☼ ☼ ☼

It does not justify their actions and in a culture and period full of war and suffering

for a tragedy the iliad is pretty funny. compiled some of my favorite things about it (not in chronological order)

- patroclus barely speaks for most of the book but EVERYBODY loves him. like he’s literally the entire greek camp’s precious meow meow. the ORIGINAL sweet little meow meow. even the GODS are sad and feel bad when he dies. even HOMER loves patroclus, always calling him “faultless patroclus” “my patroclus” “gentle patroclus” “sweet patroclus” WE GET IT. achilles, briseis, menelaus, ajax, literally every member of the greek camp is down ATROCIOUS for patroclus all bc he’s just one Really Nice Dude. just one very Sweet and Polite Fella. one Extra Special Guy <3 his whole narrative purpose is simply to be everyone’s special little scrunkly

- in one of the MANY passages where achilles is lamenting about how sad it is that patroclus is dead he promises patroclus’ corpse that he will have many deep-bosomed trojan and dardanian women weep for him. he tells his dead buddy “i will get the absolute THICKEST hoes with the BIGGEST mommy milkers for your funeral” honestly? id be honored

- all the arguments escalate so quickly. an old man very politely appeals to agamemnon to pretty please give his daughter back and offers him a huge fortune for her and agamemnon calls him a crotchety old bitch and tells him he’ll fucking kill him if he ever sees him again

- that same old man is a priest of apollo. you know, the plague god? anyway priest calls in a favor and apollo curses the greeks with a plague

- to address this, achilles decides to resolve it by calling all the greeks together and passive aggressively going “HM! i WONDER what could have caused a PLAGUE! it’s almost like we OFFENDED the PLAGUE GOD somehow. now WHAT could WE (cough agamemnon) done to offend the PLAGUE GOD?????” all in front of agamemnon

- zeus spends most of the book desperately trying to keep the gods OUT of the war. then once he’s finally had enough he just calls them all together and says “go nuts” and then they do

- artemis talks shit on the battlefield so hera calls her a bitch, steals her bow, and beats her with it. artemis then goes back to zeus and cries

- polydamas says to hector “hey you killed patroclus and achilles is gonna be fucking pissed. we should probably go back to the city while we can” and hector calls him a bitch and tells him to stfu. achilles then chases them back to the city and hector decides to stay outside and get killed by achilles instead of going in with the rest of the army bc he didn’t wanna hear polydamas say “i told you so”

- diomedes is about to fight with a guy called glaucus but then they realize their ancestors were friends or something so they decide not to kill each other, and diomedes says “hey! why don’t we even trade armor! :) just as a show of friendship! :))” and glaucus is like “yeah sure!” and gives diomedes his really nice gold plated armor while glaucus gets diomedes’ shitty plain bronze armor

- achilles makes a bitchy comment to his horses about leaving patroclus to die and the horse momentarily gains the ability to talk just to tell achilles it wasn’t THEIR goddamn fault, tells achilles he’s gonna die soon, and then goes back to being a normal horse.

- zeus with his daughters: oh child ❤️ oh my dear ❤️ oh there there i didn’t really mean it ❤️ sweetie why don’t you go help the greeks?❤️

- zeus with his sons: “ares you fucking donkey”

- everyone calling paris a stupid coward bitch every time they see him. all of troy fucking hates him. hector fucking hates him. helen fucking hates him.

- paris getting dressed up in fancy armor and prancing to the front lines going “i’ll fight ANY of you greeks!” and menelaus (the guy whose wife he stole) goes “alright bet” and paris nearly pisses his pants and tries to hide but then his brother hector calls him a piece of shit and tells him he hopes he dies and makes him fight menelaus. menelaus promptly ROCKS HIS SHIT. literally starts dragging him by his helmet like a rag doll, would’ve killed him if aphrodite hadn’t teleported paris outta there (BOO)

The fact that all of these are dead accurate to the plot with zero exaggeration. OP, please provide more greatest Iliad hits 🙏😭

My boyfriend was showing me his cat and I leaned over to kiss the cat on his soft little baby head and he went "meow" and scrambled away because I'd been wearing my headphones and I accidentally jabbed him with the microphone.

And I said "Damn, this is exactly like in the Iliad"

#explanation: this references the scene where Hektor the prince of troy goes to his wife after a battle and leans in to kiss his son #(who is still a baby and being held in andromache's arms) #but his son cringes away in fear of his father's battle helmet #it's a gut wrenching scene about how war dehumanizes you and separates you from the people you love #this interpretation implies that being a gamer is analogous

dude you should have been at the club last night it was insane. the dj was playing the lament and funeral of hector from the iliad and everyone was beating their breasts and tearing open their garments. at the end we all built up a funeral pyre in the middle of the dance floor and set it aflame. we were all feeling the inherent human connection through millennia old poetry, it was wild

i will never stop thinking about this poem my greek professor showed us

[Image description: a poem by Elisa Gonzalez titled “After My Brother’s Death, I Reflect on the Iliad,” published in the New Yorker on April 18, 2020. She won the 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and is working on her first book.

The poem says:

The water cuts out while shampoo still clogs my hair. The nurse who swabs my nose hopes I don’t have the virus, it’s a bitch. The building across from the cemetery calls itself LIFE STORAGE.

My little brother was shot, I tell the barista who asks how things have been, and tip extra for her inconvenience. We speak only to the dead, someone tells me—to comfort, I assume, or inspire,

but I take it literally, as I am wont: even my shut up and fuck and let’s cook tonight, those are for you, Stephen. You won’t come to me in my dreams, so I must communicate by other avenues.

