nardialrose

[nardialrose]

Phaedra Rant

Finally finished the book by Laura Shepperson. I was debating whatever I should make a read along posts here, but I don't want to reopen my experiences reading it, so decided to contain them here.

Spoiler ahead and CW for SA.

Before the bad stuff, here are the good stuff (and by stuff i meant only thing).

As far as character writing in the novel, I like Theseus. Obviously Theseus is gonna be an asshole like popular perception of him, but he's like straight up a villain here who's not only cold-hearted, but also pragmatic in the sense he made decisions that are unexpected but not out of character. It makes him a stark contrast to all the other male characters whose only traits are being stupid and horny.

Now onto the bad stuff

Wtf is this book.

Obviously flipping the narrative where it is Hippolytus who rape Phaedra is questionable, but the author has no concept of subtlety and "show don't tell" to build on the narrative she tried to make. We are instantly told Theseus and Hippolytus are bad people right before they were introduced. Phaedra and some of the characters already recognized they are bad people when they met them.

As if that's not bad enough, the author has to sprinkled graphic descriptions of violence toward women practically in every single chapter. Athen in this book is practically a barbaric version of Gilead; they have no concepts of etiquette and human rights in basically everything. It's beyond parody it's almost comical if it weren't for how serious the book tries to be.

What is the point of making Athen to a literal shithole? To make Crete look any better? You don't need to do that to make the point we already knew.

Laura please, we fucking get it.

I'm not kidding that there's practically no female relationships whatsoever. It's like non-existent. And the ones that does is short-lived. We don't see Ariadne and Phaedra spending time together, Phaedra is distant from her only maid, and both of them has negative interactions with the Athenians maids who are all ungrateful and described as ugly (hooray feminism /s).

Edited: Forgot about Medea she didn't form a bond with her little cousin either. I was expecting her to like teach Phaedra magic or help her escape Athen, but did neither of those.

Practically nothing good happens to poor Phaedra. The book worsen as the story progresses for her. As a young girl she married Theseus who knows he's a pos, forced to live as a peasant or slave instead of his wife, raped by Hippolytus who in the book is a sexually repressed boy who viewed women as temptress, got pregnant with his child, got called a witch and whore by the Athenian men, and when it looks like she won the verdict battle she lost that, and committed suicide to save her child from the life living under Theseus' wing. When she tried to have some agency, that hope gets dashed quickly. Anytime she prayed to the god her wishes get granted, she doesn't get what she wanted.

It's so bleak and depressing I don't know how the author say this is a feminist retelling if it's saying there's no justice in the world to improve the life of women. It's clear that point Laura Shepperson used the original story to affirm her belief instead of critically engage with the plays itself.

She cited an Oxford quote on Greek myth reflecting cultural values, and i get it and all. But from a critical lens, her worldview on women and the world is just ugly.

Also like most reviewers on Goodread already said, the multiple POV chapters are unnecessary. The side characters don't add anything to the plot aside from maybe 1 or 2. Even Medea who has her chapters, didn't contributed anything much by margin until the ending. All of them sound exactly the same as Phaedra chapters which makes it annoying anytime the story switched different characters.

As always, here are lighting rounds of dumb changes from the myths/play some of you are waiting for:

Making Theseus a 40 years old man instead of a youth when he fought the Minotaur and married Phaedra who is a teenage.

Make Heracles a stereotypical jock who has no brain (also he serve no purpose in the story).

Make Jason a p*do. Why????

The Minotaur is named "Young Minos" instead of his original name Asterion.

Bonus point, Minos Jr. was not actually a beast and a product of bestiality, he was a deformed child who just so happened to look like a bull and he's Minos' son.

So let me get this straight: King Minos doesn't want anyone to know he has a deformed son, so he went far to construct a labyrinth to confine him. But Minos Jr. was free to roam the palace since the staff knows who he is? Ariadne and Phaedra likes their brother even though they are okay with Minos Jr. being confined to a labyrinth? Also the king is fine with the rumors defaming his wife as a slut who slept with a bull?

Another point to the Minotaur, the tribute system became a soft-Hunger Games where the tributes don't die and the Minotaur was innocent who was murdered by Theseus. Phaedra blames Theseus for her brother's death and all I'm thinking was King Minos was fucking stupid.

Making Eurpides' story as that "sensationalized" story that the Bard made up to blame Phaedra and defend Hippolytus is just disrespectful.

