#small homer

[johaerys-writes]

i’d be super curious to hear your thoughts of the characterisation of achilles in the iliad! because while he is considered honourable and respected by the standards of the culture, surely by modern day standards he wouldn’t be so much? which is why i think that MM did such a great job, because she basically modernised him so that we would see him in the same ways that the greeks did re: his nobility versus his arrogance, but i thought the general consensus on achilles is that he’s an ancient greek hero which equals Not A Good Guy by our standards (but my formal education in classics is limited, i mostly partake as a hobby, so i’m always looking to expand my understandings and opinions and you’re obviously a very intelligent and considered person)

So I think the most important thing anyone needs to do when engaging with ancient greek works (and indeed any sort of work, especially those created millennia ago) is to keep an open mind. Importing modern moral judgement is anachronistic when it comes to the Iliad; hubris, as we understand it now, simply does not exist in the Iliad, there are no Good Guys vs Bad Guys, there are no Heroes or Villains. Those notions came much later and are very much a Christian thing. A hero in the Homeric world has no moral implication; he is simply a warrior. A dude that does things, and not necessarily admirable things. So it would be pointless to try to view Achilles or Hector or Agamemnon (or even the gods in the Iliad who do some pretty fucked up shit) as good or bad guys, because such a thing is irrelevant in the Iliad.

That being said, I feel like Achilles is portrayed generally positively both in the Iliad and also in other ancient Greek works. He is noble, that is, he is of noble/divine lineage, he is well-spoken, well-educated, generally reasonable and polite with pretty much everyone, except for Agamemnon in that opening scene in the Iliad (who was a dick to him as well). He is also honourable and with a very rigid moral code: in the Iliad it is stated many times that he prefers to ransom back captives instead of kill them, and he even lets the body of one of the Trojans he slew be burned with his armour on as a sign of respect, even though it is a thing of great importance in the Iliad to claim the armour of the people one slew. He is not greedy and doesn't flaunt his wealth, he is generous with his Myrmidons and is generally rather well-liked. Until Patroclus is killed and he goes on his rampage, he is a pretty chill dude; and then after Hector is killed, he organises the funeral games for Patroclus where he is shown to be very diplomatic and reasonable, even with Agamemnon; and then when Priam goes to ask him for Hector's body back, Achilles treats him with respect and the two men bond over their grief. So like, idk about you but those don't seem like the actions of someone crazed or extremely arrogant or bad, even by modern standards.

I think what is most telling about how a character like Achilles was perceived in the culture that created him, is that his portrayal in later ancient greek works, mainly the theatrical and philosophical works of around the 5th cent BC, is generally positive. Some playwrights depicted him as a bit of a hothead or a little boisterous and full of himself, but that isn't really framed as a bad thing. Achilles in those works is a famous and powerful hero who knows how good he is and how much the army needs him, but he isn't needlessly flashy, he always keeps his word, he is brave and heroic even by modern standards: in Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis, Achilles goes to great lengths to protect Clytemnestra and Iphigenia from the mob, and it is pointed out many times how averse he is to trickery and lies and that Chiron brought him up to be honourable, steadfast, to keep true to his values and to stay away from wickedness (which is what Agamemnon did, essentially). So I think it's really clear that for the ancient Greeks Achilles has many admirable traits.

You mentioned MM and how she modernised Achilles and made him sympathetic to a modern reader's eyes, and I simply don't think that's true. I think MM's portrayal of Achilles is pretty close both to the Iliad and how other ancient Greeks imagined him; perhaps the only way she differs is by portraying him a bit calmer in places lol. She simply took away all those layers of nonsense that had been piled on top of him through centuries of literary criticism that took all the later Roman works that depicted him as a sadistic monster a little too seriously or only focused on how awful he was compared to Noble Hector (no hate on Hector but those classicists really need to find a new blorbo *smh*)

I also think that maybe MM went a little too hard on the arrogance thing and on his obsession with glory without explaining it enough, but that's just my personal opinion. Achilles is very concerned with his glory in the Iliad as well, but we have to keep in mind his position here: Achilles gave up everything for that glory. He knew about the prophecy and knew that he would die in Troy, and made the choice to fight in the war because glory is just that important within the context of the Iliad. I think that many of the heroes we see in the Iliad would have chosen the same, if given a dilemma like that. So Achilles gave up the life he could have had, his kingdom, his family, just for his name to live on through the ages, and then Agamemnon royally fucked that up by disrespecting and insulting him publicly in the vilest of ways. Achilles then made up his mind to abstain from the war and to go back to Phthia and thus giving up his claim to glory because he was so over the war, and he probably would have done that had Patroclus not died. And then there was nothing else for him to do other than to die as well. So like.... idk. His actions make sense to me. He is a passionate character who is swept away by his emotions, he has flaws, he isn't perfect (if such a thing even exists) but I think he's all the more compelling for it.