A friend sends an image from Cy Twombly’s “Fifty Days at Iliam” —a red bloom, the words “like a fire that consumes all before it”— and asks: Have you seen this? It’s at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

If I have, I can’t remember, though I did visit with you, when you were eleven or twelve, when you tripped silent alarm after silent alarm, skating out of each room

as guards jostled in, and I—though charged with keeping you from trouble—joined the game, and the whole time we never laughed, not till we were released into the grand air we couldn’t touch and could.

You are dead at twenty-two. As I rinse dishes, fumble for my keys, buy kale and radishes, in my ear Priam repeats, I have kissed the hand of the man who killed my son. Would I do that? I ask as I pass the store labelled SIGNS SIGNS.

I’ve studied the mug shot of the man who killed you; I can imagine his hands. Of course I would. Each finger, even. To hold your body again. And to resurrect you? Who knows what I am capable of.

If I were. Nights, I replay news footage: your blood on asphalt, sheen behind caution tape. Homer’s similes, I’ve been told, are holes cut in the cloth between the world of war and another, more peaceful world. On rereading, I find even there, a man kills his neighbor.

“Let Achilles cut me down, / as soon as I have taken my son into my arms and have satisfied my desire for grief”—this, my mind’s new refrain in the pharmacy queue, in the train’s rattling frame.

The same friend and I discuss a line by Zbigniew Herbert “where a distant fire is burning / like a page of the Iliad.” It’s nearly an ontological question, my friend says, the instability of reference:

The fires in the pages of the poem, the literal page set afire. We see double. You are the boy in the museum. You are the body consumed, ash.

Alone in a London museum, I saw a watercolor of twin flames, one black, one a gauzy red, only to learn the title is “Boats at Sea.” It’s like how sometimes I forget you’re gone. But it’s not like that, is it? Not at all. When in this world, similes carry us nowhere.

And now I see again the boy pelting through those galleries a boy not you, a flash of red, red, chasing, or being chased— Or did I invent him? Mischief companion. Brother. Listen to me

plead for your life though even in the dream I know you’re already dead. How do I insure my desire for grief is never satisfied? Was Priam’s ever? I tell my friend, I want the page itself to burn.

End image description]

Source

the cool thing about the iliad is that almost everyone in it is a horrible person and/or literal war criminal, so you get to judge characters EXCLUSIVELY by vibes. anyway i don’t blame paris for the trojan war but he IS a little shitheel and i want him out of my city

my favorite thing that hektor repeatedly tells paris is “thank god you’re pretty”

i’ve been laughing at this all morning

new tagline for the iliad: this dude really been thru it

>She doesn't know about the wine-dark sea

I can fix her.

iliad mini comics part 3: the thrilling conclusion!! (part 1/part 2)

these took a lot longer than expected, but i had fun and did lots of iliad art in the meantime :) stay tuned–I’m looking into producing a zine or poster for these!

more iliad stuff

more ancient studies comics

ancient greeks while listening to the catalog of ships in the iliad:

ancient greeks when they hear their hometown named in the catalog of ships:

Source

ok but helen and odysseus have SO much potential as a brotp. his lying/disguise skills + her vocal impression abilities? the chaos would be UNSTOPPABLE

concept: the scene in little iliad where odysseus sneaks into troy to find the palladium and helen recognizes him, but it’s shot exactly like the window reunion scene from doctor who

the little iliad is a lost epic so i’m just going to assume this is what happened :)

This is legitimately one of my favourite pairings.

— Achilles, Iliad Book 22 (via waroftheposes)

When you learned of the god of war, you thought he’d be tall and muscular and angry. When you were about to meet him, you braced yourself for the worst.

You weren’t quite expecting the short, scrawny, shy kid you ended up getting instead.

Olive skin, black hair, skinny, dirty face with pale lines where tears had sliced through the ash and dust. A white chiton dress and a threadbare shawl draped over her shoulders.

A pair of wings - huge, black vulture wings, far too large on her tiny body - were the only things that suggested she was divine.

The general shifted his weight from foot to foot. Obviously respect had to be given to gods, but… “Er - I’m sorry, I was invoking Ares? The god of war?”

The child god shrunk in on herself, and pulled the shawl over her shoulders. She muttered something. “Sorry?” the general asked.

“Ares is the god of slaughter,” the child god said in a slightly louder voice. “Not war.”

The general looked at the priest. The priest shrugged, clearly lost at sea. “Well,” the general said, “then maybe Athena? Goddess of tactics in war?”

“Tactics,” the child god repeated. “Not war.”

There was a long, ugly silence, as the huge vulture wings shifted with the whisper of brushing feathers. “My name is - was - Iphigenia. Daughter of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, commander of the Greeks who stormed the walls of Troy. When my father disgraced Artemis, and the winds of Greece would not blow her battleships to Troy, I was brought to Aulis. For my wedding, I was told. I was-”

She sobbed. Teardrops dribbled off her chin and fell to the temple floor. “I was fourteen. And then I was brought to the highest altar in Aulis, and - and then - and-”

Another sob. “I was fourteen,” she said.

The vulture wings draped over her, and she disappeared under the cloak of black feathers. When they parted, and when the child god looked up at the general, he fell backwards. Those eyes. Eyes he’d seen a thousand times in battle -

“I am the true spirit of war, general,” the child god said. “I am the goddess of bloodshed, of sacrifice, of the slaughter of innocents. I am invoked when men ravage, burn and pillage. I am invoked when mothers cry out, when sons die, when daughters are stolen. I hear it all, general. I have heard it all since the fall of Troy.”

The terrible wings opened up. The child god loomed over the fallen man, twenty, thirty feet tall. Somewhere, the priest was screaming. “How dare you call upon my name.”

Iphigenia

thanks I hate it

You Got a Friend In Horse 

YOU DO NOT HAVE A FRIEND IN HORSE