A to Z: Teukros and Tekmessa

 

    Technically, I was also considering Thetis, but I decided I had slightly more interesting content for Teukros.  So, starting from the top:  Teukros (better known by his Roman name, Teucer) is the son of Telamon by a concubine.  In the Iliad, the identity of that concubine is not specified, nor are her Trojan origins mentioned (though they can still be surmised even there), but in all later works his mother is specifically Hesione, elder sister of King Priam.  (Which actually makes for one of the spots in the mythic chronology of Troy that feels off.  But that would take several posts to go into in any depth, so I'll leave it for some other time.)   The name Teukros proves his Trojan ancestry pretty efficiently, because Teukros was also the name of one of the mythic founders of Troy, hence that "Teucrian" is one of the words used to describe people or things as being in some manner Trojan.

    Although Teukros features prominently in Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, there's also nothing particularly exceptional about him there; he pretty much just follows the standard "devoted brother of Aias" routine that's set out in the original myths.  Which is not to say that he deviates from that in the Atalanta and Ariadne books!  Far from it!  It's just that being set almost twenty years after the war's end, I get to portray an older Teukros, king of a prosperous realm (and particularly wealthy and powerful because he controls copper mines that were so important to making bronze for weapons and armor!), father of a teenage daughter, and proud uncle who had raised Eurysakes to be his father's equal in just about every way.  (Which is only deviating from the myths in that there he would not have gotten to raise his nephew in the original version.)

            “Certainly, [the events in Egypt that were just under discussion] happened long enough ago that the princess wouldn’t know anything about it,” the king added, with a chuckle that made his nephew blush.
            “What, another fiancée?” Atalanta asked, laughing.
            “Of course not,” Eurysakes answered instantly.  It was quite possibly the fastest speech that Ariadne had ever heard from him.  “Egyptian royalty can only marry Egyptian royalty.”
            “That’s the only thing stopping her, from what I’ve heard,” King Teukros confided in the girls, making Eurysakes’ blush grow deeper.
            “I’d never have guessed you were so popular with women,” Ariadne teased him.
            “It’s not that,” he insisted, somewhat weakly.
            “I fail to see what else it could be,” the king laughed.  “You have a gift with the ladies that your father lacked.  Probably because your face looks so like your mother’s.”
            At the moment, Eurysakes’ face looked more like a pomegranate, it had turned so dark.  Ariadne actually started to feel a little sorry for him, so she decided to change the subject.

    Just being devoted and loving doesn't mean he can't do a little teasing. 😉  However, there's actually not much I can quote about Teukros in the present of the novels, because his sole appearance is so deeply mired in the overarching plot of the series that his scenes wouldn't make any sense out of context. 😅  So I'll just talk about the prologue to book five, since I omitted it from the post on Patroclos.

A to Z: Perfect Patroclos

 

    Today's choice is going to be particularly obvious to anyone who knows me well, as I am a self-described Patroclos fangirl.  I actually have a surprisingly varied selection of works I could talk about, too.

    On top of the prologues of the Atalanta and Ariadne books (the prologues are always set in and around the war), there's Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, the failed yandere visual novel I talked about with Deidameia, the play "Pyrrha," the visual novel set in the 1980s I talked about as the origin of Grant Nemo, the failed sci-fi novel I talked about (in the same post about Grant), and all its incomplete spin-offs.  There's also Ilios, my 2011 NaNoWriMo project, but...it's problematic.  😅  In the interests of not stressing myself out, gonna limit myself to just a few sources.

    One of my favorite parts of Better General is that Achilles has a madness meter (though it's a hidden stat), and for the most part the way you increase his madness meter is to separate him from Patroclos.  This can lead to him butchering you, or even the whole camp if the final blow to his sanity is Patroclos' death.  So there is actually a lot of material in there about them (though it's never enough!) and they can have some pretty romantic endings if they both survive the war...

Enraged at having had his concubine taken away, Achilleus left the war in the ninth year.  By the time the Achaian fleet returned to Hellas, Achilleus and his Myrmidons had unified the Hellenic people by conquering them all while the majority of their warriors and kings were still at Troy.  (This saved his descendent the trouble of having to do so nearly a thousand years later.)  Though Achilleus took several wives over the course of his long reign as King of Hellas, he had no children other than Pyrrhos, the boy he had fathered while he was hiding in disguise as a woman on Scyros; it was often said that his wives never conceived because he so rarely went in to them, preferring to spend his nights--like his days--with his faithful Patroclos.  The only serious threat to Achilleus' reign was the arrival of the Heracleidai, who attempted to take Hellas for themselves, but he was able to muster the survivors, sons and grandsons of his allies from Troy (even those who had initially fought against him) to work together to fight them off.  When he eventually died, his bones were enshrined in the same vessel as those of Patroclos.  Pyrrhos inherited his throne.

