#Ancient greece
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illustratus · 5 hours ago
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Theseus and the Minotaur by Edward Burne-Jones
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msbunnat · 2 days ago
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🔱𝓡𝓾𝓽𝓱𝓵𝓮𝓼𝓼𝓷𝓮𝓼𝓼 𝓲𝓼 𝓶𝓮𝓻𝓬𝔂 𝓾𝓹𝓸𝓷 𝓸𝓾𝓻𝓼𝓮𝓵𝓿𝓮𝓼
Poseidon... Poseidon... Poseidon......
I was just playing around, the same way I did Hermes, and I end up liking it -w- so lets goo!
I wanted to make him like Afrodite, I have this feeling that anything more sea coded is more natural... So I made him more animal as well.
Poseidon is other god with a lot os myths and cheating, he is more an angry god (I can understand this vision of him as he is also the god of natural tragedies, earthquakes and storm...). And if you know Laomedonte, you can imagine him have a lil beef with Ganimedes ehehe.
TEXT TRANSLATION: We need to talk about your NEPHEW.
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preserves42 · 3 days ago
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Ostracism did happen in ancient Greece, and it's where we get the word from, however it wasn't a punishment for a crime.
What would happen was that every year the Athenians (or rather the adult Athenian men who weren't slaves) would vote on whether an ostracism would happen that year. Then later on, if they voted in favour of it, everyone would write the name of a person they didn't like on a pottery shard and use that to vote for who they wanted to ostracise. Large numbers of these voting shards have been found and it looks like someone who could write would make lots of them and then distribute them to people who couldn't write.
It was put in place as a political check to get rid of anyone who had too much power or was abusing it, but in theory you could vote for anyone to be ostracised. Apparently one year they decided to vote for a guy because he was too nice.
It also wasn't just exile forever, it was specifically for 10 years, after which you were allowed to return to Athens, and you'd get to keep all of your property which you'd either take with you or leave with your family.
Anyways, classics rant over hope people learnt something.
Someone remind me of the word for when someone gets thrown out of a city/country and banned from it for doing a crime
Used to happen in Greece
It's on the tip of my tongue
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softestaries · 8 hours ago
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no one i know irl would appreciate this
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gemsofgreece · 24 hours ago
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Folklore ask! Any stories on how the Greek mermaids got to be named after gorgons instead of any other countless sea or water spirits in myth? Does it have to do with princess Thessalonike?
I think this is actually a very complex story involving literature, oral tradition, the perception of creatures, women, historical figures and the meaning we apply to symbols according to our circumstances. This is a long story so there is going to be a Read More cut below.
First of all, Modern Greek has two words for the mermaid; γοργόνα (ghorghóna) and σειρήνα (sirína), so as you see both gorgons and sirens were conflated with the image of the mermaids at some point. In fact, the sirens did that first. I write "ghorghóna" in Latin characters to stress the change of the pronunciation of γ to a voiced velar fricative ever since late antiquity but otherwise the word is the exact same.)
Ancient Greek Mythology did not have a mermaid creature in the way we imagine it since the Middle Ages but the Ancient Greeks were aware of an ancient Assyrian deity who was imagined like that. This was goddess Atargatis who was known in Greek as Derceto. Greeks identified Atargatis / Derceto as the same with a mermaid goddess worshipped in Askhelon, somewhere in the north of modern-day Syria, according to Diodorus (1st century BC) but also Ctesias (5th century BC). The Roman Lucian confirmed this perception in the 2nd century AD. It is believed that to some degree this worship was known to Greece, especially during and after the Hellenistic period. For example, there has been a scripture found in Pella, Macedonia (<- coincidence?) dating to 206 AD in which the veneration of an Assyrian water deity is described.
The early Sirens of the Greek mythology (since 7th century BC) were depicted as creatures with the bodies of birds and the faces of women, who would seduce sailors with their beautiful music and singing. However, from the Classic period onwards there is scarce art depicting them with a fish body instead, maybe due to an Assyrian influence or maybe because the Sirens were creatures associated with the water mostly. They lived at the shore waiting for ships to pass and they were children either of River God Achelous or the Titan Oceanus or of Phorcys, son of Pontus (Sea).
