C A Caesar

I was thinking the other day about the sims (as I am entering into my two week sim phase), and I know it's called the sims because it's a simulation but ALSO!!

Sim is the latin present subjunctive form of sum which translates to "I am". When turned into Sim (as a subjunctive), it expresses possibility or wishes. So instead of simply translating to "I am" it could roughly (on it's own) translate to "I may be" or "If I were". This is interesting of course because the sims is a life simulation game, where you ideally create a "perfect world" or whatever.

Now for the worship part we know that both Hyacunthus and Iphigenia had some sort of worship but both were associated to the gods they served or represented aka Apollo and Artemis Orthia. I don't personally recall anything of these two have some individual worship as gods.

My own research is looking at how the Hyakinthos cult in Amyclae being placed under Apollo at a potentially later date (as is, to my understanding, the current agreement in the limited literature) might be linked to Spartan early colonisation of the town and what this might mean for the origins of Artemis Orthia… but we’re not talking apocalyptic feeling literature because of it… we’re talking a pretty normal blend and assimilation of cultures which occurs often in antiquity.

Many of the over-dramatisations about the “dark age” between the Pre-Hellenic (Mycenaean and Minoan) world and the age of Homer can be incredibly damaging to reading some kind of mass event where there just is no real evidence for one!

Hesiod! But not by much and in different regions - in fact, by such a small amount of time that we maybe have some textual response/allusion to the Works and Days in the Iliad, but that's about as far as their traditions interact with each other, which essentially created two whole different canons by how Homer and Hesiod each adapted and subverted the existing tradition!

It was classical Greek philologists of 5th century BC that firstly placed Hesiod at an earlier mark (and many modern researchers agree) but later Homer began being seen as older which I guess plays its role as to why some more traditional reading places him at an early mark?

But because the two writers technically lived in the same time period the debate on which of the two epics is older is always on. I have seen many people claim Homer being earlier mark but always so close to each other that I doubt that we will have TRUE accuracy as to who is earlier.

Homer was originally taken to be older because “modern” scholars understood how important he was in the classical world as a staple part of education and just *assumed* he had to be older than Hesiod and everything else was an imitation of him - a view we still see in a lot of the reception of Hellenistic literature - on that ground.

Modern scholarship on the topic currently sits with them as contemporaries, but with Hesiod being likely to be the marginally older of the two thanks to various comparative and linguistic studies on the texts. The only school I know of who deviate from this are the analysts… who put Homer at least a century later.

a) please do not generalise Ancient Greece to be a monolith.

b) I'm speaking here specifically about women in Classical Athens - because this is my area of expertise - they did not hate them, they saw them essentially as perpetual children because they believed them to be irrational. This idea of them as irrational stemmed from the idea that women could not control their sexual desire (see Lysistrata as a prime example of this idea) vs men, who could control their desire [Walcot 1984]. This control, or absence of it, is why men could take up positions of leadership in their community and go to war, while women could not. They did not hate women, they saw them as incompetent. This is how we get texts like Xenophon's Oikonomikos, where he talks about guiding his hypothetical new wife in her new role a head of his household. He refers to her in a way that is condescending and in no way sees her as his equal, but there is no hatred in his tone. Classical Athens was extremely patriarchal and misogynistic, but they did not hate women.

nothing they wrote about classical athens says "extremely vitriolic" or "despised". infantilization of women is still misogyny and it can be done without any vitriol; women may be treated affectionately.

a) please do not generalise Ancient Greece to be a monolith.

b) I'm speaking here specifically about women in Classical Athens - because this is my area of expertise - they did not hate them, they saw them essentially as perpetual children because they believed them to be irrational. This idea of them as irrational stemmed from the idea that women could not control their sexual desire (see Lysistrata as a prime example of this idea) vs men, who could control their desire [Walcot 1984]. This control, or absence of it, is why men could take up positions of leadership in their community and go to war, while women could not. They did not hate women, they saw them as incompetent. This is how we get texts like Xenophon's Oikonomikos, where he talks about guiding his hypothetical new wife in her new role a head of his household. He refers to her in a way that is condescending and in no way sees her as his equal, but there is no hatred in his tone. Classical Athens was extremely patriarchal and misogynistic, but they did not hate women.

Do you really think they hated their future male citizens?? Of course not, but they're in the same box because they've been 'othered' as "not as rational as men".... that doesn't mean hatred, and that doesn't mean vitriol. It means 'other' and 'different' and 'not suited to X, Y, Z task'.

This, then, translates into the treatment of women.

If in Athens women are viewed as less suited to certain tasks due to this belief over rationality - namely, the task of statesmanship...which was the key job of the elite Athenians (bear in mind it's only really them we have a full record of 'this is how women should be suppressed' from... and even that's a 'they should be' not a 'they are') serving in a Democracy, then yes, they're going to be seen as lesser because they can't serve the state in the same integral and public way as men could.

Thus, if you can't serve the state to the same capability as these men, you get put under their 'protection' (i.e. your rights are inherently linked to theirs... which is how women were treated like children in Athens) Now, that's all just Athens... but you see how that isn't full of vitriol and hatred, it's literally just based on "women are different than men, namely in their rationality and physical strength, thus they can't serve in wars (the elite classes were also the main heavy-armed troops - hoplites; we're talking like 30kg of armour - it's HEAVY) and can't serve in politics... thus they don't serve the state publicly and must be put under protection of those who can."

I happen to specialise in Sparta, where women took an active part in athletics publicly, where they were well educated and took a key role in their sons' educations; certainly a place they weren't "hated" - but again they weren't in government... because the Spartan government was made up of the warrior classes yet again, and frankly the women were too busy running everything else to be able to train and serve too!

Just to parrot your own phrasing.... "Minimising the multitudinous and important roles of women in antiquity to just 'they were hated on' because you're misinformed about it, isn't the take you think it is." It's actually quite a dismissive one.