    ...or...

Outraged that you felt he was ruled by his desires, Achilleus returned to Phthia in a fit of anger, along with Patroclos, who had to spend days of intimate private time to convince Achilleus to spend even one evening in the company of other people, leading the gossip all throughout Thessaly to speculate that Achilleus had no use for anything other than his lover's bed.  Peleus was greatly distressed to see his son behave in such a childish manner, and swore he would not permit Achilleus to inherit Phthia if he did not begin to behave more appropriately, so Achilleus set off to the north with Patroclos to prove himself by conquering Hyperborea.  He never returned.

    ...or...

Achilleus returned to Phthia after the war's end, with many ordinary slaves, but no concubine to keep his bed warm.  Peleus set about trying to find a bride for his son, but Achilleus consistently rejected them all, and by the time Peleus died of old age, it was clear even to him that his son refused to take a wife because he wanted no one who could come between him and Patroclos.  Once his father was gone, Achilleus sent to Scyros for the son he had fathered there, and made him his heir.  When they eventually died, Achilleus and Patroclos were buried in the same grave.

    ...and a fairly romantic one if Achilles dies and Patroclos lives...

Patroclos remained behind when the rest of the Achaian army sailed back to Hellas.  He continued to tend to Achilleus' tomb until his own death, at which time a friendly local obeyed his wishes and placed his bones inside the tomb along with Achilleus'.

    But maybe what's most interesting is what can happen when the Trojan army is rampaging through the Achaian camp in the ninth year if you forced Achilles to be the first to disembark on the Trojan shores, and thus got him killed on day one.

A to Z: Dejected Deidameia

    So, today I'm talking about a straight-up character from Greek myths:  Deidameia of Scyros.  (Often transliterated as Deidamia.)  The eldest and most beautiful of the daughters of King Lycomedes, Deidameia is the mother of Neoptolemos by Achilles, who of course abandoned her to sail off to the war in Troy.

    And, surprisingly, there's not a huge amount about her in the original material that's constant beyond that.

    But there are some potentially triggering matters discussed in this post--because they're part of some tellings of the original myth--so I'm going to end the main page preview of this post after this paragraph.  I don't go into any details, but do briefly mention sensitive subjects, so if you have any concerns, maybe don't click on the "read more" link.

A to Z: Atalanta and Ariadne

 

    I haven't done this challenge in quite a few years now (I'd have to go digging around on my old Wordpress blog to see which years I did, and I don't feel like bothering 😅) so I may be a bit rusty with it, but I'm going to try my best!

    You may be thinking, based on the title of the post, that you know who I'm about to talk about.  But actually you don't.  (Unless you're one of a very tiny number of people.  Which is unlikely.)

    Because I'm not talking about the famed huntress Atalanta, nor about Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos who helped Theseus through the labyrinth.  Nope, I'm talking about two original characters of mine who were named after those two.

    Allow me to take you back in time all the way to 2014.

    (Yeah, you were probably expecting a much older date there, huh?)

    I was pondering, as often I do, a miniscule part of a familiar tale and wondering about the details that might have happened around it.

    Specifically, on that particular occasion I was thinking about the time, late in the Trojan War, that Achilles was briefly exiled for having slain Thersites because Thersites was mocking Achilles for mourning the Amazon queen he had just killed.

    All murderers in the Greek heroic age had to be exiled, lest the stain of their murder cause plagues and other disasters, and then they needed to be purified by a king before they could safely return home.  Well, the Greek army at Troy didn't want to take any risks of Achilles being away for long, so they sent a king (specifically, Odysseus) with him to purify him so he could immediately turn right back around and return to the war with as little time lost as possible.  They made their way to the nearest non-enemy city they could reach, specifically Methymna on the island of Lesbos, which Achilles had conquered personally much earlier in the war.  (Not that that's saying much:  Achilles personally conquered most of the towns within a few days' reach of the Achaian camp!)

