#homer (the bard)

[sawbeaver]

<Iliad>

the details of the lyre part

[iamnotshazam]

having a blorbo in greek mythology and epics is like the ancient world version of realizing the tv show had a different writer for the one episode your critter was wildly out of character and everyone is like "oh that's so them!" ??? did we watch the same show? helen of troy/sparta is a slut no wait she is a perfect woman no no she is a flawed human being no hold on she's a woman making her way in a man's world wait no she is the archetypal victim no wait-

not coincidentally i am reading madeline miller's the song of achilles for the first time and odysseus just showed up halfway through and odysseus'ed across the page so hard he made me fall in love with him all over again. achilles/patroclus is some foundational tragic queer romance, yeah i respect that, but odysseus. the laughing snake that tricks you into forgetting he is always ready to bite. my man

i bet he is a tricky character to write well but as long as he falls somewhere on the wile e. coyote <--> bugs bunny spectrum he is probably in character. because his character is to be tricksily varied. is he just a dude trying to get home? is he a larger than life hero? a rat bastard nobody can trust? the one male in hellas with a working brain who doesn't listen only to his dick or his overinflated ego? a wifeguy (positive)? a wifeguy (negative)? athena's special boy in this generation (telemachus and orestes wiping their noses on their blankets still)? or her latest mortal hackeysack, legs blurring in a looney tunes run between zany schemes, just a bit faster than the other doomed shmucks? all are intensely valid interpretations and go all the way back to homer 2800 years ago. incredible.

someone in the book is making fun of odysseus for bragging about how much he likes the ship, fresh from ithaca!! penelope modeled for the figurehead!!! he gets to see her while they're apart!!!! and that's why i set the book down for a minute. hgn. hdmahflshsk. odysseus sweetie pie i hope you still like it twenty years from now. the ghosts of my middle school english notes defining "dramatic irony" scream in ecstasy from the great beyond

[cjbolan]

Imagine Odysseus ever met Cassandra while in Troy she could’ve sang “No Longer You” to him like this . Then Tiresias could sing his version as a reprise , ultimately driving Ody over the edge as he’s told the same prophecy twice.,,

[mythosblogging]

This month at Mythos we're thrilled to offer you something new as we got a chance to talk to singer-songwriter Joe Goodkin about his incredible album, The Blues of Achilles. The album retells the story of Homer's Iliad, from finish, to start! You can check out the interview above.

[unsightlythinker]

Demodocus, my beloved…

[lonewolflink]

.

[cashmere-caveman]

every time i see a quote from troy (2004) attributed to homer i get a twitch in my eye for the next three hours

worst offender by far is this quote, which, for the record is the second most liked "quote" from the iliad on goodreads

sure this sounds beautiful but it is literally said by brad pitt's achilles as he tries to convince his spoils-of-war slave girl/love interest briseis that maybe blasphemy is ok bc actually the gods dont care and also theyre jealous that humans can die

here is the og version of this quote from the script:

BRO! homer didn't write this, this was written by david benioff (yes, the game of thrones guy) and u literally can tell by the fact that it is normal human sentences w modern day grammar and vocabulary instead of. u know. centuries-old poetry!!! not a single hexameter in sight smh

in conclusion:

[yea-baiyi]

nice to see my wwx post was a hit with the tumblr girlies, i could talk about hua cheng as theseus but idk if y’all are ready for that conversation

[ehj3]

MALAPHOR IN ILION

“Nevertheless, heedless, blinded by frenzy, / We press right on and set the inauspicious / Monster inside the sacred fortress.” — Virgil, The Aeneid, Book 2 The original Trojan Horse was the coup de grace for a semi-mythical ten-year-long war in about 1200 BCE between a collection of Greek city-states and Troy, a fortified ancient city and now an archaeological site in Turkey The wooden horse…

[thoodleoo]

going to become a homeric bard but the only scenes of the epics that i learn to recite are the ones about characters' massive and powerful thighs

[writeywritey]

so

I'm reading up on the Iliad and the Odyssey and I've just learnt that they are written versions of stories Homer likely performed and sang- and that he was a bard more than a poet

and it's lil wild to me that Jay writing this musical is basically him returning the Odyssey to its original format

[dootznbootz]

This is how Penelope is first PHYSICALLY introduced in the Odyssey as it's when she first speaks.

(Fagles, Book 1)

This is how the other women whom Odysseus gets with (aka assaulted by) are first physically introduced:

(Fagles, Book 10)

(Fagles, Book 5)

The two goddesses are singing during their introduction while the woman he loves says to stop, granted at the bard but I just think it's interesting. I'm definitely thinking it wasn't on purpose by Homer but I wanted to point it out.

Penelope never needs to enchant/sing to Odysseus to "lure" and/or entice him because that's where he wants to be in the first place.

[gemsofgreece]

Homeric moment of empathy towards women

Once Patroclus has been grieved by Achilles and the rest of the soldiers, his body is carried to Achilles' tent, to be grieved by the women slaves there. Meanwhile, Achilles and Agamemnon reconcile, Agamemnon vows he has not touched Briseis and sends her back to Achilles. When Briseis enters the tent, despite technically belonging to the opposite side, she spontaneously weeps for him. She reminisces that Patroclus consoled her when Achilles killed her kin and was promising to her that he would convince Achilles to take her back to Phthia with him and marry her properly. She calls Patroclus "sweet".

