The Oxyrhynchus papyri are innumerable papyri fragments found in the ancient rubbish heaps of Oxyrhynchus. This is what one of our cats is named after. We call him Plox for short (a combination of Oxyrhynchus and ‚plort‘ because the first time we saw him he did a really sloppy poo and trod in it, and i was playing Farm Rancher at the time.
The fragments from Oxyrhynchus Are still being pieces together, translated, and published, and probably will be for at least another century. They were discovered around the start of the 20th Century.
*zeus voice* i love all my children equally! ares, athena, and *looks at smudged writing on hand* hepatitis
Hahaha that’s funny cause Zeus hated his son Hephestus from birth and threw him off Mount Olympus, crippling the God as a baby. However later on, Hephestus made the thrones of Olympus for the gods and created Zeus’s lightning bolts, establishing himself as the God of fire and blacksmithing; Zeus then gave Hephestus the goddess of love, sex, and beauty Aphrodite. Greek Myth 101
A) conflicting accounts. Sometimes it’s Hera who throws Hephaistos from Olympos. B) conflicting accounts. Hephaistos is not always a child of Zeus. Sometimes he is a child of Hera only. C) conflicting accounts. Sometimes Hephaistos is thrown from Olympos precisely because he is “crippled”. D) conflicting accounts. Hephaistos does not always marry Aphrodite, but I know of no version in which she is “given to him” *because* he made stuff for the gods. E) According to Hesiod, it is the Cylopes that make Zeus thunderbolt. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of an account where it is Hephaistos who does this. This is not to say that there are none, but that they are certainly in the minority.
Greek myth 101 indeed.
Bonus:Iliad 5. 890: Zeus tells Ares that of all the gods that hold Olympos, he hates Ares the most. Personally, I love this line because it kind of says that he hates them all, and just hates Ares more than the rest of them. And I think that’s just beautiful.
Sometimes I feel like my classics education has been radically different to everyone else’s on tumblr:
- I barely did any Catullus. - Ovid is definitely better than Vergil. - I actually really like Socrates/Plato? - I barely see any Aristophanes on my dash? Which is weird for a bunch of people so enamoured of dick jokes. I did a LOT more Aristophanes than I did Catullus. - fandom needs more Seneca. - where is the love for Greek drama in general? There is not enough. - Herodotus? Thucydides? Where are??? - definitely not enough Hesiod in this fandom. - basically just not enough Greek stuff. Genuinely this fandom seems top heavy on Latinists. I mean that both in the sense of people who prefer Roman stuff, and people who prefer Latin language above other modes of study. - shout out to the Hellenists studying Ancient Greek. I know you exist.
man, there’s something about material culture that really just…gets to me sometimes, y'know? especially the small stuff. not that i don’t think the statues and buildings and whatnot aren’t great, but something about the everyday objects fills me with a fondness i can’t describe. like i’ll look at a bracelet and think, this might’ve been someone’s favorite piece of jewelry. maybe this little animal figurine was a child’s beloved toy. someone devoted this votive statuette to a god in thanks for curing their spouse’s illness.
they’re objects that, in the eyes of the people that made them, might not have been all that special. but they’re also some of the most human objects, and that makes them all the more valuable.
I’m here for “this might’ve been someone’s favorite piece of jewelry,” and I raise you what if it was the bracelet they kept running across in the drawer and saying “oh I need to wear this more, it’s so pretty,” but they always forget.
Despite the assertions of certain scholars, there is little evidence of heteroeroticism in Archaic Greece. Meager references may perhaps be found in the Iliad. While the epic is famous for the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus and its role in turning the tide of the Trojan War, Helen and Paris, commonly interpreted by modern readers as friends, may provide a parallel to these famous lovers. Instrumental to Helen’s escape to Troy with Paris was Aphrodite, whose erotic connotations are well known from Sappho’s poetry. It could be argued, however shocking it may be to our modern sensibilities, that Paris and Helen’s love was of a similar nature. Nevertheless, other possible mentions of “straight” people (I use quotation marks as such an identity did not exist in Ancient Greece) remain debatable. There is no evidence that Hector and Andromache’s love was anything but platonic; the intimacy of their exchange in Book 6 should not be taken as heteroerotic, as declarations of strong affection between friends were common in ancient times. Neither is their marriage proof of institutionalised different-sex unions based on attraction. It is well known that most marriages were concluded for practical reasons, and romantic feelings rarely, if ever, entered the picture. As such, the question of whether “straight” people existed in Archaic Greece cannot be conclusively answered.
“average roman poet demands 3 kisses a year" factoid actualy just statistical error. average roman poet demands 0 kisses per year. Gaius Valerius Catullus, who lives in Verona & demands over 3,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
If I was a Hellene living in the Heroic Age I would simply leave Thebes and never return. RIP to Semele, Pentheus, Agave, Cadmus, Autonoe, Laius, Jocasta, Oedipus, Amphiaraus, Capaneus, Hippomedon, Parthenopeus, Eteocles (not to be confused with Eteoclus), Tydeus, Mecisteus, Polynices, Eteoclus (not to be confused with Eteocles), Antigone, Haemon, and Creon, but I’m different.