A critical moment for the establishment of the siren as a mermaid in European minds might have been the book Physiologicus, written in Greek around the 2nd century in Alexandria. The book was a predecessor of bestiaries and was connecting various beasts (mostly actual animals but also a few mythological creatures) with the Christian doctrine by associating them with some trademark moral qualities they supposedly had. Physiologicus became very impactful and was translated to Latin, Armenian, Ethiopic, Syriac and later to Slavic, Old German and other European languages. I wasn't able to find what exactly was said about the Siren in the original Physiologicus, however the 10th century German copy Bern Physiologicus described the siren as half-woman, half-fish. Also, from the 7th century onwards western European books assert that the sirens are "sea girls" and are described as "having scaly fish tails". I did find a tiny image of a Greek manuscript of the Physiologicus and it has this drawing of the sirens, who indeed look a lot more like merpeople than half-birds:
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Again, Physiologicus was very influential and the rest of the Early Christian tradition also explored the theme of the sirens extensively through the lens of morality. Early Christian documents discourage people to believe in the literal existence of sirens (fair enough) but they also shape their meaning into an allegory for prostitutes or any vile lustful women who are a danger for the moral male. In this context, the fish form gains more and more ground as well as alternative imaginings of the sirens as half-snakes or half-dragons. It should be noted that there are even imaginings in which the Siren has simultaneously fish and bird traits. The scaly look though, the picture of the siren ascending from the dark abyss instead of a feathery flying singer was more effective for the description of a destructive, dangerous feminine being. It is in the Byzantine period and respectively in the Middle Ages in West Europe when mermaids really become popular. In spite of all that, the bird version was not obsolete. The 10th century Byzantine encyclopedia Suda describes the sirens as half-birds.
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Pages from Suda.
Let's go to the Gorgons now. The Gorgons were daughters of Phorcys, son of Pontus (Sea), much like the Sirens according to one version of their myth. They are too part of the general sea mythological sphere. They lived either beyond the edges or in Oceanus, in a hardly accessible rocky island. Their bodies were imagined as centaurs or wasps as early as in the 8th - 7th centuries BC but after that point they were imagined as humanoid, however sometimes they have snakes in their waist too or a scaly appearance or even wings, like we see happening with Sirens. All original accounts agree to a terrible old-looking repuslive face crowned with snakes. So does their name; Γοργώ (Gorgó) means "terrible looking, fearsome, terrifying". Despite that and before Ovid's popularisation of the Roman version of a victimized Medusa, the Greek Pindar already described Medusa as an incredibly beautiful woman in the 5th century BC. Pindar's take was influential and after this point ancient Greek art depicts a fairer Medusa. One can argue that Medusa typically looks scary but beautiful in pop culture ever since. In other words, as time passed there was some convergence in the way Gorgons and Sirens were imagined; the duality of being beautiful yet terrible and vile, sea creatures, feminine attributes, eventually a scaly look.
Let's make a pause now to talk a bit about Thessalonike and her tragic story. Thessalonike was Alexander the Great's half-sister, so named by her father Philip after an (undefined) victory against the Thessalians. Her mother Nicesipolis died when she was a baby and Philip died when she was a child so she was raised by Olympias. I would like to stress that there was a signficant age gap between Thessalonike and Alexander and there should not have been a lot of interaction between them. After Alexander's death, Olympias had still not married Thessalonike to anyone, favouring her own daughter first. Cassander, one of the diadochi, killed Olympias and Alexander's son and successor and married Thessalonike probably forcefully in order to get a better claim for becoming the King of Macedon. Cassander then named a new city he founded on the site of Ancient Therma after his wife. Thessalonike seemed to have influence over her three sons, especially after Cassander died, however when the first born Philip died, the second son Antipater murdered his mother, most likely because she favoured her third son Alexander to at least share the throne with Antipater while she was also serving as regent. I mostly wrote all this to make a point that the last person who was impactful in Thessalonike's life was Alexander the Great.
