#what has hector ever done to me?

[moonyackertarg]

#the song of achilles #house of the dragon #patrochilles #aemond targaryen #aemond one eye #rhaenyra targaryen #emma d'arcy #luke velaryon #lucemond #luke x aemond #the song of achilles quote #what has hector ever done to me? #house targaryen #hotd #asoiaf #a song of ice and fire #got #game of thrones #team black #vhagar #jacaerys velaryon #cregan stark #daenerys targaryen #the blacks #laena velaryon #daemon targaryen #daemyra

[ineedtheraphy]

How I imagine Pyrrhus and Achilles Met in the Underworld would be like:

*Que Awkward silence in the air*

Pyrrhus: ....*stares*

Achilles: *does the same*....

Pyrrhus: Fath-

Achilles: *slaps the child* ....oops- sorry my hands slipped:)

#this is just a joke don't take it seriously #patrochilles #the song of achilles #tsoa patrochilles #incorrect tsoa quotes #what has hector ever done to me? #Another Stupidity from me

[weird-tea]

Finally got round to reading The Song of Achilles and the dramatic irony of Achilles saying 'What has Hector ever done to me?' is seriously killing me. Like I knew from Tumblr he said it but I didn't realise he said it multiple times with Patroclus right there and just no baby hush go touch some wood you're jinxing yourself so hard right now

#the song of achilles #Achilles #patroclus #what has Hector ever done to me?

[ryoceann]

this phrase haunts me day and night

#IT IS IN EVERY FANFIC I READ AND I HURT OH SO MUCH #EVERY TIME I READ IT IN TSOA I FELT LIKE THROWING MYSELF ONTO TRAIN TRACKS #GOD #it hurts. so. much. #screaming crying shaking throwing up #tsoa #the song of achilles #what has hector ever done to me? #patrochilles #patroclus x achilles #hector #patroclus #achilles

[starsstardust]

Daily reminder that the first thing Achilles did after seeing Patroclus' body was to reach for his sword to slash his own throat. Yeah.

#they stay rent free in my head #my day would be going perfectly normal and suddenly I'd remember things like this #what has hector ever done to me #ahhhh #patroclus #achilles #tsoa #the song of achilles #trojan war #the iliad

[gonnamcfreakinloseit]

“What has Hector ever done to me?”

Oh Achilles my love how I wish you hadn’t asked

#arrogant bastard #queer books #achilles lamenting the death of patroclus #achilles #patroclus #achilles and patroclus #the song of achilles #what has hector ever done to me

[peggy-sue-reads-a-book]

Achilles: people always ask is it too much? But I’m like it’ll never be enough. Never. It’ll never be enough. Like never ever. It’s never enough and it will never be enough.

#tiktok audio #incorrect tsoa quotes #achilles #tsoa achilles #the song of achilles #tsoa madeline miller #greek mythology #patrochilles #achilles x patroclus #thetis #what has hector ever done to me #the trojan war #classical memes #tagamemnon #the iliad

[gayformlessblob]

"Its pride month, Hector, you know what that means!"

"Huh? What? You want me to kill, like, gay greeks?"

(And then he does)

😭😭 AND THEN HE DOES.

#would it be funny if i tagged this as a spoiler for the iliad #what has hector ever done to me etc etc

[tornadodyke]

tsoa IS fucking nuts for the line "there are no bargains between lions and men. i will kill you and eat you raw" though

#and 'what has hector ever done to me?' but you know #every time i read the former though. my god. slay king!!!! literally!!!!

[ineedtheraphy]

Some people: They we're lovers!!

Historians: They we're friends!!

Me: they we're urn mates:)

#patrochilles #the song of achilles #incorrect tsoa quotes #send help #i need therapy #i swear #Another Tsoa post cuz why not #achilles x patroclus #crack? #it's been a few months I swear #broken humour #tsoa patrochilles #what has hector ever done to me?

[skeleton-under-ur-bed]

Alternative title for The song of Achilles

#tsoa #the song of Achilles #what has Hector ever done to me? more like-what has my ego and obsession with reputation ever done to me?

[nutria--oscura]

I SAW YOUR TAGS ON MY NEW DEMON CASS AU FICNHEHEHEH THANK YOUUUU

<33

Its such a genius idea for an au! So so so much angst potential for multiple characters

#i love the repetition of 'whatever happens to willy happens to cassandra' #it gives me 'what has hector ever done to me' (song of achilles) sort of vibes- #a type of foreshadowing i am a sucker for #cookies-over-yonder

[quill-is-brainstorming]

I've just re-read the short lived duel that Aeneas and Achilles have in Book 20 of the Iliad and it's actually the most hilarious fucking thing.