    Anyway, in the myth that's all there is to it:  they go there, Odysseus purifies him, and they go back to the war so Achilles can die a few weeks (or possibly days) later.  But--and here's where it got interesting to me--these are two particularly libidinous individuals, even for Greek mythology.  So I found myself wondering what happened while they were on Lesbos, away from all the prying eyes back in the camp.

    Even as I starting thinking that maybe they got a bit too 'friendly' with some of the girls serving them whatever refreshments the surviving locals provided them, I realized I was already naming the daughters they were going to father on said girls.  🤣

    Usually, when I find myself doing that, I accept the inevitable, and that's what I did this time, too:  I sat down to start writing the stories of those girls, Atalanta (the daughter of Achilles) and Ariadne (the daughter of Odysseus).

On the (Mis)Use of Ancient Words in Fiction ~ Or ~ Patroclos is a Warrior, NOT a Healer!!!!!!

     So, part three in my series of textual rants about how people are abusing poor Patroclos in their fanfiction.  (Part one is here, part two is here, if anyone cares.  Though actually part one wasn't as much about Patroclos as about Ancient Greek naming schema...)

    One warning about this post:  I'll be talking about a lot of different works (albeit briefly) and will be changing spellings accordingly.  If I'm talking about a work in Greek or the character in general, I will use my standard spelling of Patroclos, but if I'm talking about a work in Latin or an English-language work that spells it thus, I'll be using the Romanized Patroclus.  (One exception is that there's one work I'm not sure how they spelled it, so I'm using my standard...'cause they might actually have used Patroklos, only I can't remember for certain...)  I apologize if this seems confusing.

    Over the millennia, there have been a lot of changes to Patroclos' role in the story of the Trojan War.  We don't know what the story was like before the Iliad was composed, but from the way the epic never bothers explaining who he is or why he's following Achilles around so devotedly, we can assume that prior to its composition, their relationship was well-established, and the audience would already know that they were friends, comrades-in-arms and lovers.  (Well, given the variations caused by oral tradition, it's actually safer to say that many held them to be lovers, rather than that all did.  But the way the intimacy of their relationship was treated, it was clear that the poet expected people to already be aware of it.)

    In late antiquity, two anti-heroic versions of the Trojan War story were floated about, purporting to be first-hand accounts by Dictys of Crete and Dares of Phrygia; in addition to changing the story to make everyone seem worse, these stories confused or conflated various figures who had similar names (e.g. Atreus and Catreus, Peleus and Pelias), making it clear that not all the changes to the tale were purposeful.  In these, Patroclos played almost no role, and in fact died almost immediately in one of them.  And he's not even mentioned in Vergil's Aeneid (which only makes sense, really).  And why do I bring this up?  Well, because eventually the ancient Greek language was pretty much lost in Europe, so throughout the Middle Ages and most of the Renaissance, these Latin versions of the Trojan War story (which did, admittedly, also include a highly-truncated version of the Iliad, about 1/16th the length of the real thing) became the only ones known.

    So for all the Medieval and Renaissance tales of the Trojan War--Bocaccio, Chaucer, etc.--Patroclos essentially doesn't exist.  Around Shakespeare's time, Ancient Greek was becoming known again, and there was even a translation of the Iliad into English, thus Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, while mostly based on the Medieval version adapted out of Dictys and Dares, was able to reintroduce Patroclus as a major player and Achilles' true love (despite much moaning and groaning about Polyxena).  But Shakespeare made other changes to the character.  His Patroclus was a teenage boy (probably played by the boy who usually played the female leads) and not only didn't fight (being too young) but didn't even want to fight.  (Though he still met his traditional end on Hector's blade, of course.)

    Shakespeare's version of Patroclus--despite that his Troilus and Cressida was ignored for centuries, only reemerging onto stages in the 20th century--at some point became viewed as the dominant version, being called upon by any hack writer who didn't want to deal with the real story as told in the Iliad.  (See, for example, that ghastly movie Troy.  Well, no, don't see it:  just look it up on Wikipedia or something.)

    The Patroclos in the Iliad is radically different from Shakespeare's timid boy:  he is older than Achilles, he's brave, he's kind, and when he's rampaging across the battlefield in Achilles' armor and cutting down Trojans left and right everyone knows exactly who he is and they are still terrified of him.  (In fact, when Apollo disguises himself as a regular Trojan and goes to fetch Hector to have him face Patroclos, he tells him that it's Patroclos who is running rampant, and Hector's reaction is basically "yes, only I can deal with this deadly foe" not any mockery of an insignificant opponent.)