Around 338 AD there was an Alexander Romance attributed to Pseudo-Callisthenes. This book was supposedly recounting the life and adventures of Alexander the Great, however it was highly fantastical and inaccurate and became what you would call a liberal historical novel of sorts. This is where the origins of the legend of Thessalonike were. (What if there is some connection to the surviving veneration of the Assyrian mermaid goddess in Macedonia, just a century earlier?) Alexander Romance was a huge success getting translating into 25 languages in pre-modern times and reaching as far as Malaysia and Mali. This is certainly what greatly assisted Alexander to become a legend and hero even amongst foreign nations, gaining even their own local national traits. The original Greek version was so loved amongst the Byzantine Greeks that it got multiple revised editions, including some in which it was recasted in poetic Medieval Greek vernacular. It was one of these copies that the Latin diplomat Leo the Archpriest found in Constantinople in the 10th century and translated it into Latin, which made the Romance very popular in the west too.
Okay, we talked about the duality that the sirens and the gorgons had attained at this point as well as the survival of the interest around them due to the Christian theology. In Byzantine Greek the meaning of the word gorgo (terrible, fearsome) was still fully understood. In fact, in Byzantine Greek there was the word γοργόνη (ghorghóni) which addressed a horrible woman. It is also reported in the local dialect of Amorgos island. It is thus most likely that the shift of Thessalonike as "a gorgon therefore a mermaid" happened at that time and perhaps especially in the copies in the Medieval Greek vernacular and it was due to all this mix of influences.
You see, Thessalonike is not described as just any mermaid or even just like a plain man-eating siren. She appears to have two forms or two personalities in her. She swims in the seas waiting to find a ship and ask the sailors whether Alexander is still alive. In this state she is beautiful and calm and pleasant in her manners, which resembles the romantic view of a mermaid or the initial seductive state of a siren. If the sailors confirm that Alexander lives and rules and conquers the world, she remains this way and sends good winds to help the ship travel to its destination quickly and safely. But when the unsuspecting sailors say "But, Lady, Alexander died long ago!" then she changes and becomes what the Byzantine Greeks would call "ghorghóni". Her power is way more immense than to just grab a dude and eat him. She becomes huge and terrible and with the power of her tail she causes enormous storm waves which break and sink the ship and kill all the sailors. For this reason she was probably engraved in people's perception as a terrible Gorgon.
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Here's the thing though: γοργώ (ghorghó) sounds an awful lot like another Greek word, γρήγορος (ghríghoros) which means "quick, fast". Those two are both ancient but etymologically unrelated. The fall of the Byzantine Empire and the annexation of the Greek lands by the Ottomans led to significant changes for the worse in the number of Greek people who had easy access to education and particularly education in relation to their heritage beyond this of the religion. Only select few that kept their riches or Greeks who then fled to the west had easy access to these things. In short, with more limited access to older forms of Greek or old Greek literature eventually γοργός (ghorghós) changed into a variant of γρήγορος (ghríghoros) = fast and its actual meaning of fearsome, terrible was forgotten. In these circumstances, the word γοργόνα (ghorghóna) which was used to address Thessalonike was now perhaps perceived as meaning something in the likes of "swift, agile and lithe" and it became associated with the positive mermaid form of hers. Eventually, the word γοργόνα was established as a generic term for the mermaid just like σειρήνα.
This happened because the legend of Thessalonike as a mermaid as well as the entirety of the Alexander Romance remained popular in the Ottoman period. The Byzantine copies were still circulating in the Greek population and in 1680 a Modern Greek version was printed with the name Φυλλάδα του Μεγαλέξανδρου (loosely translated to "Papers about Alexander the Great"). The book was written in the colloquial Demotic vernacular and it could be read by everyone (who knew how to read). This is how these stories spread and became oral tradition and folk tales. The romantisation of Alexander's character and by extension Alexander himself became a point of reference for their historical origins for both the Byzantine and the Modern Greeks.