I hope this answered your question, anon! Thank you for giving me the chance to ramble about my favourite fictional man <3

#achilles #the iliad #homer's iliad #greek mythology #patrochilles meta #not a big meta writer but if you poke me with a stick i might just write a small essay about it #or not so small ;w; sowwy

[aeide-thea]

getting up IS hell and i do legitimately think my body is adhd-typically wired for a later shift, such that getting up is extra hell for me personally

that said, especially with the house to myself for once there's a real pleasure in prying myself out of my oyster bed half-respectably early and absent-mindedly making myself a latte and taking it in with me to sit in the little living room while the light still looks indefinably but definitively like Morning—feels like there's something of a pome in it, only i haven't got words in me about it, exactly, just a deep swept-clean contentment and a cat that's climbed up into my lap again, warm and soft and heavy as love…

#journaling #(look. if you only knew how much catblogging i restrain myself from) #(i don't assert that she's objectively especially special but like. nous nous avons apprivoisés) #(so yes there is a small constantly burbling rivulet of besotted joy in my breast with her name on it‚ like a little tag‚ jingling) #(…also every time i use 'breast' singular i think about all the shaggy breasts in the iliad) #(silly but i guess it's true my στῆθος IS λάσιος insofar as my entire torso is‚ albeit with borrowed wool…) #(also mostly a hairy chest means what you might think—strength in homer‚ coarseness later— #but the LSJ informs me that in a number of authors it was apparently a sign of cunning?? plot stored in the fuzz ig) #(good morning and welcome to K's den of philological factoids…)

[the-cricket-chirps]

Winslow Homer

The Herring Net

1885

#winslow homer #homer #seascape #small boats #fishing boats #fishing #herrings #herring net #boating #ocean waves #sea waves #american art #art history #aesthetictumblr #tumblraesthetic #tumblrpic #tumblr art #tumblrpictures #tumblrstyle #tumblrposts #aesthetic #fishermen

[toutpetitlaplanete]

Jessie Homer French - Rewilding In Chernobyl, 2021

#Jessie Homer French #art #contemporary art #Various Small Fires

[finelythreadedsky]

i'm fundamentally opposed to book titles in translations of ancient epics ('beguilement on mount ida,' 'a hero's son awakens,' 'the olive tree bed,' 'camilla's finest hour,' 'juno served by a fury') bc it just seems like too much to me to presume you know what single thing the book is really about, but christopher logue is allowed to do it

#i have the collected volume but just bought the husbands (books 3-4) and yeah. he's right. that IS what books 3 and 4 are about #fitzgerald does call iliad 3 'dueling for a haunted lady' which is cool but the rest of his book titles suck #iliad 18 isn't 'the shield of achilles' and aeneid 8 isn't 'the shield of aeneas' there's a LOT more going on in both #even aeneid 5 isn't just REALLY about the funeral games (bc its also about the first punic war) #and all the more so with the homeric epics whose book divisions were not intentional and who had no author to focus on a single thing at on #titles are useful indicators of what the translator thinks the book is really about and what they think everything else is supporting tho #like does the translator think the embassy to evander is central and the shield a supporting detail or vice versa? #(aeneid translators are 50/50 on whether book 8 should be titled based on the shield or based on evander and the arcadians btw) #and like. does odyssey 4 take its title from menelaus' tale or helen's tale or do you call it 'the king and queen of sparta' or something #its really funny when translators try to do book titles with the metamorphoses though #'impious acts and exemplary lives'? 'of the ties that bind'? #those tell me nothing about what's even in the book let alone what the translator thinks the most important part is #(this is a not small part of the reason i have not gotten the new stephanie carter translation. #efforts to divide epic neatly even into the book divisions used by the author rub me the wrong way. #going beyond that and presuming to be able to say where one story ends and another begins... it's not for me) #mine

[baejax-the-great]

Hello. How would you categorize Achilles/Patroclus' faces? (Traditionally speaking)Masculine/Feminine/Androgynous? Beautiful/Pretty/Handsome? Any more hcs on how do you picture their looks? Or does it differ among AUs?

