#The Argonaut

[dailycephalopods]

Daily Cephalopod #88

[mournfulroses]

George Seferis, translated by Rex Warner, from Poems translated from the Greek; "Argonauts,"

[atomic-chronoscaph]

Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

[theseventhveil1945]

JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963) Visual Effects by Ray Harryhausen Dir. Don Chaffey

[mouse-romance]

Just watched Jason and the Argonauts and holy shit

I really crave whimsical fantasy.

I feel that today everything is poisoned with irony and smugness, even high fantasy. Everything has to be cynical or "a parody of", and it kills the romance.

This is the most epic shit i've seen in years in a movie, and that saddens me.

[oldschoolfrp]

Jason and the Argonauts, Columbia Pictures, 1963, directed by Don Chaffey, starring Todd Armstrong and Douglas Wilmer -- but really starring the animated creations of Ray Harryhausen (born June 29, 1920)

[the-evil-clergyman]

The Golden Fleece by Herbert James Draper (1904)

[chernobog13]

Jason battles the Ray Harryhausen-animated hydra in the 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts.

[ilions-end]

do you think at the start of the trojan war all the greeks who were sons of argonauts (achilles, odysseus, diomedes, machaon, eumelus, both ajaxes, teucer, idomeneus, etc) would bond over it, but then they had to make a rule against mentioning the argonautica at all because nestor was actually there and just did NOT shut up about it when brought up

[hecates-corner]

I had an epiphany.

In “My Goodbye” from Epic - The Musical, Athena is referencing past heroes who she too abandoned, whether that was Jorge’s intention or not.

“This day, you sever your own head”

Perseus, who had slain Medusa

“This day, you cut the line”

Bellerophon, who was crippled/who died when he fell from the back of Pegasus, due to the crossing of the line of Olympus’s high heavens and the earth he wished to impress

“This day, you lost it all”

Jason, who’s wife, Medea, murdered his new wife, the woman’s father, and her very own children, and then he was forgotten

Consider this as my goodbye! This came to me in a dawning realization.

[illustratus]

The Argonaut by Moonlight by James Brereton

[dailycephalopods]

Paper Nautilus? Those boys are lovely and I feel like they're SO underrated

Daily Cephalopod #6

These are Argonauts! (Also nicknamed The Paper Nautilus)

To spread some Argonaut love, here's some cool facts!

The females grow much larger than males (about 8 times larger) and they produce a thin eggcase, or their "shell"

Females can mate and reproduce multiple times in their life, while the males only mate once and die shortly after

The males mate by removing their hectocotyl arm, which is then stored in the females eggcase!

The hectocotylus is the modified tentacle on male cepholpods that is used for mating and it was first discovered on an argonaut! (although it was originally misidentified as a parasitic worm attached to the mantle of the female it was discovered on)

The nickname 'Paper Nautilus' is quite misleading, because Argonauts are actually octopuses!

Argonauts have often been observed floating with/on salps, jellyfish, plant debris, driftwood, and even other argonauts at all stages of life!

Argonauts do not reside near the sea floor, they tend to drift closer to the surface and are the only known pelagic octopus!

Like many other octopuses, they have ink, they can change color, and they have venom!

[hlblng]

"Come, my heart, put on your armour" - Euripides' Medea

Medea sits on the porch of her house in Corinth after killing her children, in a short moment of contemplation, waiting for the arrival of Iason and her final triumph over him. She is the Deus ex Machina in her own play. She doesn't need a god to intervene on her behalf, she is half-god herself.

The Medea of Euripides is probably one of my favourite plays of all time with Medea being one of my favourite characters ever put on stage. Euripides is a master of the pyschological thriller and the portrait he paints of Medea the child-killer, Medea the witch, Medea the wronged woman, Medea the hated foreigner, is still so modern and so topical, even now almost 2500 years later.

[gingermintpepper]

In my Zeus bag today so I'm just gonna put it out there that exactly none of the great Ancient Greek warrior-heroes stayed loyal and faithful and completely monogamous and yet none of them have their greatness questioned nor do we question why they had the cultural prominence that they did and still do.

Jason, the brilliant leader of the Argo, got cold feet when it came to Medea - already put off by some of her magic and then exiled from his birthland because of her political ploys, he took Creusa to bed and fully intended on marrying her despite not properly dissolving things with Medea.

Theseus was a fierce warrior and an incredibly talented king but he had a horrible temper and was almost fatally weak to women. This is the man who got imprisoned in the Underworld for trying to get a friend laid, the man who started the whole Attic War because he couldn't keep his legs closed.

And we cannot at all forget Heracles for whom a not inconsiderable amount of his joy in life was loving people then losing the people around him that he loved. Wives, children, serving boys, mentors, Heracles had a list of lovers - male and female - long enough to rival some gods and even after completing his labours and coming down to the end of his life, he did not have one wife but three.

And y'know what, just because he's a cultural darling, I'll put Achilles up here too because that man was a Theseus type where he was fantastic at the thing he was born to do (that is, fight whereas Theseus' was to rule) but that was not enough to eclipse his horrid temper and his weakness to young pretty things. This is the man that killed two of Apollo's sons because they wouldn't let him hit - Tenes because he refused to let Achilles have his sister and Troilus who refused Achilles so vehemently that he ran into Apollo's temple to avoid him and still couldn't escape.

All four of these men are still celebrated as great heroes and men. All four of these men are given the dignity of nuance, of having their flaws treated as just that, flaws which enrich their character and can be used to discuss the wider cultural point of what truly makes a hero heroic. All four of these men still have their legacies respected.

Why can that same mindset not be applied to Zeus? Zeus, who was a warrior-king raised in seclusion apart from his family. Zeus who must have learned to embrace the violence of thunder for every time he cried as a babe, the Corybantes would bang their shields to hide the sound. Zeus learned to be great because being good would not see the universe's affairs in its order.

The wonderful thing about sympathy is that we never run out of it. There's no rule stopping us from being sympathetic to multiple plights at once, there's no law that necessitate things always exist on the good-evil binary. Yes, Zeus sentenced Prometheus to sufferation in Tartarus for what (to us) seems like a cruel reason. Prometheus only wanted to help humans! But when you think about Prometheus' actions from a king's perspective, the narrative is completely different: Prometheus stole divine knowledge and gifted it to humans after Zeus explicitly told him not to. And this was after Prometheus cheated all the gods out of a huge portion of wealth by having humans keep the best part of a sacrifice's meat while the gods must delight themselves with bones, fat and skin. Yes, Zeus gave Persephone away to Hades without consulting Demeter but what king consults a woman who is not his wife about the arrangement of his daughter's marriage to another king? Yes, Zeus breaks the marriage vows he set with Hera despite his love of her but what is the Master of Fate if not its staunchest slave?

The nuance is there. Even in his most bizarre actions, the nuance and logic and reason is there. The Ancient Greeks weren't a daft people, they worshipped Zeus as their primary god for a reason and they did not associate him with half the vices modern audiences take issue with. Zeus was a father, a visitor, a protector, a fair judge of character, a guide for the lost, the arbiter of revenge for those that had been wronged, a pillar of strength for those who needed it and a shield to protect those who made their home among the biting snakes. His children were reflections of him, extensions of his will who acted both as his mercy and as his retribution, his brothers and sisters deferred to him because he was wise as well as powerful. Zeus didn't become king by accident and it is a damn shame he does not get more respect.

[katharpy]

learned about argonauts

[ltwilliammowett]

'The Argonaught by Moonlight', by James Brereton (1954-)