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The modern book from 1680 (yeah that's modern)
The true reason Thessalonike's legend remained so popular was not due to Thessalonike herself. Thessalonike was a minor historical figure for the most part and her interaction with Alexander was minimal. Some historians believe it was her son Alexander she was grieving for in the original legend but then he was confused with his much more famous uncle. I downright disagree. I believe the reason Pseudo-Callisthenes or the unknown authors and / or all these revisions imagined Thessalonike as the one grieving and wreaking havoc for Alexander was because of her being the name-giver to the city of Thessaloniki which by the ending of the Roman period and the beginning of the Byzantine period became very prosperous and gained a lot of power. Thessaloniki was so loved by Byzantine Greeks that it was considered as the Συμβασιλεύουσα (symvasilévusa) = co-ruler city of Constantinople. Thessaloniki remains the most loved city for the Modern Greeks too. After the unification of Macedonia and its largest city Thessaloniki to the already independent from the Ottomans south and central Greece, Thessaloniki became the "Συμπρωτεύουσα" (symprotévusa), the co-capital to Athens. It is also called Capital or Nymph / Bride of the North. Greeks damn sure love that city. This was a folk legend which connected the ever loved Greek city to a distant past.
Furthermore, the legend explores a theme that resonates deeply in the hearts of the Greeks across millenias. The allure and the danger of being a sailor, of travelling in the seas. The Greeks have always been seafarers. Losing loved ones to seas far away is a very common theme of Greek folk songs. The folk felt represented in this legend with the ghorghona representing the unpredictability of the sea. But this is also how Greeks developed an understanding for this dual creature, beautiful yet ruthless, yet also melancholic and temperamental. The ghorghona became a familiar concept, representing their loved sea and their loved city and their loved symbol of old glories (Alexander). Inevitably, she was "forgiven" of her fearsome qualities and the ghorghona became the beautiful mermaid of the Greek seas that you have to know how to talk to and earn her favor.
The ghorghona became a loved symbol of Greek folklore and she is featured in numerous modern Greek poems, artworks, short stories etc
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Modern art by the prolific cartoonist and painter Bost (Chrysanthos Mentis Bostantzoglou, 1918 - 1995). All the national symbols are here: the Ghorghona as the beautiful mermaid, the sea, Alexander, the White Tower of Thessaloniki and the flags.
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"The ghorghóna as the captains of old told her story." Modern Greek folk artwork. Look how she eventually becomes a postive emblem of Greece.
Due to the tight connection of the sense of ethnic identity with the Greek Orthodox Christianity for Byzantine and Modern - frequently occupied - Greeks, the popularisation of the ghorghona the mermaid was reflected in the Greek Orthodoxy as well .
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Detail from a wooden templum in the Church of Saint Dionysius in Zakynthos (Zante) island.
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Detail from the Chruch of the Great Archangels, Tsagarada, Mount Pelion. This templum was probably completed in 1749.
And because this was not enough of a "how to make an Evangelical mad" I guess, you know how saints in Orthodoxy are venerated and they are often imagined as patrons of certain groups of people or certain qualities??? Well...
may I introduce you to Virgin Mary the Ghorghona?
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...who also became a novel?
Clearly, this is Mary imagined as Patron Saint of the sailors and those who travel in the seas.
In conclusion, there is not an exact moment in history that suddenly turned the gorgons into mermaids, however I tried to explain how in the long course of time there were many linguistic, cultural and religious points which ever so slowly contributed into changing the perception of the gorgon from an ancient, murderous, fearsome creature to a positive, beautiful (yet at times very dangerous) symbol of ethnic identity.