Thank you, and have a nice weekend!

I don't know that I usually classify faces this way. I also have enjoyed a lot of different versions of Achilles and Pat and don't think any are particularly "wrong" or anything.

My first introduction into a visual representation of Patroclus was through Hades game, and I am partial to his design there. I also truly love @lady-forest's drawing of Pat here which is close to the Hades design, but a little different. Variations on Hades!Patroclus will always have me all heart-eyes.

A lot of how I envision their faces will depend on their age. Faces change a lot between the ages of 15 and 25. I had a silly post a while back about different artists' representations of Achilles as a girl in Skyros and how they had to choose to make him a hot girl or an ugly girl. Personally I enjoy the hot girl interpretations better.

This one, where he's serving, is a personal fave. But passing for a girl at 15 is a lot easier than passing at 25. And I've known a few very pretty boys who grew into "masculine" looking men, so I don't know that you can really predict.

I've debated what Homer would mean while calling Achilles' the hottest dude in the army. Does he mean the masculine ideal? Is Achilles sort of a perfect average of all idealized traits? Or is he pretty in the way Helen is pretty? The latter seems less likely given the misogyny of the culture as well as Ajax being called the second hottest Achaean in the Odyssey, and at like seven feet tall and built like a tank, I don't know that anyone is depicting him as having feminine features. Another example I think of is Heracles. Based on the sheer number of lovers Heracles had, he was also considered hot as shit by both men and women, and again he's not ever depicted as particularly feminine.

Achilles is a bit different because he represents "youth" in the epic cycle. It's the reason he's rarely depicted with a beard even when he's an adult in a culture that values beards a lot. In that spirit, I tend to try to blend the "masculine" and "feminine" in my mind, a boy whose features could have been girlish who grows up into a beautiful man. So much of what we consider "feminine" in a man is more about styling/affect/the way he moves and carries himself than actual bare bones facial structure, anyway.

As for what I personally envision while writing, it does change depending on AU to an extent, but there are a few constants. Patroclus can and will grow a beard (depending on his age). Achilles cannot and won't. Patroclus has big, brown cow-eyes (in the Homeric sense). I liked Miller giving Achilles green eyes, so I stick with that. I like Pat having a bump in his nose. I give them both long hair, though Pat's is more subject to change. Pat has darker skin than Achilles.

#that pat is my lock screen I love him #absolutely forlorn #homer also contradicts himself #in the iliad Nireus was the second hottest guy in camp #and in the Odyssey he mentions TWICE how hot Ajax is #and ajax doesn't even have any lines #I think he was apologizing for slighting him in the other book #I think a dude who is wearing heavy armor for 10 years and sprinting the way Achilles does #would probably not look very feminine to our eyes #no matter how big and beautiful his eyes are and how luscious his long blond hair #idk with the right makeup you could make him more feminine or more masculine #so much of this is just culture #there are *small* aspects of face shape that are more masc or fem #but often when we are calling a dude feminine looking it's because he's clean shaven with smooth skin and very groomed eyebrows #like it's fully constructed

[deranged-italian]

mfw i only find depictions of scylla where she's either a topless woman with weird tails or dogs (?) instead of her legs or a full on monster instead of the weird being that's described in the odyssey :( where are the three rows of black teeth

#also the idea that she doesn't have hands because if she did homer would tell us. #the fact that she used to be a gorgeus nymph but someone fucked her up.the fact that she's a monster but her voice is that of a small dog : #the odyssey #homer #scylla #tagamemnon #x

[thatguyinthecornerhasachannel]

Homer simpson

#homer #homer simpson #the simpsons #adult animation #art #small youtuber #small artist #my art #the simpsons fanart

[robertmatejcek]

When the Swallows Fly - acrylic painting - 6″x6″ mdf - robert matejcek - 2023

"What has to start just has to end… Everybody's got a destiny…"

- When the Swallows Fly - Bee Gees

tags:

#robert matejcek #acrylic painting #small scale #trompe l'oeil #after winslow homer #seascape #landscape #natural world #art history #still life #botanical #plant #bird #traditional swallow tattoo #after sailor jerry #retro #art #my art #painters on tumblr #artists on tumblr #travel #voyage #wanderlust