This is a very informative excerpt for the early Archaic period or, even, the late Bronze Age if it's accurate to it. What would seem outrageous nowadays, seems to effectively console Briseis and give her hope. It would be crazy to consider marrying the killer of your kin with hope or receive it as consolation. However, we should remember the disadvantageous position of women at the time. Briseis had no family anymore, thanks to Achilles, and not a husband anymore, also thanks to Achilles. If Achilles left her behind before leaving for Greece, there were most likely only two possibilities for her: death or prostitution. This means that despite essentially being her enemy, Briseis depended on Achilles for her well-being and survival. Therefore it really made a difference that Patroclus promised her to talk Achilles into marrying her - thus improving her status drastically to being a queen consort of his.

But I found what follows even more interesting:

Translation in English:

"So she said, weeping, then the women were sorrowful, supposedly for Patroclus, but actually for their own woes."

We see how Homer (or the ancient rhapsodoi - bards anyway) acknowledges the face women are forced to put on in front of the repressive society and he acknowledges how they use this as an opportunity to freely release their own pain, contemplate their own problems, while justifiedly lacking in genuine regard for the soldiers they have to serve.

BTW irrelevant but I have said before how I prefer as faithful translations as possible, in all languages but even more so when it comes to interpretation of Ancient Greek into Modern, so here's a closer one by me, seperated with colours to make it easier for you to follow through:

Ancient Greek:

Ὣς ἔφατο κλαίουσ᾽, ἐπὶ δὲ στενάχοντο γυναῖκες, Πάτροκλον πρόφασιν, σφῶν δ᾽ αὐτῶν κήδε᾽ ἑκάστη.

Modern Greek:

Ούτως είπε κλαίουσ', έπειτα δε, στεναχωριόνταν οι γυναίκες, με τον Πάτροκλο πρόφαση, γι' αυτών τους κηδευμένους έκαστη.

[intermundia]

whenever they announce new star wars anthologies, on some level i am always thinking of the festivals in ancient greece that had poetry competitions, and you'd have a bunch of different bards coming into town and telling homeric stories. those rhapsodes would get to stand on stage and perform in front of an assembled crowd at a sanctioned community event, so their version of the story would have credibility and authority (unless they tell it 'wrong' enough that the audience doesn't like it). everybody who was there and heard the story now shares that story, so it's a common cultural token inside the community.

but there are of course hundreds and thousands of times that average people would tell homeric stories, while they were weaving, or around the campfire, or while on a ship, or any sort of small group. we know that at least some people would even roleplay as homeric figures in bed (looking @ you, alexander), and so would be telling stories just to and with their intimate partners. all of these private, inter-personal, non-authoritative stories are all homeric, but they're not the homer that survived, not the homer that was stamped with approval and given circulation by local authorities.

the question of who control the narrative of star wars is interesting when thinking about modern corporate, extractive intellectual property law. the corporation hosts the festival and ensures all the stories are based on a cohesive set of intellectual property assets. their relative authority is granted by being the stories that can generate profit, and so the 'real' ones, becoming circulated community tokens by virtue of this central authority. the corporation controls the bards that get on stage, and so controls the story that way.

but as a private citizen and fan of the star wars corpus writ large, i can listen to these stories and enjoy them, but they don't have the same authority to me that they might hold to other people. they're just telling one version of the story, with a louder mic and a bigger stage, but at this point imho they're no closer to homer (lucas in this case lol) than many amateur bards. if a rhapsode told a story about odysseus that had him doing something that you personally don't think odysseus would do, you can go on living, knowing that everyone else is familiar with the 'wrong' version, and tell it yourself, your way, to your friends.

so seeing new anthologies drop, i'm excited to go to the festival and see the bards tell the new stories and appreciate how those stories are nested inside a dense web of context and lore that adds more and more referential, inter-textual meaning. but if one of the stories feels like it doesn't 'fit' inside the mesh of star wars in my mind, i'm pretty comfy just letting it exist beside and around me, accepting that it's authoritative to most of the community, but not to me and my murmured stories at night lol

[ilions-end]

like man, i genuinely WISH i believed the iliad and odyssey was composed by this one singular amazing bard and i could have one of those homer busts on my shelf and look at it for inspiration like "homer is my GUY, shoutout to a real one" and that i was convinced that with enough work we could finally recreate the poems "like homer wrote them"

normies will ask me an innocent question about the author of a poem that means a lot to me and i don't enjoy complicating their lives with going into the homeric question and oral traditions and the mystery of when and how these were written down and how i see no reason to believe that there WASN'T at some point a really amazing bard named homer but the ancients loved attributing a LOT of works to that guy and personally i actually don't think the iliad and the odyssey as we know them were shaped by the same people at their crucial developmental stages but nonetheless there are some brilliant linguistic and narrative touches that speak to very strong and precise authorial intents

so instead i'm gonna start nodding my head and going "yep, homer's awesome! you should read the iliad"

[casthesixteenth]

I know everyone always likes to make the 'bard and sorcerer bullying the wizard because "Oh you had to study? Sucks to be you!"' joke, but honestly - as someone who studies music - bards are closer to wizards than people want to admit.

It takes years to master an instrument. In 5e DnD bards get 3 instrument proficiencies. In Bg3 bards have proficiency in ALL INSTRUMENTS! Not to mention the writing and understanding of songs and music in general, which is poetry and music theory, which is literally a whole other kind of language! Also the fact that bards aren't innate, they literally have colleges where they study!

And college of Lore, anyone! Where mechanically through study they learn spells that aren't related to their music at all. Bards learn history, and long epic poems and songs! In the real world aswell, historical figures like Homer told stories from their heads, and passed them on verbally.

Bards and wizards are so much more alike than we want to admit. Bards may have some innate casting ability, but they study and work at it.

Sorcerers are actually the odd ones out, because let's be honest, anyone can have latent magic if their ancestors were into the more magical races.