Well, my attempt to blog daily died a very quick and miserable death, but I am still going to try to purge in (web)print my deep-seated frustrations at the way people on AO3 frequently treat certain subjects in Greek mythology.
And today my topic is specifically in reaction to the hideous trend (which seems at this point to be present in almost all AO3 works dealing with the character) of claiming that Patroclos was a prince before being exiled for murder as a child.
This is wrong in every way, except the part about him being exiled.
Patroclos' father was never a king. Making him a king reveals multiple very deep errors.
Firstly, it means mistaking the kingdoms of the Late Bronze Age for the city-states of the Iron Age, in that at some point someone said "Well, gee, we don't know who the king of Opus was, so why not make it Patroclus' father?" Well, guess what? There was no king of Opus! You know why? Because Opus was the palatial center of Locris. (There is, in fact, no city named Locris. It is the name of the region/kingdom only. Thus making a character into the king of Opus is rather like making someone into the President of Washington DC or the Prime Minister of London.) The king there was Oileus. He is a very well established mythic character, and his son, the lesser Aias, was such an important character in the Trojan War that he caused the deaths of more of the Greek army than all the Trojans combined did.
Second, it misunderstands the role and nature of royalty in the culture. Exiled princes in the Greek Heroic Age did not become nobodies, mere attendants, as Patroclos did. Exiled princes typically ended up marrying a daughter of their host and then inheriting his kingdom (or at least part of it). This is how Peleus, Telamon, Teukros and many others came to their thrones, and how Jason would have become king of Corinth if the city hadn't been burned down, taking his prospective bride and her father along with it. Royal titles were not simply titles: royalty were believed to be naturally different and superior to the rest of the population. An exiled prince remained a prince. (And if you honestly think people have changed in this regard, look at how people react to the British royal family these days. I can't remember the last time I went to the grocery store and didn't see at least one article on the magazines at the checkout line about the royal family, esp. Prince Harry. And this country rejected the monarchy almost 250 years ago!) To have an exiled prince become nobody special means you don't understand the culture you're using as the setting of your story. (And if you doubt that Patroclos was considered a nobody among the nobility at the Trojan War, let me remind you that he did not have his own hut. He had to share with Achilles. Or rather, Achilles let him stay with him in his hut. If he had been important--as an exiled prince was by definition--he would have had his own hut. Teukros had his own hut, even though he was not only the son of an enslaved concubine, but the concubine in question was Trojan! (In fact, in all post-Homeric sources, she is specified to be King Priam's sister Hesione.))
The third point is more an assumption on my part regarding why people want to make him a prince, and I'm not sure if it comes from the fanfic authors or their solitary source for this mutant version. Because even without having read it, I know where they're getting this "Prince of Opus" malarkey from. They're getting it from Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles, which I once contemplated reading and now I'm very, very glad I didn't, because I can see it would have driven me completely mad very quickly. (For more reasons than I'll get into in today's post...) So, I'm not sure if it was Miller or if it's the fanfic authors, but I get the feeling someone at some point is/was thinking "well, he's a better match for Achilles if they're both princes!" Like that's somehow an improvement.
It's not. It weakens their relationship.
Like, by a lot. Making a prince--a prince who is all but irresistible, according to some authors, and could therefore have just about anyone he wanted, no matter how high their rank--fall in love with another prince is bland. It's "safe." But making him fall in love with a man below his station? An older man, therefore putting him in a position that is--culturally speaking--subordinate to someone who should be far below him? That is a sign of a truly powerful love, breaking through the boundaries of what is accepted in his society, and one for which he is risking the one thing he normally protects above everything else: his reputation. Making him love an equal is so weak that it's pitiful by comparison.
Admittedly, the ancient Greeks wanted to make them closer to being equals, so that Achilles wasn't "lowering" himself by loving and being loved by someone so much lesser in status. That was why many ancient authors (dating all the way back to the Hesiodic Catalog of Women) made Menoitios (Patroclos' father) into a brother of Peleus. (At least one other ancient author made Menoitios the half-brother of Aiakos, making Patroclos into Peleus' first cousin, which is completely insane, because Patroclos kicks way too much butt to be an old man. Plus his shade literally has a line to Achilles about how they grew up together, so obviously they can't be more than a few years apart in age.) But they never went so far as to deny the text of the Iliad, which said very bluntly and directly that Achilles was more important than Patroclos, which would not be the case if Patroclos was also a prince.