So it starts out with Apollo disguising himself as Lycaon, one of Priam's many sons, and telling to have a go at Achilles. Keep in mind that this is post-Patroclus Achilles. Aka: berserk Achilles. Aka: so fucking mad he would fight a literal river Achilles.

Aeneas, who is capable of critical thinking, says he doubts he can actually take him on. He also references a time when he was herding cattle on Mount Ida and Achilles ambushed him, adding that the only reason he survived then was because Zeus gave him enough strength to book it (cracking up the official times that he's been saved by a god from certain death to 3, you go dude!).

However, after a bit of back and forth and a ton of hyping up on Apollo's part, Aeneas decides to try anyway.

Like, what could possibly go wrong?

Achilles notices Aeneas charging at him and he begins to taunt him. It's something among the lines of: "I'm sorry, are you, background trojan character #61, actually gonna try and beat me? And then what? Do you think that Priam will reward you in some way? Maybe making you king after him? Well it's BULLSHIT, because Priam fucked so much that your chances of succeeding him are basically 0. Ahah. Loser."

Now, you'd think that maybe Aeneas got enraged at the comment and attacked him, or maybe he even got scared and backed down, but NOPE. What does Aeneas do?

Well, first of all, he insults Achilles' insults, comparing his bickering to that of a child. Literally, "I heard third graders do better than that." And then he decides to list his and Hector's entire fucking family tree.

You know that part of the Bible that's like "this guy sired this other guy, and this other guy sired yet another guy" and so on? It's basically that.

So after he's done with all that, Aeneas states that while he'd love to have a battle of insults with Achilles, because according to him he's actually very good at insulting people (his words, not mine), they should probably throw hands now. Achilles agrees.

The duel is shortlived and Aeneas gets his ass handed to him. Badly. As expected. And he's about die when ✨️POV shift✨️ we're not on Olympus where Poseidon, Hera and Athena are watching this absolute train wreck go down.

Poseidon, pitying Aeneas, suddenly goes on a rant. It's something among the lines of: "come on guys, look at him, he's just a little guy! He literally has no stakes in this war, he doesn't deserve to die here! He even gives us lots of gifts and sacrifices, he's literally such a nice guy. How can we do this to him!?

...oh and also he's part of some prophecy, Zeus would get mad if he died."

The fact that the way it's worded makes it sound like Aeneas being part of a literal prophecy is an afterthought to him absolutely floors me, Poseidon is literally just attached to a random dude that's fighting on the opposite side to his because he thinks he's nice.

After all that Hera is pretty unimpressed and states that she really doesn't care if our man lives or dies as neither her or Athena have ever saved a Trojan from death, she however adds that Poseidon is free to do whatever he wants.

The literal moment Hera stops talking, Poseidon lunges down from Olympus and onto the battlefield to look for the two combatants. When he does, he saves Aeneas like only he can do.

You know how when Diomedes first tries to kill Aeneas, Aphrodite gently folds her hands around him to shield him? There's none of that here. Poseidon just runs up to him and literally flings the motherfucker.

It literally says that he flies "high in the air". It's like a Looney Toons sketch.

So Aeneas lands and, while he's obviously a bit dazed, Poseidon proceeds to call him a madman and essentially tells him to never do something stupid like that again and just wait until Achilles is dead, then he'll be able to murder Achaeans to his heart's content. Aeneas is fine with that.

Achilles, who just saw his opponent just get yeeted into the fucking sky, just shrugs and goes "welp, guess that guy's off limits, I'm gonna go kill someone else now I guess lol".

This entire scene is pure fucking gold and the fact that I've literally never seen anyone talk about it just breaks my heart.

#tagamemnon #trojan war #the iliad #the aeneid #achilles #aeneas #apollo #poseidon #hera #athena

[badvibesonly911]

The Song of Achilles

By Madeline Miller

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

#wtf 😭😭😭😭😭 #what has hector ever done to me #book reviews

[baejax-the-great]

Absolutely reeling.

So I knew that the origin of "Hector was a great man, moral, noble, better than all of the Greeks" began as Roman propaganda that somehow has made it to now, the year 2023, and is still taught to high school students.

What I did not know was why scholars shit on Achilles as vehemently as they did (and still do).

