Were there gay scenes in the illiad
First things first, I need to apologise for how late this is. It’s about eleven months after time if I’m honest. But I think we can all relate to the fact that it has been A Year, and for me personally it’s been A Year on top of a load of personal life nonsense which – though things are vastly better than they were – still has debris that I must sift through. However, Queer as Folklore is a project I am really enjoying and wish to bring to you all on a more regular basis, so once a month, there will be a new one (here I am holding myself to account and I hope you will too). Huge thanks to Rural Gothic with The Folklore Podcast and 207 Press for having me as part of their Queer Horror conference, it inspired and motivated me more than I could ever express. You can get access to all the excellent talks that weekend through: https://twitter.com/ruralgothic
Now, without further ado, Queer as Folklore is back! Spoilers for the Iliad and its modern adaptations The Song of Achilles and The Silence of the Girls, but frankly, it’s a 2000 year vintage poem that still influences our narratives today so… how spoilery those spoilers really are remains to be seen.
A few nights ago I finished re
Goodreads
Summary: The Song of Achilles is a book written by Madeline Miller and is the story of Achilles and Patroclus’ relationship. The book is written in first person from Patroclus’ signal of view. In the book we are told more about the background of Patroclus, how Patroclus and Achilles met, their development by Chiron, and the Trojan war. It is similar in setting to the Iliad and the Odyssey. The gods and dude conspire and battle together and in the end there is always tragedy.
My take: The guide is beautifully written. Ms. Miller is an exceptional scribe. Her way of describing what is happening makes the scenes in my head so much more detailed. Her description of the gods was also very well done. I could view Thetis, Apollo and Chiron so clearly I had to stop several times to soak in the visions. The story was also very entertaining and all the characters involved in the book were very well described and developed. The issue I mostly had with this novel was the story line, especially towards the end.
The first stage of the manual tells us about Patroclus and his hardships, and when he is exiled he finally meets Achilles and they develop a sturdy friendship.
And neither was Achilles.
I contain heard several times now someone assert that Patrokles and Achilles were not merely good friends, or cousins, as depicted in Troy (2004). It has become somewhat popular to say that the cherish that Achilles demonstrates for Patrokles implies a sexual relationship, one which seems to dovetail with a later Greek proclivity for homosexual relationships of the kind championed in Plato’s Symposium.
But this position is — to borrow from Wolfgang Pauli — not even wrong. It is classically unfalsifiable, but the assertion grossly underestimates the depth of what Homer is doing in the story, and takes a superficial and crassly literal reading of a affair that extends beyond individual people.
To explain why this theory is both false and yet superficially plausible, one must understand the etymology of the name “Patrokles” — especially in the context of the Iliad — and juxtapose it with a sub-narrative presented within the story. In Manual IX, Achilles — having withdrawn from the fighting — is approached by an old man named Phoenix, along with Ajax and Odysseus. Phoenix bids to persuade Ac
The Iliad is the archetypal war story. Over nearly 16,000 lines and 24 books it hones in with a laser-like concentrate on the events that bring the Trojan War to a close. There’s a lot of stabbing and a lot of blood (pretty much every character gets to depart “on the page”), and a lot of people lamenting the awfulness of war while acting otherwise. But putting all that aside, there’s that age-old question: is it gay?
It might surprise people coming to the Iliad from the film Troy to find that the poem doesn’t start with the Greek princess Helen entity stolen away by the Trojan prince Paris. Although this is the event that “launches a thousand ships”, by the day the poem starts the fighting has been going on for nearly ten years. It’s reached a stalemate, and everyone is getting bored, particularly the gods who watch from Olympus and occasionally swoop down to meddle in the fighting. The gods are very important in The Iliad; the war is essentially the finding of a domestic spat between Zeus and his wife Hera. All the other gods have had to choose sides.
When the Iliad opens, the Greek king Agamemnon has had to return a slave girl to her father, so he poaches the girl, Briseis
Q.: Do the Greek myths really matter in our current world of cutting-edge technology and tenuous global politics?
A.: It can be a cliché to phone a story timeless. But the stories of ancient Greece—the Iliad foremost among them—are exactly what this cliché was made for. To borrow Ben Jonson, they are not “of an age, but for all time.” Human character and its attendant folly, passion, celebration and generosity has not changed in the past three thousand years, and is always relevant. And especially at this fractured and shifting historical moment, I think people are looking support to the past for insight. These stories have endured this long, moving generation after generation of readers—they must, still, have something important to reveal us about ourselves. Every day on the front page of the newspaper is an Iliad of woes—from the self-serving Agamemnons to the manipulative, double-speaking Odysseuses, from the senseless loss of life in war to the vicious treatment of the conquered. It is all there, in Homer too: our past, present and future, inspiration and condemnation both.
I would also append , more specifically, that I think the culture is ready for the gentle of love story that t