Of course, it also said (in a couple different places) that Patroclos' father moved to Phthia with him when he was exiled, a fact which all those modern authors are steadfastly ignoring, and/or ignorant of. Because the poet of the Iliad understood the purpose of exiling a murderer, and none of those modern people seem to get it, or if they do, they're ignoring it.
Exile was not the "punishment" for murder.
Murderers were exiled for the protection of the community.
Not because they were expected to kill again (though I'm sure that also played a role in it in many cases!) but because killing someone off the field of battle left the killer polluted. It was a stain that was actually dangerous to those around him/her. A murderer was ejected from the community so that they could be purified of that pollution, in order to prevent a plague or other disaster from striking.
Don't believe me? Take a look at the first of Sophocles' Oedipus trilogy sometime. In it, Thebes is suffering from a terrible plague. Seers are consulted, and it's learned that the reason for the plague is because of an unpurified murderer in the town! (Worse still, the murderer of their previous king!) And what does Oedipus promise to do about the murderer? To banish him from Thebes, of course.
Because that's what you did with murderers to protect everyone else.
Then some other king could purify them, and--unless the banishment was specified to be permanent--they could return home and everything would be just fine. (Y'know, except for the dead person and their family and friends...) There are a lot of examples of this in surviving myths. Peleus and Telamon, for example, you know why they were exiled from Aegina? Because they had murdered their half-brother. Jason was exiled from Iolcos because of his role in the murder of Pelias. In Euripides' surviving Hippolytus (he wrote another play about the same subject, which has been lost), the play starts with Theseus in the midst of a one year exile, due to having killed someone. Queen Penthesileia of the Amazons arrived in Troy in the final year of the war because she had accidentally killed her sister, and was thus in exile to be purified of the death, but she would have gone home again at the end of the war if Achilles hadn't killed her. Achilles himself, in fact, was briefly exiled from the Achaian camp due to having killed Thersites when the wretch mocked him for mourning the fallen Amazon queen. (Of course, that was a very carefully arranged exile, as Odysseus accompanied him to the nearest convenient still-standing city to purify him, so they were probably only gone two or three days, tops. Normally, it wouldn't be quite so heavily planned in advance.)
So, in other words, there was nothing cruel or unusual about the young Patroclos being exiled from Opus after he accidentally killed a friend in a quarrel. It was standard procedure, and far from being a heartless father sending his young son out alone in the world, his father uprooted his entire life to accompany the boy. (Presumably this also meant uprooting the boy's mother and any siblings he might have had, but the subject did not come up in the Iliad.) The fact that they never returned to Opus likely had nothing to do with being forbidden to do so, but rather to having found a much better situation at Peleus' court than whatever Menoitios' situation was in Opus. (All known ancient lists of the Argonauts include both Peleus and Menoitios, so even in the versions where they're not brothers, they would at the least be old comrades, so being welcomed with open arms makes complete sense.)
What bothers me most about the modern authors deciding to turn a devoted father into a cruel one is that I feel like someone (whether Miller or someone in the fanfic community) decided that it was "necessary" in order to give Patroclos' situation more "drama."
I'm sorry, but if you think his situation needs more drama than it already has, there's something wrong with you. He's just a child, and he accidentally killed one of his friends. If you need more drama than that, I suggest you seek therapy.
...
...okay, so....that got a bit accusatory towards the end there.
Sorry about that.
I get worked up about this. It's honestly the largest reason I've stopped trying to read Patroclos/Achilles fics on AO3. Even when I specifically found fics that did not list Miller's novel as one of their fandoms, they still drew on that horrible, awful, terrible, no good, very bad "wrinkle" in his past. And I just can't take it anymore.
The last time I tried to read one--one I was sure wouldn't do it because it was going even further than I do in using the original Greek spellings!--I hit the back button immediately on reading the first paragraph (possibly just the first sentence!) of the first chapter, because there it was, they'd made him the freakin' prince again.
I just cannot understand why anyone would want something so broken to be part of their story when they have the choice to write something that's both better and more accurate.
There's literally no positive side to this modern miscreant version.
Mind-boggling.
That's all it is. Just mind-boggling.
No comments:
Post a Comment