Somehow the author conflated Helios with Apollo.

Overall a depressing book that only leaves a bitter taste. Worse than Jennifer Saint's Ariadne.

Funny for all of the book about women's accusation not being taken seriously, Eurpides' play has Theseus believed in Phaedra. Yes the accusation false, but Theseus wasn't this asshole king that people make him out to be.

[nardialrose]

Pandora and Evils

[nardialrose]

Bruh, the Phaedra novel is so bad.

I know people are saying this book is anti-men and all, but they aren't exaggerating this book will constantly hits you with a hammer with in. Every. Chapter.

There's no subtley and the multi-pov chapters annoys the fuck out of me.

I don't hate Jennifer Saint's Ariadne like most people who said the book is also anti-men. Well this book will surely put them in a coma.

[nardialrose]

It occurs to me that in religious worship, Hera was rarely, if not, never paired with her sons Ares and Hephaestus as far as records goes.

Some of the gods get to share an altar with their parent in some cult.

Leto-Artemis-Apollo

Athena-Zeus

Demeter-Persephone

But it's only Hera's daughters she was shared. Hebe shared an altar with Hera at Heraion to represent her mom's youth aspect while Eileithyia at some places in Argos and Olympia.

Instead Ares was grouped with Athena and other minor war deities like Enyalios and Enyo, and Hephaestus with Athena.

While Hera was commonly paired with her husband Zeus and sometimes Athena.

One of the most mysterious question indeed.

Why do you think that most of Hera's children with Zeus are relatively minor Olympians, while Zeus' children with other, relatively less important goddesses are more popular? Ares, Eileithyia and Hebe are important, but they pale in comparison to Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Hermes, or Dionysus. Leto, Dione, and Maia don't seem to have been as worshipped as Hera. The closest might be Hephaestus, who did have many festivals in his name at least, but he is not always Zeus' son.

I understand that some of these cases involve symbolism; the Horae are goddesses of natural and civil order, so it makes sense for their mother to be Themis rather than Hera. But I expected that the most favored children of a king would be the ones with his wife, rather than bastards born from the king cheating on the queen. Wasn't an important role for wives in patriarchal Greece to bear legitimate heirs?

Yeah, this is one of the most interesting aspects of the Olympian pantheon but honestly I haven't the vaguest idea why things are that way. It gets into the very complicated subject of the origins of the Hellenic gods, which are obscure for most of them.

One idea could be that some of the gods were already associated with their mothers even before they were imagined as children of Zeus, or that most of these family connections originate in a time when there was far less agreement on who the principal consort of Zeus was. But all of this is speculation hard to prove in lack of any solid evidence, and the explanation could be something else entirely.

I do think that it depends a lot on the particular god though. For instance, many classicists consider the fact that Aphrodite appears as the daughter of Zeus and Dione in Homer a motif borrowed from the Near East, based specifically on the Epic of Gilgamesh where the goddess Ishtar is the daughter of Anu (the sky god) and Antu (whose name is derived from her male consort's just as is the case for Dione), although other scholars disagree with the idea of direct influence and consider a shared tradition instead. For another example, if we assume that the motif of Athena's birth from Zeus' head was well-known even before the Archaic period, then it is only natural that if someone (e.g. Hesiod) wanted to introduce a mother in the picture she had to be a symbolically fitting but essentially disposable figure whom the Greeks did not actually worship as a goddess. But again, speculation.

Why was Hera given Ares and (even stranger) Hephaistos as sons? This is the most mysterious thing to me.

[nardialrose]

Felt bad for putting my book club to read through Lilith and Penelope’s Bones, so might as well join the suffering.

(I know I swore not to read retelling novels but 🤐)

[nardialrose]

The gods whose cultic veneration had been institutionalized by the Roman polity (other gods were irrelevant as long as one did not invade their territory) were part of society. As was true for human members of society, interaction between gods and humans was infrequent outside of a person’s large, private space. Some gods were regularly consulted on political decisions (e.g., Jupiter); others were asked for their help and general benevolence, volens propitius esse/fieri, ‘‘to be/ become willing and benevolent’’ (e.g., Plaut. Curc. 88–9). The aims of this communication and the concepts its words expressed varied. One could seek venia (pardon) or to establish pax (a pact) with a particular god or all of them. The gods could be asked sinere (to allow) or velle (to will) something. On the level of the polity, military success was seen as a result of Roman piety, and defeats signaled the wrath of the gods (ira deorum). The divine members of Roman society were present in physical space. She or he (a gendered conception was obligatory) had a place of her or his own within the boundaries of Roman territory. The gods’ property rights complicated the fundamental difference between public space, that is, territory owned by the community as a whole (a locus publicus) and private space owned by a human or corporate (juridical) person (a locus privatus).

