#trojan women

[sarafangirlart]

I’m fine with taking creative liberties in adaptions but shifting the blame for Astyanax’s murder to Zeus instead of Odysseus (or at least Neoptolemus) has been disastrous to Trojan war discussions, bc now dumb ppl who have never read the Iliad or Odyssey or watched any adaptations of the Trojan women will think that big mean Zeus pressured poor boy dad Odysseus into killing Astyanax. As if Zeus didn’t favour Hector and was hesitant to destroy Troy.

[evilios]

— Euripides, Trojan Women (trans. by A. Shapiro)

[ladylazrus]

[katerinaaqu]

According to Dares the Phrygian Helen has a beauty mark between her brows! What do you know? Greeks possibly considered moles attractive from that time hehe 😜 but now I remember this amazing mycenaean female head from around 1300 BC

And now I imagine Helen when doing her makeup instead of painting the usual sun on her forehead she just draws the dots around her beauty mark instead! 🤔

[moony-2001]

You know who I’d like to see more stories about? Hecuba, the Queen of Troy. Her story is genuinely so tragic.

She loses her husband, all of her children, and her kingdom/title

She finds out that one of her daughters, Polyxena, was “claimed” by the ghost of Achilles’ as one of his spoils of war and she is brutally murdered at his tomb

Her other daughter, Cassandra, is claimed by Agamemnon the asshole as his “bride prize” and she’s carted off, never to be seen again

Her daughter-in-law is also shipped off to be a “bride prize”

Her grandson is thrown off a roof by Odysseus, the man who Hecuba becomes the “prize” of

As she sets off for Ithaca, she finds out that the man who was supposed to be keeping guard over her last remaining son, Polydorus, has not only stolen the riches meant for him, but that Polydorus had also been murdered

But despite that, in my mind, she gets the last laugh. Not only does she claw out the eyes of and (in some interpretations) kill the man who killed her final son, she manages to be free from having to belong to Odysseus by turning into a dog and even the gods take pity on her.

Hecuba’s story is another wonderful example of the rage of a bereaved mother and the incredibly sad realities of what happened to the losing side after a war.

[pelideswhore]

petition to change “written by a woman” into “written by euripides”

[quidam-sirenae]

Playing with this idea of making all the women from the Trojan war unpalatable to our modern tastes

[secretceremonials]

- just a girl x the women of the trojan war

[helpmeimblorboing]

First draft of the first chapter of Tearing Tides, a post-Trojan-War story following Andromache after the death of Helenus, being granted immortality and living through all the many epochs of humanity :

He was dead. His blood slid against the stone floors like thick, oily tar, dark and glimmering in the dim light of the room

The man who had married her was dead

The man who had taken his brother’s wife as though she were a prize, to be owned and inherited, was dead.

The Prophet of Troy was dead, throat split open with a knife in the dead of night, his oracular voice slipping out with the gushes of his crimson-black blood, never to be sounded again

Andromache stumbled back, half out of shock and half with the dizzying rush of absolute TRIUMPH. The bloodied knife slipped from her trembling fingers, a spill of ruined starlight against the dim light cast by the sputtering candle she held in her other hand

A loud clatter sounded out as it hit the ground blade-first, its sharp edge cutting a faint groove in the red-spattered gray of the stone

Helenus didn’t stir. His lips were parted, as though to speak, to wheedle and deceive like he had done so many times before. To Briseis. To her. To all the wives of the sons of Troy.

But no trace of whiny, nasal voice emerged. The prophet was gone, and all at once, a great weight seemed to lift off Andromache’s shoulders, so stunning in its relief that she nearly fell to her knees

But she was a warrior queen of Troy, no matter how much her pride may have been broken in the beds and throne rooms of these Achaeans. And a warrior queen she would remain. Right up to the end

Reaching down, she wrapped her fingers tentatively about the blood-slick knife hilt, lifting it up to stare into its sullied blade, blood dripping off it and rejoining the growing puddle of scarlet below with steady drip-drips that seemed loud as thunderclaps in the stillness of night

Hector, my love, I’m coming

She lifted it high, and prepared to drive it deep into her breast. The knife rose and fell, a glimmering streak of silver, and Andromache braced herself for the sharp stab of pain that was sure to come next

It never came. The broken splinters of the blade clattered against the earth. She stared at the empty, leather-bound hilt of what had once been a knife

Before she could pray, or protest, or do ANYTHING other than stare dumbly as her only hope of salvation was torn away from her, a surge of golden light filled the room. The twang of a bowstring being plucked. The sweet sound of a lyre.