    But what does any of this have to do with the misuse of ancient words in fiction?

    Well, I'm getting to that.

    You see, not all modern authors are willing to work with Shakespeare's teenage boy version.  He'd have been sorely out of place in the video game that was a Canadian-made spin-off of Koei's Dynasty Warriors franchise.  (I think it was called, like, Warriors:  Legends of Troy or something like that.  I'm sure about the first word and the last, just not the ones in the middle... 😅)  I haven't played the game, but I did watch some footage of it years ago (when I was working on a paper on the changing portrayals of the Trojan War heroes over time), and its Patroclos was just as buff and dangerous as any other player character.  (Too buff, honestly; the characters were kind of grotesque, as I recall.  Like, they looked like they'd all overdosed on steroids.)  The version of Patroclus in the very recent game Hades is probably the best, most accurate version of the character I've ever encountered in a modern work.  (Yes, they changed his ethnicity, but there aren't actually any ancient descriptions of him that specify his ethnicity.  No reason his family a few generations back couldn't have moved to Greece from Africa.  I think it happened a lot more back then than people now expect.)

    Literature seems to have been less kind to Patroclos than video games, weirdly enough.  Most of the (unintended) abuse of the character I've encountered on AO3 has been entirely caused by fans of a single modern novel, Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles.

    And why do I call it abuse?

    Because it turned a warrior into a healer.

    Seriously, some of these fanfic works have claimed he never even went onto the battlefield, just waiting in the camp for Achilles to return.

    That is the most appalling nonsense!  (I can only hope that comes from the fic writer and not the novelist, but I fear the opposite is true.)  Every man in the Greek camp--with the possible exception of the priest Calchas--went out to battle.  Even the aged Nestor, who was too old to fight, still went onto the field for every battle!  Let's be real, here:  the Greek army was having too much trouble procuring food for it to have useless hangers-on in the camp who didn't fight.  (Uh...especially in light of all the women they had enslaved, who obviously didn't do any fighting, but still had to eat...and all the children those poor women were being forced to bear...)

    The closest to professional healers that the Greek army had were Machaon and Podaleirios, the sons of Asclepios.  But they still went out and fought.  (Machaon, in fact, died in battle, either to Penthesileia or to Eurypylos of Mysia, depending on the version you're looking at.)

    Now, yes, it's true that Patroclos had some knowledge of field medicine, and in the Iliad he helps a bit with some of the wounded before persuading Achilles to let him join the fight, but they've all been fighting for nine years at that point!  Every soldier would have needed to know a bit about field medicine just to ensure his own survival.  And all the more so for an attendant like Patroclos, who would need to be able to help his lord if the need arose.  (Okay, not so likely given Achilles' natural skills and supernatural armor (his first set of armor was also made by Hephaistos) but still!)  Furthermore, in pretty much all known traditions, Achilles was trained as a child by Cheiron, who was known for his knowledge of healing (he had, in fact, trained Asclepios himself), and who had surely taught the boy at least enough medicine to be able to deal with injuries on the battlefield.  Whether or not Patroclos was trained alongside Achilles (and there is ancient precedent for that being the case), Patroclos would have learned some of the techniques from Achilles if he hadn't learned them with Achilles, because Achilles is going to want to make sure his lover knows how to save his own life if necessary.

    So, where did Miller's healer-only version come from?

    Well, in that we get to the title of this post, and the misuse of ancient words.

    Because the word for Patroclos' position is θεράπων (therapon), a word often used in the fanfictions that have gotten me so worked up about this.  Obviously, someone (presumably Miller?) looked at that and said "well, it looks so much like therapy that it must be related!"

    And yeah, it probably is related, in the sense of it having come from the same root word as θεράπευσις, meaning "treatment, attention."

    But θεράπων does not mean anything related to healing!

    In the Homeric context, it has traditionally been translated as "squire," and its most standard definition is "comrade-in-arms, but of inferior rank."  Other definitions include "attendant," "servant" and even "worshipper."  But not one of its definitions has even the slightest thing to do with healing.  (You can check out the dictionary entries for θεράπων at the Perseus Project:  here, here and here.)

    This is not only just plain wrong, it was also purposefully wrong on Miller's part.  She had to have done enough research to have known that the word did not mean that, and she used it that way anyway.  In consequence, its misuse has been spread like a virus throughout the Trojan War-related fandoms on AO3.

