#bugshcblog

[anghraine]

back again with a borgia question, because a day may come where showtime's the Borgias has no hold on me, but it is not this day; if you could put the Borgias into Greek Mythology archetypes, who would you put where? Rodrigo is obv the archetypal Zeus (to an insane degree) but I feel there's more subtlety than the shortcut my brain wants to make for Lucrezia going the maiden to mother pipeline and Cesare being a hot-blooded Ares type (more fitting of Juan surely?)

Haha, hello!

Rodrigo is definitely the Zeus of the family, I agree. Cesare, IMO, is warlike in a more calculating way—a strategist, a planner, someone who can take on different personas as suits the occasion, yet capable of acting out of fury when the situation allows. I have to pick Athena (strange as a virgin goddess is for him!).

My kneejerk Lucrezia association is with Artemis—graceful, skilled, and, in her way, relentless. And the Orion stories seem apropos for her love interests, lol. I think she might convince herself she wants to be a Hestia or even Aphrodite, but it's not actually true. You could probably also make a decent argument for Persephone.

Juan is more of an Ares than Cesare, I agree, but ... hmm, there's something so specific about his particular kind of desperation. I'm not quite sure tbh—I'd probably veer away from the Olympians for him.

[anghraine]

Hi! Back again with another Borgia q lol. I want to read a good introduction into the Borgias, one that shows the characters of the family as well as an insight into medieval Italy and Vatican politics without that being too laborious. I've come across the Borgias by G. Meyer, have you read it? What would you recommend?

Hello! I do enjoy getting Borgias asks, so no problem :)

Hmm, I do own Meyer's The Borgias, and it does have a lot of interesting information presented in an engaging way, but it's so heavily filtered through his pro-Alexander VI/Rodrigo bias that I can't fully recommend it. (I think the interpretations of both Cesare and Lucrezia are pretty bad, for instance.)

One of the difficulties with Borgia historiography (at least when I was reading a lot of it) is that it tends to be very obvious which Borgia the historian favors, with the others sidelined or worse. OTOH history texts involving the Borgias but not about them tend to fall back on dubious myths (Paul Strathern's study of Machiavelli, Cesare, and Leonardo unfortunately does this, for instance). So it's difficult to fully recommend any singular text. I myself started with the comically anti-Borgia biography of Lucrezia by Gregorovius, then read the comically pro-Borgia biography of Cesare by Rafael Sabatini, then kept going.

I did personally like Sarah Bradford's biography of Lucrezia—Bradford's definitely pro-Borgia, but not to the extreme of Sabatini, and she seems interested in multiple Borgias and not in dismissing or villainizing the entire rest of the family. And there's a lot of contextual material that helps make it readable (at least as I recall—I haven't read it for a number of years now). But if you go in knowing that it does have its slant, it's an interesting read.

[anghraine]

SINCERE apologies for sliding into your ask box with the most randomest of questions, but, here we go - enneagram, Borgias? Sweet lady Lucrezia has to be a 2 - but I am stumped between 3 and 8 for Cesare. What do you think?

Oh, no problem! I love Borgias questions :)

Interesting question. I wouldn't pick Type 2 for Lucrezia, myself, at least not primarily—but I see her as a harder, shrewder, less sweet person than a lot of people do. I think she's a Type 3 (though with a 2-wing) and Cesare is a Type 8.

As a bonus, the description of the Type 3-Type 8 dynamic here seems pretty spot on to me, honestly!