The dominance of models taken from Greek literary texts have, from the late Republic onwards, induced scholars beginning with the Augustan historian Dionysios of Halicarnassus (in Asia minor), who wrote in Greek, to believe that Roman religion lacked myths. However, the Romans made sense of their world in a particularly distinctive way, by narrating the history of their city, and this trait does not support the claims of Dionysios and other scholars. The Romans memorialized their gods by their appearance in history, by their actions in times of crisis. Also, Roman gods frequently lacked the fully-fledged personalities of Greek deities. Genealogy was less frequently employed to establish relationships among the gods than in Greece. In addition, only second-rank families like the Iulii in the first third of the first century felt the need to increase their prestige by introducing gods among their forebears. Old and dominant families instead legitimated their political positions by the number of consuls they could count among their ancestors. The severing of the leading families’ genealogical links to the most important state deity, Jupiter, might have been a self-conscious measure taken during the emergence of the nobility in the middle Republic.

The gods could be addressed for many reasons: thanksgiving, asking for favors, exploring the divine will. In general, the Romans were not excessively eager to contact them. The gods were thought of as members of an ordered society who had obligations and rights. They were to receive their share and, for the most part, no more. The astonishing openness of the system that admitted more and more gods on private initiative does not indicate exaggerated piety but rather corresponds to the openness of the citizen body on the human level.

-Jorg Rupke's Communicating with the Gods in A Companion to the Roman Republic

[nardialrose]

Quickly found an explanation from here.

(Not that it makes the whole thing any better)

In her shame Procris forsook Cephalus and went off as a fugitive to Minos the king of Crete. She found on arrival that he was afflicted by childlessness and promised a cure, showing him how to beget children. Now Minos would ejaculate snakes, scorpions and millipedes, killing the women with whom he had intercourse. But his wife Pasiphae, daughter of the Sun, was immortal. Procris accordingly devised the following to make Minos fertile. She inserted the bladder of a goat into a woman and Minos first emitted the snakes into the bladder; then he went over to Pasiphae and entered her. And when children were born to them, Minos gave Procris his spear and his dog. No animal could escape these two and they always reached their target.

-Antoninus Liberalis (2nd or 3rd century CE). Metamorphoses 41. Translated by Francis Celoria (1992). The Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis, page 101. Routledge.

Now if any woman had intercourse with Minos, it was impossible for her to escape with life; for because Minos cohabited with many women, Pasiphae bewitched him, and whenever he took another woman to his bed, he discharged wild beasts at her joints, and so the women perished.315 315. The danger which the women incurred, and the device by which Procris contrived to counteract it, are clearly explained by Ant. Lib. 41. According to him, the animals which Minos discharged from his body are snakes, scorpions, and millipeds.

-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca. 3.15.1

Thanks i hate it.

[nardialrose]

Now if any woman had intercourse with Minos, it was impossible for her to escape with life; for because Minos cohabited with many women, Pasiphae bewitched him, and whenever he took another woman to his bed, he discharged wild beasts at her joints, and so the women perished.315 315. The danger which the women incurred, and the device by which Procris contrived to counteract it, are clearly explained by Ant. Lib. 41. According to him, the animals which Minos discharged from his body are snakes, scorpions, and millipeds.

-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca. 3.15.1

Thanks i hate it.

[nardialrose]

The Iliad, Homer, transl Emily Wilson

OG horsegirl Hector...... godlike Sparkle the war horse!!

[nardialrose]

Alcaeus had a son Amphitryon... and Mestor had Hippothoe by Lysidice, daughter of Pelops. This Hippothoe was carried off by Poseidon, who brought her to the Echinadian Islands, and there had intercourse with her, and begat Taphius, who colonized Taphos and called the people Teleboans, because he had gone far from his native land. And Taphius had a son Pterelaus, whom Poseidon made immortal by implanting a golden hair in his head.

