadestown #aristos the musical #the circe saga

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grief lessons - anne carson

#grief lessons #anne carson

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"Ulysses giving wine to Plyphemius." A book of famous myths and legends. 1901.

Internet Archive

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Reblog for larger sample size whatever

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questions the iliad is meant to inspire: 

how free are we really, as human beings, to make our own decisions?

where should the line be drawn between heroism and cruelty?

ought the quest for individual honor to be prioritized over the lives of others?

questions i have:

what accounts for the bro code dissonance of agamemnon stealing achilles’s girl when he’s literally leading an army in a war that was started because paris stole his brother’s girl?

is diomedes single?

to the nearest thousand, how many heart emojis would achilles text to patroclus in an average day if the technology were available?

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of course you have blue hair and epithets 🙄

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A collection of ancient ceramic paintings depicting Achilles in a blanket being miserable and pathetic.

That's the post. Sorry that some of these are mircowave quality.

I can't really pick a favorite, I like them all equally. They're just so silly looking.

#might make one of these my new icon

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"[The Iliad] avoids all the obvious highlights of the traditional story, including the Wooden Horse. It does not start at the beginning — with the Judgment of Paris, the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the abduction of Helen, or the muster of ships at Aulis — or end with the fall of the city. Instead, the action takes place over a few days in the last year of the war — neither the beginning nor the end. A brief and ostensibly trivial episode — a squabble between two Greek commanders — becomes the subject of a monumental twenty-four-book epic.

Moreover, The Iliad eschews the obvious way for Greeks to tell the Trojan War story: as a conflict between 'us' and 'them.' The Trojans are not dishonest foreigners, despite the fact that Paris abducted his host’s wife. Implausibly, they speak the same language and worship the same gods as the Greeks.

The poem is ancient from our perspective. But it came at the end, not the beginning, of a long poetic tradition. Whoever created The Iliad used the myths, tropes, and techniques developed by many generations of oral poets, and reinvented them to create an extraordinarily original and surprising written epic."

- Emily Wilson, from the introduction to her translation of The Iliad, 2023.

#emily wilson #the iliad

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i think one of the things that makes anne carson and rosanna bruno's the trojan women: a comic so powerful is the way the dialogue is drawn.

it's full-page panels with interweaving dialogue boxes that you have to carefully track to be able to know who's speaking. the voices blend together, especially when it's hecuba and andromache talking. when we lose track of which dialogue belongs to who, we are reminded that they could be anyone who has been affected by war— they are anyone's grieving relative, they are anyone who has watched their entire life be destroyed before their eyes. really gets the point across that this interpretation of the play is meant as a timeless representation of the way war affects people.

#the trojan women #hecuba #andromache #anne carson #the fact that this was published in 2021 also makes it feel More Relevant than the anne carson work i've read

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listening to going invisible 2 by the mountain goats while rereading the page of the anne carson trojan women comic where hecuba and the chorus watch troy burn is. ha

#“i'm gonna burn it all down today/and sweep the ashes away” #pyrrhambles