Brilliant, burning eyes in the night. Immaculate lips moving with vindictive hate. A curse being cast from on high

Helenus was a prophet of Apollo. And Apollo, the god who had wrestled his own mortal half-brother to a standstill for insulting one of his seers, had always been protective of his priests

All at once, a sweet voice seems to sound through the room, music personified, with no source and no end, and yet, gratingly, shrilly, unnatural. Too perfect. Too unreal.

There will be no salvation for thee, murderess of my prophet. If death is what thee desire the most, then death will be what I take from thee, now and forever

The myth of Psyche. Mortal made god. The myth of Hyacinthus, and Narcissus, and Heracles. And now, the myth of Andromache - the mortal to whom eternity had come as a curse

She does not know what she did next. She only knows the mouthfeel of the curses spilling from her lips like the last breaths of the man lying beside her, the thudding force her knees impacting the stone floor, her chiton quickly growing wet and dark with her husband’s blood

She remembers the feel of godly magic within her, the way her nails seemed to refuse to find purchase in her flesh, no matter how hard, how desperately, she scratched at her skin.

How ironic, that she be inflicted with the blessing of the very man who had taken everything from her. Akhilleus’ ghost liked its twisted jokes, it seemed

She had heard that he, too, had mourned someone he loved, once. That his life being taken from him had been why he had taken her life from her

But he had died. He had had that, at least, if nothing else. Andromache didn’t even have that. The gods truly hated their Trojan children, it seemed

She stared down at the floor, at the scarlet threads of blood webbing through the cracks and crevices of the stone like the branches of some vast tree, ever-extending, ever-flowering

She had known a tree, once. It had grown in her garden, back in Troy. Her love had planted it for her, with her own two hands.

Ithacan Ulixes, he had told her, had made his wife a bed out of an olive tree. But not even he had GROWN her one.

So he had planted a laurel tree for her, intending to turn it into a bed when it grew old enough. Her love had always been the competitive kind

He had never gotten the chance. He had died before he could. And then, the tree burned. It seemed almost comedic that Ulixes be the one who had caused the fire that consumed it, like one of those Achaean tragedies her father used to tell her about on his knee

Her father, who had fallen when Akhilleus took Cilicia. Along with all her older brothers. That Achaean bastard had truly robbed her of everything, hadn’t he ?

And yet, it wasn’t his fault, either, was it ? Not even Agamemnon’s, if she really allowed herself to admit it. Eyes unclouded by her vengefulness and anger, she could admit that, if anything, the gods had been the ones to twist all of their fates into tangled, frayed threads, and that the blame for it could not, indeed, be laid at the feet of any one mortal

Andromache was not feeling particularly inclined to look past her vengefulness and hate right now, so she simply went back to hating Akhilleus. It seemed safer than hating the gods

Her mind whirred, cold and clinical, refusing to process the gravity of her fate. Andromache had always been a clever one - not just for a women, either, Hector had told her once, just clever. Cleverer than me, even - and all that cleverness was put to work now

Idly, she wondered if trying to climb Mount Olympus and attack Apollo would rid her of the curse, the better to smite her, or if she would just be, like Prometheus, sentenced to an eternity of torment

(Just to be noted - in this book, Andromache is a trans man. The reason I refer to him as she/her here is because he only really DISCOVERS that some time around the 1900s, though he does develop a curiosity about certain aspects of gender androgyny when he visits the Viking lands and learns of their gods)

[elektrascreaming]

something something about astanyx being called scamandrius and him being washed in the Scamander to heal the wounds on his dead body (Trojan Women, Euripides)

[minty-mythos]

This was the attendance question in my classic civ class today and there were some polarizing opinions, so:

[sarafangirlart]

“What if Odysseus adopts Astyanax 🥰” tf happens to Andromache in that timeline then?