-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca, 2.4.5

Supported by his allies, to wit... Amphitryon ravaged the islands of the Taphians. Now, so long as Pterelaus lived, he could not take Taphos; but when Comaetho, daughter of Pterelaus, falling in love with Amphitryon, pulled out the golden hair from her father's head, Pterelaus died, and Amphitryon subjugated all the islands. He slew Comaetho, and sailed with the booty to Thebes, and gave the islands to Heleus and Cephalus; and they founded cities named after themselves and dwelt in them.

-2.4.7

Damn double Et tu Brute

[nardialrose]

Pindar and others say that he [sc. Pan] was son of Apollo and Penelope, others that he was son of Mercury and the same mother, and that he was handed over by his father to the mountain nymphs to be nurtured, whence he be- came a god of the woodlands. Euphorion represents Pan as son of Ulysses.

-Commentary on Lucan, Pharsalia

Some say that Pan was son of Penelope <and all the suitors, whence he was named "Pan" ("All")> , others that he was son of Apollo and Penelope, <while others still say that he was son of Odysseys and Penelope>, which is Euphorion's version.

-Scholiast on ps.-Euripides, Rhesus

People generally don't like the versions of Penelope having Pan because it's usually with someone else, but one of them have at least Odysseus as the father.

It's cute and fun to explore this.

[nardialrose]

Im willing to talk about anything in Greek myth except that Odysseus and Circe and Calypso conflict.

Ain’t poking the can of worms no matter what.

[nardialrose]

As if explicit proof Patroclus is a super badass like Achilles in the Iliad.

[nardialrose]

I seen latest debates over Ganymede lately on whether it's okay to ship Ganymede and Zeus, or they are just romanticizing rape.

I don't have any strong feelings toward this subject matter cause it's pretty heavy and complicated like most things about the ancient Greeks.

Because while Ganymede is always seen young and an eronemos (beloved), we don't know how young and obviously this depend on the writers and period of time and places, and various factors like marriage and life transition.

History Stuff Being Complicated

For the Greeks and Romans, while they recognized the concepts of life cycle and don't have the term "teens" (it's often divided between children and adult), they don't have a strict definitions and set of specific ages for each terms, and thus fluctuate the meaning for males and females.

With Greek terminologies for examples:

Neos - a term referred to a young man roughly between in their 20-30, but was sometimes used for a man in their 50s.

Ephebos/ephebeia - teens from 16-20s, but in truth there's no fixed age. Reports of ephebos were referred from boys of 12 to 20s.

Pais - child, but is used to refer to a 17 or 18 years old.

Parthenos & kore - young girls, but sometimes referred a child or adult.

Not to mention the categories of life cycle for an age bracket differs from writer to writer. Aristotle believed men mentally matured at the age 14, but not all agreed with him and some who do only partially with some may agree a man may matured, but he has yet to grow a beard for example.

-Youth in the Roman Empire: The Young and the Restless Years? By Christian Laes, Johan Strubbe

Alright, but what about legally? For marriage, women were typically married off much younger than men, but the age differed somewhere between 12-20s. In Classical Athen, girls were married off at the age 14 or 15 (particularly for epikleroi), 20 for Sparta, 12 for Crete according to the law code of Gortyn. For men, it's 30.

However despite all this, there’s no fixed minimum age requirement as age was not the determining factor, but rather the age correspond to a woman’s menarche and a man’s polis rights. A man is legally considered an adult when he earned his civic and military duties.

Further complicated the issue is the age of consent - or rather the lack thereof. While there were instances of pushback in which a boy take on the role of an eronemos, it's more to do with the adjacent roles like the impact on the boy's status rather than the pederasty system as a whole.

-José Malheiro Magalhães' The Rape of Boys in Ancient Athen In Revisiting Rape in Antiquity: Sexualised Violence in Greek and Roman Worlds

So when it comes Greek languages, the contexts always matter. But when it comes to Greek myth however, well there are rarely contexts on what the author exactly meant or envisioned. Ganymede was always referred as an eronemos in Ibycus, Pindar, Hymn to Aphrodite, but no other descriptions given other than he's young and beautiful across most, if not, all accounts.

All these similar problems applies for the Romans too.

Important Note

With that being said, I will be up front that virtually any lovers of the gods or heroes can be interpreted as young that would fall in the category of being a minor today. Hence why I decided to include the information about women because I think it's relevant. Persephone, Semele, Europa, Ariadne doesn't have any aspects that indicate them otherwise older than being 18 or more. They can be imagined as anachronistically adolescent or teens by default to the Greeks and Romans, in the same vein we tend to imagine the characters at least 18 years of age or older. The rare exception to the ambiguity age is famously Helen which I made a post about her.