Sources:
Mermaid - Wikipedia
Atargatis - Wikipedia
Siren (mythology) - Wikipedia
The siren: a medieval identity crisis – Mittelalter
Physiologus - Wikipedia
Gorgons - Wikipedia
Thessalonike of Macedon - Wikipedia
Alexander Romance - Wikipedia
Η Γοργόνα Θεσσαλονίκη | Parallaxi Magazine
Φυλλάδα του Μεγαλέξανδρου - Βικιπαίδεια
Ο συμβολισμός της γοργόνας στη λαϊκή παράδοση της Ελλάδας μέσα από τη ποίηση και το τραγούδι
«Ζει ο βασιλιάς Αλέξανδρος;» Η γοργόνα και ο Μέγας Αλέξανδρος – ΧΩΡΑ ΤΟΥ ΑΧΩΡΗΤΟΥ
Ζει ο βασιλιάς Αλέξανδρος;
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sidyashchiy-na-plakhe · 22 hours ago
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I haven't heard of this musical, but I looooove Greek mythology.
HEYYY do you know what epic the musical is?? If so, have you drawn your interpretations of any of the characters??
YES I LOVE EPIC
I may or may not be working on a wof au animatic using a song from it
I’m really not comfortable drawing people yet because I have no idea what I’m doing, so the only art I’ve done of any characters so far are these doodles of Athena
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I have started reading the Odyssey though so I may well be drawing more of them
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annakacoyett · 14 hours ago
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憧憬 (doukei)
[v.]
definition: yearning for, longing.
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fem skk ancient greek AU.
(chuuya's a warrior nymph and osami's the heretic princess.)
(fem!dazai's name is dazai osami.)
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batgummy98 · 2 days ago
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my girlfriend has gotten me into epic the musical and its my new hyperfixation and personality now sorry
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crowancawcaw · 1 day ago
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Hear me out… What do you think about lonely avatar Odysseus?
We have the lost at sea, the dead friends, the trapped alone (with calypso but honestly I think he would have rather been alone) on an island for several years, the appearing through the fog, etc. etc.
I could see him being friends with Martin ngl
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mint-wreck · 2 days ago
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Odysseus' Keyblade
Here's the very first EPIC: the musical inspired keyblade that I've made. I don't know what to name it yet, I don't want to use "Warrior of the Mind" coz it feels too expected of a name if I use it. What do you guys think?
Anyway, I have plans to make more keyblades inspired from EPIC since I heard that Jay Herrans looooves Kingdom Hearts. It might take long though coz I also plan on making fan-Animatics for some of the songs of the musical.
I wouldn't call myself a Kingdom Hearts fan but I grew up with it through "Kingdom Hearts 2" and "Birth by Sleep" and they struck a chord that influenced me to become an artist as well. I even started to watch KH-related clips to push me more into drawing this keyblade, and I'm loving it.
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plutoarttv · 4 months ago
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prometheus: hot take,
the greek gods: no give that back
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mostly-funnytwittertweets · 6 months ago
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kimiko24 · 1 month ago
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DOG MOSAICS (From Italy and Greece ××)
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tarantula-hawk-wasp · 2 months ago
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mycenaean miku
she was there singing on the beaches of llion. homer copied the catalogue of ships from her.
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msbunnat · 2 months ago
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🦉 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒂𝒓𝒕 𝒐𝒇 𝒘𝒂𝒓 𝒅𝒐𝒆𝒔 𝒏𝒐𝒕 𝒔𝒂𝒗𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒐𝒍𝒅𝒊𝒆𝒓
Here is my Atena design!
I'm thinking of making her a little more muscular, but slender, as if she represented the agility of battles. She rarely smiles, like a strict teacher who wants the best for you and one way or another, she will always be remembered. Also her snakes re a refference to medusa, as they represent each other (as my friend told me and I love to see like that).
And! Apollo and Athena after 'God Games' in EPIC - the musical and she gets this lightning scar.
Zeus beat the crap out of her, but he would never kill Athena!! And I like that it suits him to be so strict with her, at least for me, she is the oldest daughter and the one who suffers the most pressure. What I dont like... its that in Epic, Zeus changed to look worse again!! ;w; really, he was way chill about releasing Odisseus and just wanted to not upset Poseidon in the process....
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