[evilios]

— Euripides, Trojan Women (trans. by A. Shapiro)

[readinthedarkpod]

We're a movie podcast now.

B: The end of the film ends on Irene Papas's face. And so in this moment she's Clytemnestra, she knows of the big, like, terrible lie and crime that her husband has committed by sacrificing their daughter. And it is like, by far, the best moment of acting ever. Because you can see on her whole face that she's planning Agamemnon's murder when he returns home from the war ten years later.

Iphigenia (1977) dir. Michael Cacoyannis

Click here to find out where you can listen to the full episode (spoiler alert: anywhere podcasts are!)

[katerinaaqu]

Was Helen in Troy for 20 years?

This is a very good question given how sources often contradict themselves as well. Sorry if this gets long! There is a passage in Homer's Iliad in rhapsody 24 during the funeral of Hector or the preparation of it. Helen joins the mourning women and says this:

"Hector, most beloved to my heart than any of my husband's brothers, for the godlike Alexander is my husband, who led me to Troy; if only I had died then! For it is the twentieth year since when I have come here and left my homeland"

(Translation by me)

So it seems like here Helen implies that she was 20 years in Troy. Other sources seem to disagree with this characterization and adapt a more moderate timeline; Helen was traveling around a year with Paris before settling to Troy plus the 10 years of war.

Unlike the Odyssey that has a clear-cut timeline that speaks about 20 years and counting, the Iliad is not as clean as that. Helen doesn't seem to imply anywhere else inside the poem that she was more than the years that the siege of Troy takes place.

Now Homer could indeed be literal and speak of an aparent 10 year preparation between Helen's taking to Troy and Hector's funeral and negotiations and such and there seems to be a record for a first gathering of the fleet before Aulis where the fleet suffered a huge loss from the winds. However one needs to note as well how Iliad doesn't take place at the 10th year of war but somewhere at the end of the 9th and the beginning of the 10th. So there seems to be one year left to be filled up. Now of course one could count the year where Helen roams about with Paris but there seems to be an interesting thought here; that Homeric texts used the term "20" here as to imply a very long time.

The term "20 years" here could be more equivalent to what we say nowadays "it took eons to do this" or "it took me forever" or "one eternity later". It is possible that Helen is not being literal here but implying she has been a very long time in there. I tend to side with this version more for many reasons; timeline that includes 10 years extra doesn't make much sense. It could imply that the characters involved in it are way above their 40s and that doesn't seem the case. Helen and Menelaus were ellegedly married for 10 years in Sparta. Even if Helen was married at 15 that doesn't seem to be logical to assume that she would be 25 when following Paris and 45 by the end of the war. That would make Menelaus over 50 at the end of the war, Odysseus probably way over 60 and Nestor like way over 70 if not over 80. Not to mention the few years that Menelaus needed to come back to his homeland and his shipwreck in Egypt. That would make him way over his 60s in the Odyssey and that doesn't seem to be the case from his descriptions (he ain't described as being old as opposing to Nestor in Iliad) As a timeline seems to be way too extended. What is more, it seems that preparing 10 years for a siege is not a very logical assumption either. Why would the Greeks wait so long to make a second ensemble? One or tops two years seems reasonable but 10? Why would they wait 10 more years to reach Troy? (of course here we have many local traditions that want to insert some heroes of the Trojan war roaming about the area before reaching Troy).

In one essence this timeline would be way too unreasonably extended even for mythology standards. So in my opinion when Helen says she was "20 years at Troy" she just implies "it has been a lifetime ago since I came here" or "it has been so long since I came here!"

But you can of course interpret it literally if you want. I hope that helps!

[moony-2001]

WIP that I probably won’t finish