my men think today is a good day to talk about how proteus has told us the means to pass over the teaming ocean and finish our journey back to Sparta. Wrong. Today we are honoring my Brother who just was killed in the bathtub
FOR SALE: One Demigod’s Set of Armor With “ornate rhetorical scenes” forged into shield, Lightly Used (919) 625-3325 - Ask For Mycenaean King Agamemnon
I hate it when I talk wistfully about the ancient world and then people are like “you wouldn’t survive back then” yeah obviously I would die immediately but do you think achilles would be able to survive in the modern world if he had to send one polite email? no
congrats to these people on being funnier than me on my own fucking post
99% of all murders committed by women in ancient greek plays are completely justified
Ok the only other woman in Greek tragedies that I can think of who committed murder is Medea, and honestly in the TWO (2) she committed (her brother and her son), IMO neither of them were justifiable
Helen, Agamemnon, and Menelaus interpretations homework from Robinius Iliad class #4!
I meant to post this weeks ago, but I haven’t had time nor have I been on tumblr very much! As always I love this TT_TT Everyone is so clever !!!!!!!! I def invite my followers here to attend a Robinius class. It’s just an introductory class and very basic to help people who are unfamiliar with the Iliad! Imo I think greek myth esp epics should be accessible and made easy to understand for everyone to enjoy~ It shouldn’t be something that is gatekept at all. Mythos is for everyone!!
✨ And if I told you that I loved you, you’d maybe think there is something wrong. I’m not a man of too many faces. The mask I wear is one. ✨ (Shape of my heart - Sting)
It’s so funny to me that Odysseus was considered the smartest of the Greeks at Troy. He has like 3 coherent thoughts in a 20 year span and they’re like yeah that’s good enough.
The goddess, Judgement, favours someone learning from adversity. But I shall hear of what will be, after it comes into being: Before then, I leave it, otherwise, it is the same as a premature grieving. Aeschylus: Agamemnon, 250-254
..the culture of ἀρετή is, in essence, the education of discovering and knowing, intellectually and personally, that noble balance between our natural human tendency to commit ὕβρις - to go beyond the respectful, noble, limits of behaviour - and the necessity of learning the hard way, from πάθει μάθος, from direct personal experience. Δίκα is this balance; a balance manifest in us - or which can be manifest in us - through thoughtful reasoning, that is, by a well-balanced, fair, noble, personal judgement.
The death mask of Agamemnon, right? I don’t think so! Why would anyone expect Heinrich Schliemann, amateur archaeologist discoverer of “Troy”, to correctly date and contextualize, well, anything? It’s all SO OLD, you guys. It’s really hard to tell. Well, let’s straighten out this mess. Eratosthenes says the Trojan war was between 1194 and 1184 BCE. This is a pretty long time ago and it is during the Greek Dark Ages, so history was pretty shady. For scale, this is 700 years before the Greeks got all fancy and made their name in the Persian wars. It is 500 years before the mythical probably-fake founding of Rome.
So the death mask of Agamemnon? Unfortunately for Heinrich Schliemann and his late nineteenth-century German Romanticism, some amazing Mycenaean goldsmith forged that golden mask somewhere in the latter half of the 1500s BCE, and let us not forget that the Mycenaean civilization sort of collapsed in the 1200s BCE. So when Agamemnon returned from Troy and had his head chopped off by Clytemnestra, some other dead king had been wearing this mask for at least two hundred years, and Agamemnon probably had never even heard of him because the civilization had collapsed and revivified in the meantime.
Plus, why would Clytemnestra let such a daughter-sacrificing asshole wear such a fancy mask?
I was going to start this with a convoluted lead in about Cassandra, the murdered, doomed prophet who was abducted from Troy by Agamemnon, using her acceptance of her fate, to be murdered along with that egotistical bastard, by his wife, Clytemnestra, as a metaphor for sacrifice within D/s. The problem was that’s a terrible metaphor.
Sacrifice is rooted in offering, and when you present yourself to me, that’s an offering, right there. An offer to hurt you, draw blood to the surface. An offer to use. Each one a little sacrifice, a part of yourself to lose, for a time, to surrender to me.
But we’re not going to be pleasing any ancient gods. It’s not about the White Bull of Poseidon, or Zeus’ perverted swan that we’re aiming for. Each one is for me, and me alone. Every blow I lay on your flesh, the gasps and cries that spill from your lips, is supplication that I will take and enjoy, leaving you both indebted and absolved. Torn between the two, you’re going to approach catharsis.
And that’s another little bit of classical Greek, between me and you.
