#roman mythology – @yuutfa on Tumblr

yuutfa reblogged

hiddenlacuna

kawaiiwhitegirl

Anonymous asked:

How is that Persephone post wrong if you dont mind me asking?

kawaiiwhitegirl answered:

IM SO GLAD YOU ASKED!!!!

Okay so under the cut are pics of the original post just so we can keep track of what is being discussed. This is gonna be a long post and I hope that isn’t too off-putting! This is just a rly complex topic and I wanna explain my objections better than I did on the original post!

Okay so, admittedly I was being a little over the top with my initial comments here, but it’s because I wrote my undergraduate thesis on modern interpretations of the Rape of Persephone myth (which got published here) and it drives me up the fucking wall to see people treat Classical myth this way.

Because here’s the thing, there is nothing wrong with reinterpreting and retelling ancient myths to suit modern contexts. In the academic world this is known as Reception Studies and it’s really fucking cool!! I am 100% supportive of Reception!! But people who participate in Reception need to be honest about it. You can’t claim that your modern, feminist retelling of a myth is accurate to the ancient source material, because that will give your audience an inaccurate understanding of the past. Ancient Greece was incredibly misogynistic and Persephone was not an empowered female character, and here’s why!

So, OP dustypurple says that their version of the myth is the “real, original version of it,” and likewise thealienonbroadway also claims that “this is the original, before it was altered to scare Greek/Roman girls into submission.” So here’s the thing, there was no original, “pre-Greek/Roman” version of this myth, BC THIS MYTH IS INHERENTLY GREEK IN ORIGIN.

The earliest recorded source we have for the Rape of Persephone myth is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (which you can read here). Here’s a summary of this Greek hymn from my thesis:

And here’s a discussion of the traditional Roman version by Ovid (read full text here):

aaaaaaand here’s a section explaining why the textual evidence from these two versions of the myth strongly indicates that Persephone was raped and not just kidnapped.

So, yeah, I hope those summaries show why OP’s version of the myth is definitely not the “real, original version” of the myth. Persephone did not choose to go to the Underworld, Hades was not a passive figure in this myth, and Demeter was not being unreasonable (”throwing the temper tantrum of the millennium”) when she demanded the safe return of her kidnapped and raped daughter.

So just to get a few things straight, the ancient Greek and Roman versions of the Rape of Persephone myth probably were meant to scare women into submission through the way Persephone is raped and Demeter is forced to compromise with Zeus. But there’s no secret, “original” feminist version of this myth where Persephone chose Hades and the Underworld.

Now, that doesn’t mean that modern people can’t rewrite this myth and ship these characters however they want. But to claim that their version of the Rape of Persephone is somehow the ~original~ and to imply that anyone who tells the “version of the myth that’s commonly known and taught” is sexist because they’re ignoring the ~true feminist version~ is utter bullshit.

#rape #greek mythology #roman mythology #Persephone #anthropology #neat o A o

yuutfa reblogged

watsonsstripeyjumper

tequilakisses-and-bigfootcuddles

spinatlasagne.soup.io

mildlyamused

oh man wouldn’t it be GREAT if Hollywood gave Medusa the movie treatment and showed her as the tragic wronged hero she was? Just chillin’ out as a just a ordinary woman until Poseidon raped her in Athena’s temple and instead of being like “DUDE UNCLE NO WTF ARE YOU DOING?!” and smiting him, Athena punished the victim and turned her into a monster with snakes for hair…only wait Athena isn’t an idiot and how could she even punish the god of the sea? But she could give Medusa the power to make sure no man ever laid a goddamn finger on her again. Until Perseus traipsed in and fucked it all up. Way to go idiot. I bet if you’d just asked nicely she might have turned shit to stone for you.

renlyslittlerose

Okay I am seeing this type of commentary frequently, and I have to say something about this because it has been bothering me.

In the original myth, the rape/transformation of Medusa never happened. This was added in by the Romans— Ovid, specifically, who changed the myth in his Metamorphoses that was written in 8 CE. The entire theme of these tales was the transformation of mostly women who were perused by the gods in some form or another (some men were also transformed throughout the series, such as Hyacinth.) Prior to this, during Archaic Greek times and Classical antiquity, Medusa was never a beautiful maid who was transformed by Athena (and I am gonna get into the whole situation with Athena being a feminist figure in a second.) She was a gorgon born from two underworld monsters, Ceto and Phorcys. This story is outlined in Hesiod’s Theogony which is sort of the accepted canon of Greek creation myths. It was in the 5th century that she was shown by artists to be beautiful but still a monster, and it wasn’t until Ovid showed up that she was the human maid who was raped by Poseidon. Also, many Greeks and Romans read Ovid’s version of the tale as Athena being outraged at Medusa for having been raped in her temple— it was a punishment, not some mercy shown to her.

Because guess what— Athena was a grade-A asshole just like her father, who often sided with men rather than women. In fact, she saw herself as a man and not as a woman. Physically, yes she was a woman, but mentally, because she came from Zeus’ head and was not born of any woman, she considered herself male in all respects. Therefore, her intelligence and strength was indicative of her masculine side. This is all explained in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, in which Athena as a judge, ends up siding with Orestes when it came to the murder of his mother, Clytemnestra. She stated she sympathized with Orestes because he was a man, and she would ‘defer to all things’ as her father would. Athena was never seen by the Greeks (and to some extent the Romans) as a strong female figure. She was a man in thought and in action, female only in her figure.

So the original story of Medusa was that she was a monster— born of monsters and resided on earth to be defeated by a Greek demigod who goes by the name Perseus. Had Athena really been ‘protecting’ Medusa, she’d not have given Perseus a mirrored shield, and she wouldn’t have placed Medusa’s head on her shield after Perseus cut it off. The Greeks and Romans did not see her as a person in which to empathize with. I’m all fine and good with people in literature classes reading this myth through a feminist lens, but I see a lot of these posts on Medusa that come off as historical. Only trouble is, they see things through this modern view when you need to look at it through the perspective of the ancients— from the view of those who wrote it and who their intended audience was. And I think both sides of the myth should be told; the original and the changes Ovid made. Don’t just explain one side of the story. There were multiple sides and changes and adaptations, and they should both be discussed and examined.

Hail classicists quoting sources.

#greek mythology #gif #a line #roman mythology