Besides Ganymede, other characters like Pelops, Hyacinthus, Achilles or Patroclus, were sometimes molded into the pederasty image.

Youths who were most handsome. Adonis, son of Cinyras and Smyrna, whom Venus [Aphrodite] loved. Endymion, son of Aetolus, whom Luna [Selene] loved. Ganymede, son of Erichthonius, whom Jove [Zeus] loved. Hyacinthus, son of Oebalus, whom Apollo loved. Narcissus, son of the river Cephisus, who loved himself . . .

-Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 271 (trans. Grant) (Roman mythographer C2nd A.D.)

-Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West

Philostratus the Younger, Imagines 14 (trans. Fairbanks) (Greek rhetorician C3rd A.D.) : "[Ostensibly a description of an ancient Greek painting :] Hyakinthos (Hyacinthus). Let us ask the youth, my boy, who he is and what is the reason for Apollon's presence with him, for he will not be afraid to have us, at least, look at him. Well, he says that he is Hyakinthos, the son of Oibalos (Oebalus); and now that we have learned this we must also know the reason for the god's presence. The son of Leto for love of the youth promises to give him all he possesses for permission to associate with him; for he will teach him the use of the bow, and music, and understanding the art of prophecy, and not to be unskilful with the lure, and to preside over the contest of the palaestra, and he will grant to him that, riding in the chariot drawn by swans, he should visit all the lands dear to Apollon. Here is the god, painted as usual with unshorn locks; he lifts a radiant forehead above eyes that shine like rays of light, and with a sweet smile he encourages Hyakinthos, extending his right hand with the same purpose. The youth keeps his eyes steadfastly on the ground, and they are very thoughtful, for he rejoices at what he hears and tempers with modesty the confidence that is yet to come. He stands there, covering with a purple mantle the left side of his body, which is also drawn back, and he supports his right hand on a spear, the hip being thrown forward and the right side exposed to view, and this bare arm permits us to describe what is visible. He has a slender ankle below the straight lower leg, and above the latter this supple knee-joint; then come thighs not unduly developed and hip-joints which support the rest of the body; his side rounds out a full-lunged chest, his arm swells in a delicate curve, his neck is moderately erect, while the hair is not unkempt nor stiff from grime, but falls over his forehead and blends with the first down of his beard.

On the other hand, grown adult depictions of the usual eromeos examples also exists.

On the altar are also Demeter, the Maid, Pluto, next to them Fates and Seasons, and with them Aphrodite, Athena and Artemis. They are carrying to heaven Hyacinthus and Polyboea, the sister, they say, of Hyacinthus, who died a maid. Now this statue of Hyacinthus represents him as bearded, but Nicias, son of Nicomedes, has painted him in the very prime of youthful beauty, hinting at the love of Apollo for Hyacinthus of which legend tells.

-Pausanias, Description of Greece. 3.19.4

Very different was the reward of the true love of Achilles towards his lover Patroclus—his lover and not his love (the notion that Patroclus was the beloved one is a foolish error into which Aeschylus has fallen, for Achilles was surely the fairer of the two, fairer also than all the other heroes; and, as Homer informs us, he was still beardless, and younger far.)

-Plato, Symposium. 108a

In general even outside of the pederasty practices, the Greeks and Romans thrived off age-gap and power imbalance.

[nardialrose]

Out of context meme for my write-up on Roman religion

[nardialrose]

An antefix depicts the head of Juno Sospita, circa 500-480 BCE, From Latium, Italy. At Altes Museum.

Juno-Sospita was major goddess whose cult was home in Lanuvium. She is known for her distinctive appearance (see below), representing her political and military roles in Lanuvium. Despite Lanuvium collapsed to the Roman's conquest, Juno-Sospita 's cult enjoyed moderate popularity among the Romans, still retaining her Lanuvian's identity centuries later.

[…] Precisely as much as you believe Juno Sospita of your native place to be a goddess. You never see her, not even in your dreams, unless equipped with goat-skin, spear, shield and slippers turned up at the toe. Yet that is not the aspect of the Argive Juno, nor of the Roman. It follows that Juno has one form for the Argives, another for the people of Lanuvium, and another for us.

-Cicero. De Natura Deorum 1.82