My copy of Fagles' translation of the Iliad has a preface by a different scholar who I'm not going to bother to name because he's an idiot (and idk probably dead at this point). I read the entire thing, absolutely baffled, because he would cite a part of the text (that I admittedly had not read yet! at all!), quote it, and then come to the most batshit interpretation based on that quote I had ever seen in my life. His general take was that Achilles was a sociopath who had no feelings for anyone other than himself and his own pride, and every action he took (until welcoming Priam into his hut) was done in service of that pride. To support this, he decided that Achilles did not see Patroclus as a person, but rather as an extension of himself, and thus someone injuring Patroclus was them injuring Achilles, and so he did not care about Patroclus, he only cared about his wounded pride.

Yeah.

That sounded wrong before reading the book, and while reading the book all i could think was, "Did we read the same fucking thing???" Put in context, those quotations still did not support his conclusions whatsoever.

But i cracked open Caroline Alexander's "The War That Killed Achilles" last night, and she solves this mystery of "Hector good, Achilles bad" for me right out the gate (which is good because so far I've only read the preface).

Western Europeans by and large learned about the Trojan war from Roman stories, which became fairly popular, and not the Iliad, which was not translated into French or English until centuries later. As mentioned, these were propaganda that cast the Trojans in a much better light than the Greeks because the Romans believed they were descended from Trojan refugees. This starts a trend that is still going on in scholarly circles as casting the Iliad as a war between "barbaric Greeks living in a shitty, lawless camp" vs "civilized, educated, weaving, real-wife-having Trojans," making the Iliad a tragedy in which Homer for some reason skewers his own people and their warlike culture as barbaric while propping up a dead, foreign city-state. This interpretation is still extant and was the postscript to another copy of the Iliad I have.

According to Alexander, scholars closer to Homer's time saw the entire war as a tragedy--both the destruction of Troy AND the destruction of the Greek army. While this is not covered in the Iliad, very few Greeks actually made it home after Troy. Some that did were then outcast (Teucer for example), some were murdered (bye, Agamemnon), some went on to create new kingdoms in other places (Diomedes), but by and large, there was no going home from that war. There was no great victory with all their loot. The entire thing was a disaster for both sides, spurred on by fickle gods.

Back to the more recent European interpretations of this story, one reason Hector ended up cast in such a "good" light, despite being a dumbass who wants to dishonor dead people just as badly as Achilles ever did, was in order to make Achilles look worse. Why was it important that Achilles becomes a villain in this story in which he is very much not a villain? Because Europeans were involved in so much war with each other and the rest of the world that a young, insubordinate man who criticizes his idiot of a commander, decides his life isn't worth throwing away for this war, and refuses to fight to sack a city was an affront to their values. Young men were to be obedient, follow their commanding officers, and colonize the world for queen and country. Achilles suggesting losing his life is not worth it to prop up Agamemnon's war is a dangerous precedent for all the good little soldiers needed to make their nations wealthy.

It's almost funny that these analyses propping up Troy as a beacon of civilization were made by people living in countries so bent on colonizing the world. They identified with the city being sacked and not the greedy sackers of said city, who they were much closer to. And Achilles, educated, morally rigid, emotional Achilles, is recast as a sociopathic asshole who doesn't care about anyone other than himself, unlike all of those other beacons of selflessness among the Greek leadership.

The tragedy of the Iliad is that Achilles is right, the war is pointless, Agamemnon did dishonor the shit out of him, and it doesn't matter because he's going to die in it anyway.

Frankly, given how badly his character has been interpreted for so long, I think the muses owe him an apology.

#the iliad #achilles #I have only read the preface of this book #hope yall like essays #writing essays at 6am and hoping they are grammatical #haven't even had my coffee yet my head is too full of achilles #also a hefty chunk of it was FRENCH propaganda like come ON

[peggy-sue-reads-a-book]

Meanwhile in Troy …

Hector: what know you of this “Aristos Achaion?”

Aeneas: well sir, he has an IQ approximating .003.

Paris: he feeds on Oreos, r*talin, and your mother’s tears.

Hector: go on.

Aeneas: they say he has a weird thing for toes.

Hector: I see

Paris: in short, we’re fucked.

Hector: ok, I get it.

Aeneas: I’m not sure you do, sir. *clicks open power point* He is literally this:

#tagamemnon #incorrect greek mythology #incorrect tsoa quotes #incorrect iliad #homer’s iliad #greek mythology #the iliad #achilles #hector #what has hector ever done to me #aeneas #Paris #troy #the trojan war #Trojan war #incorrect Trojan war #aristos achaion