#i think by now i’ve read every major greek or roman epic except civil war most after reading the iliad

[devilsskettle]

i’m just trying to think of other comparable pieces of media that get the same treatment as the iliad and the song of achilles. imagine reading wide sargasso sea and refusing to ever pick up jane eyre and having all of your opinions on jane eyre and charlotte brontë based on what jean rhys decided to write over a century later. despite it being free to read online or to borrow at the library. and basing all your opinions on the characters of the original novel on how you feel about them in the adaptation. or what if you tried to do that with pride and prejudice and death comes to pemberley. or pride and prejudice and zombies. first of all, you’d be missing a lot of the interesting part of reading adaptations which is the intertextuality! to be fair i’m kind of obsessed with intertextuality so i get it if that’s not what you’re here for but still! wouldn’t you be confused, or at least a little disappointed that you’re missing out on the full experience of the book? the author of a retelling or spin off kind of book like that expects you to be somewhat familiar with the source material, maybe that’s not true of song of achilles since it’s aimed at younger readers and there’s no good quick movie version that will get you up to date if you don’t want to or have time to read the original first, but would you really prefer to read it entirely stripped of its context? genuinely not mad or “gatekeeping” or whatever, that just sounds less enjoyable and more anti-intellectual than being excited enough about what you’re reading to want to know as much about it as possible. you sound boring. again, to be fair, maybe i just get overzealous about intertextuality, i did read/watch red dragon through hannibal in the hannibal book/film series just because i wanted to compare them to the tv series and actually get the original context of a lot of the content and i really loved doing that even though it was kind of a waste of time lol but it made watching the show really refreshing and interesting from a new angle. why would you not want that for yourself

#to be fair i think i’m like that BECAUSE i’m a classics major and that’s so much of what studying ancient mediterranean literature is #and i put off reading the iliad for a long long time considering my major but it made reading the aeneid that much better for me #and all the literature that was heavily influenced by homeric epic which is most of it in the greco-roman world! #and a good amount in classic and modern english lit too! #i think by now i’ve read every major greek or roman epic except civil war most after reading the iliad #and that was essential reading for all of them #including milton actually. yeah it’s in english but the guy just won’t shut up about homer #he might as well have written the damn thing in latin with the kind of grammatical constructions he’s trying to use to emulate classic epics #but that’s a story for another time #anyway i know it’s not that deep and i genuinely don’t care that much but. i am perplexed by that attitude #also i get how pretentious this sounds lol i promise i’m not angling for a good sticker here but i do study this shit you know? #*gold sticker #i’m not gonna dumb it down to try to sound less pretentious okay i’m dumb enough already