    I cannot express emphatically enough just how much that pisses me off.

    I'm not even going to try (the fact that I've spent this long ranting about it is probably a good indicator of just how angry I am, obviously), as the whole point of this was to try and purge the anger from me, not to wallow in it.

    The worst part is that--whether this comes from Miller's novel or from the people writing derivative works on AO3--by making him a passive healer, they've imposed an artificial heteronormative dynamic on a homosexual relationship:  the Patroclus of those fanfiction works is forced into a feminized position, allowing those writers to essentially write a straight relationship despite that they're writing about two men.  Now, yes, not all of them do that, even when they embrace the "sitting passively in camp" aspect.  (My sample size is small, since I quickly got too fed up to read any more of them, so I can't guess at percentages either way.)  But the fact that any of them do it is already cause for alarm as well as fury.  And yes, Shakespeare's Patroclus was a relatively passive character in a submissive role in the relationship, but he was not so much feminized as not-yet-masculinized, as man/boy relationships were not uncommon in Shakespeare's day.  (Shakespeare himself wrote more than one love sonnet addressed to a boy, which if they were in his own voice (rather than works written on commission for someone else) indicate that he was likely bisexual, but due to the culture in which he lived, that bisexuality would have found expression only with boys, not adult men.)

    Hopefully, this has concluded my series of rants about the ghastly things people are doing to my poor favorite on AO3.  (Aside from my overwhelming fury that they keep putting their fics that are 100% contrary to the Iliad in the Iliad fandom!  Anything that lists Miller's novel as its fandom is automatically not compliant with the Iliad, and therefore shouldn't list it!)

    *ahem*

    Yes, so, as I was saying, hopefully I'm done with this ranting, and will post more positive, interesting things in the future.  (I always have lots of things to say about Greek mythology, after all...)

    In closing, though, I just want to encourage everyone to actually read the Iliad if they're interested in the Trojan War.  Some of the battles can get a bit gruesome (though tame by modern standards, I suppose) and the catalog of ships is pretty dull unless you're into ancient power structures and/or geography, but the characters are fascinating, the dialog is often very entertaining (the snipes at Alexander/Paris esp.), and the pathos of loss is genuinely heart-wrenching.  And Patroclos is just 💓.

On Exiles and Princes

     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.

Patronymics are not the same as last names!

     Okay, I've decided to take the plunge and start ranting posting about certain things that people do in Greek mythology works on AO3 (specifically in the ones focusing on the romance between Patroclos and Achilles) which drive me completely up the wall because they are so very, very wrong.  And yes, I do know that these are amateur works posted by fans (indeed, the bulk of my work available online is on AO3, so who could know better than I?), but that does not stop me from being annoyed by it.  (And, indeed, it should not stop the authors from taking the time to do a little research before they actually post what they've written.  A really good fanfic author makes sure to get things right first, whether that means double-checking the canon work or learning a bit about the culture in which their work is set.)

    Some of these things I know come from a specific, highly-publicized, highly-lauded novel (which I personally have not read, so I'm not sure how many of the others also came from it), but I probably won't get to those things until the second post (trying to keep it to a few things per post, all revolving around a specific theme), so I won't mention the novel in question until I get there.

    Today's primary beef is the way so many of the authors use patronymics as direct equivalents of modern last names.  And I don't mean in introductions, as that's one of the only places it might be used in an equivalent  manner.  No, I mean using both their name and their patronymic for emphasis.  As in, a modern mother might yell at her son "John Smith, you get back here this instant!" to really hammer home how angry she is at him.

    No one would ever do that with a patronymic in Ancient Greece.

    The two do not serve the same function.  And, more importantly, that whole thing of adding the last name for emphasis is a cultural thing.  It's something people in the US do, yes.  Probably in the other English-speaking countries as well.  (I'm drawing a blank on whether or not I've seen anyone do that in any of the British TV and movies I've watched over the years...ooh, no, I just recalled Gandalf doing that with both Sam and Pippin in Fellowship of the Ring (don't remember offhand if the either line was in the book, though) so...yeah, probably there in all English-speaking countries.)  I find it highly improbable that people do that in every non-Anglophone country in the modern world, however.  The more different the language, the more different the culture, the higher chance that it doesn't happen, it seems to me.  And that's despite that there is a growing world subculture low-key blending everyone's reactions and behaviors.  (If I was only close to someone from modern Greece, I'd ask if people even do that last-name-for-emphasis thing there now, because I feel like the answer would probably be "no."  Unfortunately, I'm not.  I do know of one person in a few game dev Discord servers who's from Greece, but I don't know him well enough to ask such a weird and random question.  Don't really know him at all, in fact.)

