Si Sapis Sis Apis

me: yeah whatever. i don't feel shit

5 minutes later: dude i swear i just saw vines sprouting from the mast

Also, separately, I have to include this quote that is not in the Guardian article. It was an in an article from The Times where Emily Wilson was interviewed, but it's behind a paywall so I'm putting a screenshot/alt text instead of just the link. Emily Wilson is such an icon for saying this.

"[Emily Wilson] does, however have views on the women of The Odyssey. 'By Nolan standards this was great for women characters. By Homer standards it was a bit disappointing.'"

byzantine mosaic

White supremacists use Ancient Greece to insert themselves and their beliefs, completely erasing an accurate Ancient Greece and actual Greek people and culture from the narrative. There's a reason why when discussing the casting of Helen in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, they only show pictures of blonde, blue-eyed, Germanic, or Anglo-Saxon women, and never actresses who are actually Greek or of Greek descent. Just like how a black woman playing Helen is an issue to them, a Greek woman playing Helen is also an issue to them.

Since the very beginning of the concept of whiteness, beginning in the 19th century, white supremacists have excluded Greek people from whiteness, like they did for other ethnicities that you may now consider white, such as the Irish and Italians. Whiteness did not exist before the 19th century. When whiteness was conceptualized, it was purposefully created to not just view people native to the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania as lesser than, but to also view other Europeans as lesser than.

A lot of Western idealization of Greece was built around a fantasy of Greece, not Greece as a real place with real people, language, history, occupation, displacement, and survival (this part is important to me, because we survived over 1,000 years of occupation).

The idealized version of Ancient Greece that white supremacists (and many non-Greeks more broadly) love to fetishize and fixate on is largely a fantasy constructed by European powers and intellectual movements, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was used as an imperial and racial ideology at a time when Greece itself had been under foreign rule for centuries and had very little control over how it was being represented.

In fact, European travellers who journeyed to Greece in the wake of Greece's War of Independence frequently reported disappointment because they did not match the idealized image of “ancient” Greeks that existed in their imagination.

Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte, Halle, Germany

Including:

The Shaman of Bad Dürrenberg

And:

Tethys

A gold medallion featuring a high-relief depiction of Tethys seated on a seahorse amid stylised waves, ca.300/200 BC., 7x6.5 cm, weight 25 gr