[elmelloill]

got called a waver kinnie in DMs :/

#'were you being a waver kinnie' can't a guy read the iliad #(for elsa's benefit This Is A Joke) #i think it's fun to be jokingly accused of kinning bc at this point it's like #yes a tiny bit gratifying #but also a relief to be like. 'no ok yeah i don't Actually think like that now' lol #also can i go on a small tangent #f/z refers to achilles when talking about the book iskandar stole from the library #but in the anime it's always shown as the odyssey #and in the translation i read it's referred to at least once as 'an anthology of homer's poetry' which #is that BOTH like what a massive fucking book that would be #ANY way #levblogging

[exrayspex]

OH

MY GOD

SPONGE!!!!!

BOB!!!!!!!!!!!!!

one of the most incredible games i've seen in my life. a walkoff playoff win, the third in team history, the SECOND by THIS SPECIFIC GUY, who is A ROOKIE!!! two outs, two strikes, but the base are loaded and he fucking gets two of them home with a beautiful little single!! auygigydydfglbl never fucking count this team out!!

#final guardians 6 yankees 5 😁 #none of those guardians runs were homers btw. that's small ball baby! #⚾️ #delayed posting bc i was busy yelling. experiencing the ecstacy of baseball etc. #so much more i could say abt this game but i am restraining myself for now lol

[johaerys-writes]

When you're watching a film set in the 40s and the characters are reading an Odyssey translation that was only published in the 90s, so you just sit there like 😐

#nothing quite like small details like this to throw me off #i don't even own that particular translation but something about it didn't sound right #i was like wait... this sounds like fagles #but he didn't publish his Homeric translations until the 90s. that can't be right #and i check online and it WAS fagles #and now i'm wondering why movies do that lmao??? it's so easy to find a version of an ancient work #that's contemporary of the ppl you're filming #literally so easy #lots of ppl still read pope's translation for instance and it was published in the freaking 1700s #*sigh* #anyway. i wish my hyperfixations let me enjoy things lmao

[pythiaswine]

check out my redbubble <3 i make stickers like this one of dear achilles' tragic death, but colorful

#fate achilles #achilles #the iliad #patrochilles #the song of achilles #tsoa #tsoa fanart #achilles and patroclus #achilles fanart #achilles sticker #greek tragedy #greek epics #homer's iliad #homer's epics #epic poem #redbubble #redbubble art #support small artists

[the-cricket-chirps]

Winslow Homer

Fishing Boats, Key West

1903

#winslow homer #seascape #sea view #sailboats #sailing #small boats #american art #art history #aesthetictumblr #tumblr art #tumblraesthetic #tumblrpic #tumblrpictures #tumblrstyle #artists on tumblr #tumblrposts #aesthetic #fishing #fishing boats #boating

[mazthemeh22]

Another Magma doodle! Enjoy the cool Octo, emerging from a deep mysterious lake. (Apologies again for the quality, not much i can do.)

I also drew this creature hiding in the depths. It's a bottomless lake… with who-knows-what lurking beneath. So don't go too deep, or you won't make it back to the surface…

I also drew this silly Homer. He chillin'.

#art #artists on tumblr #my art #small artist #art tag #digital art #doodle #magma #magma doodles #magma art #homer simpson #octopus #creature #monster #lake

[greecedlightningpod]

Troy: The Trojan War

In the series premier of Greeced Lightning, Dr. Sara Hales-Brittain, Luke Patrick, and Sam Siegel begin their deep dive into ancient Greek mythology by breaking down the legend of the Trojan War. Dr. Hales-Brittain teaches Luke and Sam about the epic cycle, Paris' past, and how much the movie Troy failed. Dr. Hales Notes: Troy: Fall of a City - The miniseries Troy: Fall of a City aired in 2018 and does an excellent job of interpreting the Iliad and the epic cycle of the Trojan War. Check it out for a more accurate rendition of Homer! The Iliad, trans. Fagles - One of the most commonly used translations of The Iliad, by Robert Fagles. This is the one Sara usually uses.

Listen Here!!

#Greeced Lightning #Mythology #Myths #Troy #Trojan War #History #Ancient Greece #Movie vs Myth #Educate #podcast #new podcast #indie podcast #small podcast #fun #funny #Epic #Homer