Almost A Week Of School Left I Am Doing It For Him.

thinking about heroes wishing to switch places........

[...] when Odysseus meets the shade of Achilles, he addresses Achilles as "best of the Achaeans". But the Odyssey then has Achilles saying that he would rather be alive and the lowliest of serfs than to be dead and the kingliest of shades. [...] Achilles seems ready to trade places with Odysseus, whose safe homecoming will be marked by a painful transitional phase at the very lowest levels of the social order. The words of Achilles in the first nekuia are ironically conjuring up the glorious days of the Iliad when he had said: "I have lost a safe return home [nostos], but I will have unfailing glory [kleos]." (IX 413) The destiny of the Odyssey is that Odysseus shall have a nostos, 'safe return home'. From the retrospective vantage point of the Odyssey, Achilles would trade his kleos for a nostos. It is as if he now would trade an Iliad for an Odyssey. By contrast, at a moment when Odysseus is sure that he will perish in the stormy sea, he wishes that he had died at Troy: "...and then the Achaeans would have carried on my kleos." (v 308-311)

From Gregory Nagy's The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the hero in ancient Greek poetry (1979)

Etruscan mirror, 4th-3rd century BC.  This bronze mirror case shows Odysseus’s homecoming, namely him reuniting with Penelope - with his dog Argos in between the two.

i’ve seen some chatter regarding pro-war sentiment in rings of power. lotr was so clearly anti war, and people are claiming that is lost in rop. are we watching the same show?

when finrod goes to war, galadriel loses her best friend and brother.

when the southlanders go to war against the orcs, they end up slaughtering their own townsfolk.

when elendil sails to middle earth with miriel, he is sailing to the loss of his son and she her eyes. when she returned, her father was dead and her kingdom at a precipice.

when galadriel takes ups arms with halbrand, she ends up bringing the destruction of the southlands and advances sauron’s own plans.

war touches even the harfoots, who come to arrive to their haven to find the stones of eruption have destroyed their grove and all their food and hope for the next season.

there is no glory in war here. there is only ruin, black orc-blood, and the ashes of mount doom. when the characters in rings of power go to war, they end up killing their own kin and causing a chain of events that cannot be undone.

ClassicsTober Day 5: Chiron

Everyone you raised.

Do you have any article related to the odyssey you'd reccommend as complementary to the source?

sorry i've been sitting on your ask for so long! i am not and never have been a classics student; i came across most of these articles incidentally or here on tumblr:

"the odysseys within the odyssey" by italo calvino

"a note on memory and reciprocity in homer's odyssey" by anita nikkanen

"penelope and the poetics of remembering" by melissa mueller

"a glossary of haunting" by eve tuck and c. ree (this is mostly about horror fiction and settler-colonialism but it has a gloss on the cyclops that i think everyone, certainly everyone american, should read)

silence in the land of logos by silvia montiglio chapter 8: "silence, ruse, and endurance: odysseus and beyond"

"the name of odysseus" by g.e. dimock, jr.

also ok it's very much not "good" but there's an article by w.b. stanford called "personal relationships" that just lists all his hot takes about the relationships in the odyssey for 25 pages. it reads just like scrolling the blog of a mutual twice removed. they let men publish ANYTHING in the 60s. i love this essay. i would read this essay out loud over discord right now if someone asked me.

watch out for this vase with young-looking hot Menelaus holding Diomedes, to prevent him from killing Achilles (who murdered Thersites who was Diomedes' cousin)

Meanwhile Agamemnon is depicted as older hot papa, very angry at Achilles like "kid, can you stop killing people and work on your anger issues???" - not like Mycenaean daddy could join him for the anger stuff...

and Phoenix like "not this angry kid killing people again" and Achilles giving zero f 🍆cks.

Athena to Penelope when Odysseus and her reunite:

some of willy pogany’s illustrations from padraic colum’s the adventures of odysseus and the tale of troy, 1918