avery

Greek mythology is also full of a bunch of slavery and rape that the Greeks were frankly okay with. It was a SUPER HOT TAKE back then to say “Hey, maybe the people we conquer and enslave and rape… have feelings?” The Greeks also engaged in pederasty, where adult men had sexual relationships with adolescent boys and society was totally okay with it for a long time.

Like, that’s the thing. The ancient Greeks are PROBLEMATIC AS FUCK. They had VERY different social attitudes from us. If you require any piece of Greek culture to follow today’s morality, 99% of them would fail. That’s why holding Orestes to these standards means that you basically have to cancel all of Greek mythology.

So a lot of the modern reclamation/fandom around Greek myth is trying to say, “Hey, are there ways we can grapple with this and NOT have it come out super icky? Can we look past the very specific problematic ways these things reach us in text, and find alternate interpretations that restore the humanity to the people and groups the ancient Greeks violently silenced?” 

And part of that is looking at later works in ancient Greece, like the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, that revisit but drastically reinterpret those myths to go, “Wait, that’s super fucked up, can we find a new and better way?” And Orestes was one of the characters they wrote plays about, to sharply question old beliefs about how war was glorious and it was okay to unfairly kill someone when your religion dictated it. He’s not perfect, but he’s the example of someone ground between two impossible systems of belief who is saved from the brutality of the old system by a new emphasis on logic and peace.

Despite the (actually relatively arrogant) unilateral declarations of the so-called Renaissance and afterwards, the peoples of the Mediterranean and surrounding areas of Antiquity are very very much different cultures than we are, in a very different surrounding context. And when you add in the element of mythology shit gets even more complex because the Greeks explicitly held mythological and divine characters to different standards than humans had in some areas. 

So unless you’ve done a lot of the research work it can be actually difficult to tell “does this reflect a standard norm? or is this something that is Okay Because Gods, but would be totally ‘that person needs killin’’ if it were humans involved? or is it something everyone knows WAS okay In The Days of Achilles* but is totally NOT okay NOW, or … .?” 

Because yeah: they also totally had “well of course we all know that you can’t do that NOW, but Back Then it was acceptable”. Yes, the Greeks already had that in 500ACE. (And before.) 

Everyone in History is almost certainly Problematic. So you know.