    And if not everyone now does that, is there any reason to think people three thousand years ago did it?

    Answer:  no, there absolutely is not.

    More importantly, the last name and the patronymic serve radically different functions.  The last name is something passed down from generation to generation, identifying the larger group to which you belong.  The closest ancient equivalent would be the gens name in ancient Rome, but the behavior regarding the gens name is radically different:  unless you were really close to someone, you spoke to or about them using their gens name, possibly adding their praenomen on the front if there was any concern that someone might be confused as to which member of the family you were talking about, or using their cognomen if they have one.  (Roman names are very complicated.  I would have to give them a full post of their own to explain them, but I'm sure the information is already posted online in many places, all of them better than any explanation I could provide.)

    As to the patronymic, it's not passed down from generation to generation.  (With the occasional oddity, like Achilles sometimes being referred to as Aiakides in the Iliad, which means "son of Aiakos," and is technically his father's patronymic.  Aiakides, therefore, could function like a modern last name, since it's more referring to the founder of his line of descent from Zeus.)  It specifically identifies the father of the person in question.  The patronymic is specifically designed to be used both to identify the father and the son, thus its primary use in epic is actually in place of the character's name.  Atreides, "son of Atreus," is probably the most famous and commonly used (outside of the Iliad), and could be applied to both Agamemnon and Menelaos, though I think it was mostly just used for Agamemnon.  It sets the tone of expectations for a person:  by identifying Agamemnon as Atreides, the poet could signify in a single word that he had a dark and bloody past and would have a dark and bloody future (Atreus was murdered by a tag-team of his brother and his brother's son/grandson (product of father-daughter rape), Agamemnon murdered the uncle in question and would later be himself murdered by the cousin in question), by identifying Achilles as Aiakides, the poet could instantly remind the listener/reader of his glorious ancestor who went on to be one of the judges of the underworld and thus signal Achilles' glorious present and his future as a minor god of the dead (though actually I'm not sure if he'd been deified yet when the Iliad was composed), and by identifying Patroclos as Menoitiades the poet could signal that he was from dependable heroic stock who never actually achieved any great or lasting fame (though really his name kind of already signals that, as only the most arrogant or the most insignificant would ever name their son "glory of the father," depending on whether they meant "product of my own glory" or "son who is my only chance of ever getting any glory").

    Now, there are cases where it's reasonable to put the patronymic directly after the name, as if it was a normal last name.  For example, in my books, I have Eurysakes frequently identify himself as "son of Aias Telamoniades."  This is for the very sensible reason that there were two men named Aias who were of great note in the Trojan War:  one was the bulwark of the Achaians and the original tank character, while the other was a mean-spirited little man who literally got most of the Greek army killed on the way home from Troy.  As the son of the former, Eurysakes does not want to risk anyone thinking he's the son of the latter!

    That's not the purpose of these people just sticking a patronymic on at the back of the character's name, though.  They're going for the "I just can't believe you, John Smith, you rogue!" thing.

    And. That. Is. Not. Right.

    It drives me insane.

    And, in a deeply-related note, considering the character who's been the butt of that behavior...

    ACHILLES' PATRONYMIC IS NOT PELIDES!!!!!!!!!!!

    Sorry to shout, but....AARRRGGGGHHHH!!!!!!

    I mean, what do they think his father's name is?

    Pelos?  Peles?

    Because that's what "Pelides" would mean.  Son of Pelos or son of Peles.

    Neither of which, to the best of my knowledge, was ever an ancient Greek name.

    Achilles' patronymic is Peleides.  Or sometimes Peleades, depending on the metrical needs of the line in question.  But that second "e" is deeply important, because his father's name is Peleus, not Peles or Pelos.

    I mean, really, what do these people think the patronymic for "son of Pelias" would be?  Or rather, if they think that "son of Peleus" is "Pelides" then how do they think anyone would tell "son of Peleus" from "son of Pelias," since by their logic they would both be the same thing?

    Is it that they just don't think?  Are they so ignorant of Greek mythology that they've never heard of Pelias?  Have the only encountered patronymics in one novel that got them so drastically wrong that a) they misspelled Achilles' patronymic and b) used it like a last name and c) didn't even use any others?  Do they just not care that they're 100% wrong?

