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quote:Originally posted by Cavatina:
Originally posted by Haus:
That's an certainly an interesting take on Helen, Haus...Historically IRL, also, weren't Helen and her brothers worshipped as gods in Sparta?
Sort of - IIRC the Dioscuri had cults across Greece, whilst Helen seems to have had some sort of cult presence in the Peloponnesus.
A problem for your interpretation though is that, as Homer depicts her in The Iliad, Helen is so guilt-stricken in her consciousness of all the harm that she ('bitch' and 'hateful creature' as she calls herself) has caused, that she seems entirely human. She may have been capriciously goddess-like initially, when simply pursuing her own whims and desires in regard to Paris, but in Troy - in her conversation with Priam (who interestingly exonerates her from blame), in her slighting words to Paris, and again in her lament for Hektor - she is given a human complexity which I found quite surprising.
Oh, sure. Helen clearly isn't divine in the Iliad, but there are hints of of texts in which she is within it. The Iliad itself functions as intertext, or hypertext if you would prefer. And, like Achilles, Helen occasionally appears supernatural as a result of that. Difference being that Achilles sort of breaks through the text - his anger carries him through into a text where he actually *is* something inhuman.
For example, Miles Burrows in his poem, "Economics" takes the line of 5th century Thucydides that the Greeks fought the Trojans not over a woman but to extend their political and economic domination over the eastern Mediterranean world.
Indeed. I'm not great on history, but Schliemann's excavation, along with chronicles describing an attack by the "Sea Peoples" (I forget the Assyrian, but it sounds something like Danaan, IIRC), suggests a dating of somehwere in the 13th century for a major city controlling the Hellespont being destroyed by fire. Coincidence or magic? You decide.
Persephone - Most of this is from memory, although The Greek Mythology Page is a very useful crib. The Atreids' history is covered in the Epitome of Apollodorus, as is Troilus, by the way, Proclus' summaries of the Epic Cycle, the Odyssey, Aeschylus' Agamemnon and the Libation-Bearers (Choeiphoroi) and points south, and referred back to in Euripides' Electra.
That pretty much covers the major stuff, although Tantalus also crops up in Ovid's Metamorphoses IIRC, and there's almost certainly some reference to Pelops in Callimachus - there usually is, although in this case I am thinking of the wooing of Atalanta... |
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