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theres a reason people in core adjacent fandom circles dont joke about rape the same way they do with war crimes & genocide and thats because rape is something that can happen to them, therefore deserving consideration, while war crimes and genocides are silly stuff that happen to unreal people they dont see as humans as much as themself

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not exactly sure how to phrase this but there's kind of a strain of discourse about the ancient world (& specifically the characters within it who are objects of study, whether mythical/fictional/historical) that posits that, well, everyone back then basically sucked, so you shouldn't look at them through a quote-unquote "modern lens". and this gets expressed in everything from throwaway tumblr posts about just like picking your favourite war criminal (why "war criminals"? not call them e.g. rapists?) to academic books cautioning against the supposed ahistoricism of talking about ancient Athenian "misogyny". and this has always kind of bothered me. but the longer i go on working in this field the more i think this idea amounts to, fundamentally, a denial of the personhood of tbh basically everyone who was not a freeborn citizen man. the harms done to women, enslaved people, war captives etc. may have been legal or legitimate or unnoticed as such in the ancient world but they were still harms. which is one thing when those harms are fictional or mythological (tho' surely still worth acknowledging as such?) but quite another imo when you're talking about historical figures. sorry but your blorbo made commodities out of people as real & human & capable of suffering as he was or you are. and no i don't think we (in or out of the academy) talk about this enough. i don't think we'll ever be done talking about it.

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Alcibiades 🍷

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marcus aurelius honey i'm so sorry they did this to you i know all you wanted was to think about dying and make out with your tutor

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Hector and Astyanax :)

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“Then glorious Hector kissed his darling son

and took him in his arms to rock and cuddle”

- The Iliad 151, Wilson

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Drops Iliad angst and runs away

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Lock in

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Post-War Pyrrhus

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I'm not drawing armor again (few notes under cut)

I heavily based the armor from this pottery art where Achilles is bandaging Patroclus' arrow wound only changing their skirts/kilts(?) and a few elements. Also changed Achilles' helmet a bit because I really want to lean in on the idea his face is obscured so Patroclus is not recognized when he's wearing it (from afar at least)

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🏺🧥✅

greek amphora cardi

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Pelops and his ivory shoulder

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messy sketch of a tired Deidamia and little Pyrrhus

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the madoka magica comic

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the girls!!!! and toxic old man yaoi.

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penelope didn't have to turn the tree bed into a riddle. she could have asked odysseus to prove his identity, to tell her something only he would know — which she actually did a few books earlier, when she asked the beggar to describe odysseus, and odysseus told her about a purple cloak with a particular golden brooch that she fastened herself twenty years ago. when penelope tells telemachus they have signs by which they'll know each other, you sort of expect more of the same. and instead, she decides to trap him. like a bug in a cup.

and it's delightful to me, idk, how odysseus has been trapped and cornered in various way throughout the odyssey, but arguably never so that he has to tell the truth to get out. (with the phaeacians, maybe? the omniscient narrator corroborates some of what he tells them, but do we really know everything?) and in fact he is not trying to get free of penelope. he wants something from her, wants to convince her, wants to be welcomed home, but until this point he's lied to her, revealed himself to other people before her, and been distant with her (though also patient! he doesn't try to strongarm or rush her into accepting him; it's his idea to sleep elsewhere).

except penelope isn't looking for him to be distant and patient. penelope lies in a way that requires odysseus to stop playing along — not only to prove that he knows what odysseus knows, but that he's willing to tell the truth about himself.

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"odysseus is [depicted as being] justified in murdering the twelve women because they [are depicted as having] betrayed the household that provides for them" yeah i know, i just don't think it means we can't interrogate the odyssey further. that is an accurate description of what the text portrays and believes, but even so, it's loaded with assumptions. why does the text assume they slept with the suitors willingly when they are otherwise depicted without much interiority (melantho's feelings about eurymachus are ambiguous even compared to melanthius)? if they weren't willing, would it have been depicted differently, and how? if they were willing, what might have made those relationships look attractive or strategic or safe to them? why are they dependent on the household in the first place? why are some readers resistant to the extension of compassion toward them? does that have anything to do with the text's depiction of them? is that worth pushing back against?

i mean, obviously i think the answer to the last question is yes. you should try to understand the context of odysseus' actions, but you should also try to understand the actions of the slaves, even though (and especially because) the text cares about them less. you can interrogate how it portrays and what it believes about power. the odyssey is thousands of years old; it can take it