    .

    ..

    ...

    Yeah.

    Sorry.

    That just really freaking bothers me.  Especially since every time I've run into the first problem, it's been a double-whammy with the second one.

    Sometimes makes me want to bash my head into a wall.

    (Needless to say, I actually gave up on trying to read Patroclos/Achilles fics on AO3 a long time ago, but the frustration has been lingering and festering ever since, so I'm trying to purge it.)

The Mathematics of Love

     Something I wasn't particularly aware of until reading A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities, selected/edited/translated by J. C. McKeown, was that the Ancient Greeks had a very particular way of expressing numbers with letters.  (No details are given regarding why, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't just for "number games," but was for actual mathematical purposes--much like the Roman system--since numerals as we think of them didn't exist yet, not in Europe, anyway.)

    The numbers 1-9 were represented with the first eight letters of the Greek alphabet, with the archaic digamma (Ϝ, "w") for 7, presumably indicating that its position (before being excised from the language) was in between zeta and eta.  Then you had the tens:  10, 20, 30, etc., with the next nine letters of the Greek alphabet, including the archaic koppa (ϙ, "k") for 90.  And finally the hundreds started with rho and went up past omega to end with the archaic sampi (ͳ, "ts" or "ss") for 900.  (The inclusion of these archaic letters presumably means that this numeric process was not only developed before those letters (and their associated sounds in the case of digamma) were dropped from use , but was so firmly established that changing it just because the letters were no longer used was simply impractical, if not downright unthinkable.)

    However, unlike the Roman letters-as-numbers system, the Greek system meant that every word and phrase had a numerical value.  And evidently they liked to play around with figuring out the values of various words and phrases, and comparing them to the values of others.  (For example, he cites one ancient source that had gone to the trouble of finding two (contiguous) lines of the Iliad that added up to the same number.)  While a number of these equivalencies are listed in the book, one of them particularly gave me a case of the warm fuzzies:

Αχιλλευς φιλει Πατροκλον (no accent marks 'cause I couldn't find some of them)
Achilleus philei Patroklon
Achilles loves Patroclos

    The first word and the second two both add up to 1276.  The number is immaterial, and even the fact that the phrase adds up isn't what makes me smile:  it's the fact that someone first went to the effort of calculating it, and then felt the need to share that with the world by writing it down.  On top of that, their work was then preserved (in the form of one of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, so only barely), so it's just sort of extra exciting.  :D

    I guess I just can't help sort of squeeing when other people are fans of the same ship I am.  :P  (To put it in modern terms that would baffle any ancient mind...)

    (Their story in Hades also makes me squee uncontrollably:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt7FWky4jh0)

 

    But now, in honor of the day, I plan to download and play the number one most appropriate game:  the demo for the anti-dating sim I Just Want to Be Single.  (From what the devs have posted on discord, it's going to be fantastic.  I've been looking forward to it a lot...)

Oops, fell behind in posting!

     I didn't fall behind in my writing, though, so that's something!  :D

    So, the last time I posted my word count for my NaNo rebel progress (those handy-dandy graphs are the one thing I truly miss about taking part in the official NaNoWriMo process), it was the 24th, and I was up to 109,131 words between the main novel, the prologue for a different novel, and the start of my next visual novel.

    On the 25th, I wrote a measly 1,700 words in moving forward on the visual novel, moving my total up to 110,831.  (I call it "measly," but I think that's actually about the "suggested" number of words per day for the official NaNo...)

    On the 26th, I had another slow day and only added 1,962 words to my visual novel, bringing my total up to 112,793.

    Today, I added another 2,034 words to my visual novel's script, bringing my November total up to 114,827.

    Clearly, my output has dropped dramatically since I moved from standard fiction to visual novel script.  I was writing much more slowly when I was working on my other visual novel, A Song of Warriors, too, so I think part of this is just that it's a slower, harder process to write a visual novel's script than to just write a novel or short story or whatnot.  You have to worry about how much needs to be said and doesn't need to be said regarding non-dialog (do you describe the action in detail, give it a lick and a promise, or say nothing and plan on there being special art to show it?), and of course trying to figure out how to handle dialog choices and branching storylines.  (And this one is super-heavy on the branches!)

    This one--which still hasn't got a title yet--is particularly tricky, because it's a "yandere" take on a Greek myth, turning half the cast (or more) into mentally unstable individuals who gladly kill over the one they love.  Now, this is not actually as crazy and wrong as it sounds at first blush.

    Especially since one of the people being made into a yandere is Achilles, who canonically goes on a bloody rampage and spends more than two weeks torturing a corpse because of the man he loves.  Granted, that's in vengeance rather than "how dare you talk to my boyfriend!" but the principle is not so different.  Likewise, Thetis happily asked Zeus to visit death and destruction on the other Greeks in order to avenge the insult to her beloved son's honor, so she's clearly quite eager to visit harm on every other mortal if it will protect her son in any way.  Neither of them is mentally unstable in the myths (well, Thetis isn't, at least), but...they're probably not really unstable enough in my VN to count as proper yanderes anyway.

    The main thing is, I'm not really good at writing violence, crazed behavior, or jealousy that doesn't come off as shallow and pat, so it's a good challenge for me...but it also makes writing it slower. 😅  Still, I think the idea is pretty fun, and I'm enjoying some of what I've come up with so far, so there's that.  :)  Trying to do the art for the game myself is going to be a challenge in and of itself, but the game jam this is for isn't until February, so hopefully I'll have enough time to get at least the prologue and first chapter finished by the time the jam ends, if not the whole thing.

Not-Nano Day 5: Steadily Climbing...

Actually, I didn't do much writing today.  I spent my roughly 2 and a quarter hours working on coding, mostly.  Largely in bashing my head against the brick wall that was me trying to figure out how in the blue blazes to force TWINE to let me get rid of my pretty text box for one passage so I could have a full-screen title splash.  (It would help if I had any understanding of CSS rather than merely adapting a template a helpful individual posted on itch.io, of course...)

But the good news is that I did eventually figure out how to do it.  (It helped when I finally noticed that "~=" is CSS for "=" not for "does not equal".  That sped things up enormously.)

I also remembered to go back into my glossary and add in an explanation of why I describe Achilles as having red hair, which is rather unexpected since a) he's described as a blond in the Iliad, and b) most ethnically Greek people tend to have dark hair.  (Of course, with his descent from an ocean goddess and his linguistically non-Greek name, there's not really too much reason to think he's ethnically Greek...)

Oh, and thanks to a suggestion from someone on itch.io, the escape game now has a name!  Yay! :D  I even found a way to express the name in Ancient Greek for the title screen. :)

I also prepared all but one of the images I'm going to use, thanks to my old computer still having an ancient copy of Photoshop on it.  (The new graphics programs have been made impossible to use, having way too many buttons and way too little text to tell you what the *#@&$*T%& the buttons do.  When I got this new computer up and running, I downloaded the latest version of GIMP, but I can't use it for much more than changing image sizes, because they've made its functions too obscure.)  I needed one more change of time image, though, and I've downloaded the base image for that, so I'll be able to get that done tomorrow.

I'm going two routes for the images.  One route is genuine ancient art (well, some of the Mycenaean frescoes are very heavily reconstructed, but...they're as close as we can get to genuine at present) and the other is graphically manipulated photographs of locations on Lesbos (where the game takes place) to make them kinda-sorta look a little bit like frescoes, maybe.  (All the images are from Wikimedia Commons, of course, and I'm going to have a credits page in the game crediting the people who took the photos and there will be links to the download pages, too.)  The "Photoshopped photograph" is not the most professional of looks for game graphics, needless to say, but as this is a free game I'm uploading for a game jam, I'm hoping people will forgive that. ;)  The hardest part was that one of the photos I wanted to use had a modern road smack dab in the middle of the picture.  Fortunately, it also had a tall tree in the foreground...so now it has two tall trees in the foreground. :P

Tomorrow I'll finish up that last image, and then I'll probably do a little work on the glossary for the earlier game before I switch back to this computer and keep coding.  (It may sound absurd to have two working computers, but the thing is that my "good" laptop, the one I use for writing, is at this point so old that I'm not sure when I got it.  (I know for sure I already had it in 2008, but I don't remember for how long.)  It's lasted so long because it never, ever touches the Internet, and I'm going to keep it that way.  So while I probably paid more for this new computer I'm writing on now, it's still not my "good" computer.  Heck, this one still has all the paint on its keys!  And they're not all shiny from having been pressed a zillion times, either.  What kind of proper computer keyboard still has all the letters visible, and the keys aren't smooth and sweet to touch?  No kind at all!)