Sources? What sources?

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. 

Because, I've just been thinking about it for a while. We know he isn't welcomed but is he banned? Or just doesn't want to go? I've always been curious about that.

Demeter, Artemis, Aphrodite (I think), and Eros have entered just fine and it appears that anyone can just drive in and out of the underworld so, I've been kinda confused about it.

The unseen land [the Underworld] where Apollo does not walk, the sunless land that receives all men. - Seven Against Thebes, Aeschylus

So, I’m still scrolling through Wikipedia.

And I see that Patroclus (Yes, the one who was gay for Achilles) was a lover of Poseidon.

But like, I never heard about this before and the only thing that pops up in Google is how in love Patroclus and Achilles was, nothing mentions Poseidon in the story.

Homer calls Patroclus the first horseman because he learned from Poseidon, who loved him, the art of riding horses.

Artemis of Gabii

1920

Plaster

Secondly, have you read the book? In neither case is Odysseus' tenure with Circe and Calypso portrayed as fully voluntary - he's an outright captive of Calypso and spends all his free time crying and staring at the sea. Things didn't get off to a great start with Circe either. I feel like the modern interpretation of the encounters with the goddesses in the Odyssey make it out as though Odysseus was just screwing around for the ten years between the end of the Trojan War and his homecoming, but that is reading against the text pretty significantly. I'm not saying there's 0 textual support for that reading but there's much much more in the opposite direction. The Odyssey is a nostos story - it derives its narrative tension from Odysseus' struggle to get home, so the story doesn't happen without the challenges he faces along the way.

Third - when you reduce the episodes with Calypso and Circe to "Odysseus is a bad husband because he cheated on Penelope", you're missing a really interesting parallel to the Iliad, where the events of the story are precipitated by a fight over a captive woman. We don't actually get very much of Briseis' perspective, despite the fact that the story couldn't start without her. She has very few lines of dialogue. But when we get to the Odyssey, now the story starts with the main character who is essentially powerless in the role of a slave concubine. Do the gender ramifications there not make your head spin? In the Iliad, a straightforward poem about straight shooting heroes, which romanticizes war as much as it critiques it, the experiences of the war captives is all but absent. In the Odyssey, we see the aftermath of war and its impacts up close and personal, although the narrative comes at it at an angle (incidentally, the way Odysseus himself comes at problems). If you don't want to examine that because you think Odysseus was a bad guy for cheating on Penelope... okay? That's your prerogative I guess. You're missing out some of the best stuff in the poems though!

(Incidentally I'm not saying Odysseus is a *good* guy, either - he's a man of many ways, as Emily Wilson put it, he's "a complicated man" - but that's what makes him so interesting! If he were 100% wholesome and Unproblematic, we wouldn't be reading this shit 2800 years later! Trust me! There are some extremely boring ancient works I've read where everybody does exactly what they were supposed to do! I'd rather read the Odyssey!)

Fourth, and I don't exactly know how to frame this, even if you take Odysseus' captivity with Circe and/or Calypso as infidelity... that doesn't actually mean that he and Penelope don't still have this crazy powerful bond! He deploys all his cleverness to escape from Calypso (even though she offers him immortality!) and then from Circe (in part) because they can't offer him the like-mindedness he has with Penelope! He leaves because he wants to go back to Ithaca, his kingdom, and his family! And it's not some kind of secret affair! Odysseus TELLS Penelope about both of them the same day she finally recognizes him and they reunite! If it is infidelity, it doesn't compromise the foundation of their relationship.

Every single thing I’ve read with the gods gets something wrong about him in particular.

Honestly a bunch of triggering subjects under the cut.

Additionally, he chased Daphne and Bolina until the former begged her father to change her form and the latter committed suicide. Even in the myth of Cassandra, he seems to have pursued her rather ardently, even if he didn’t force her.

"Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium said that Apollo was responsible for sealing up the split after people's true pairs were cut apart (people used to be made of two halves, sort of like soulmates, and Zeus punished them by splitting them)

Phaedrus (early CE) attributes Prometheus' getting drunk with people with 'misapplying' genitalia - both applicable to trans people and intersex people.

It makes more sense that Prometheus, creator of mankind, was the one creating certain groups of people, rather than Apollo."

Guess what daaaaay it isssss!

Hera isn’t just some ~abused housewife.

She was not raped by Zeus so she’d marry him (look, if you want to interpret the cuckoo myth that way, be my guest, but there’s no support of that unquestionably being what happened and claiming that is just wrong.), and she can and has left him. Zeus had to win her back, and if she didn’t want to be convinced, she would’ve just not come back with him.

She also fucks people up if they claim to love each other as much as/more than she and Zeus love each other (aside from being hubris, this wouldn’t be something to be angry about if they didn’t supposedly love each other).

Have a second hill while we’re at it:

Zeus has good qualities, ACTUALLY, and (general) you are boring and lack nuance when you pretend he’s the horny root of all evil in Greek mythology. yeah, He’s a cheater, because fertility and the ancient Greeks wanted to be related to the gods/the king of the gods, but he also indulgent as all hell, gives his children gifts, is actually a good ruler who obeys the same laws everyone else does even when he really doesn’t want to (ft. Sarpedon).

He also clearly feels bad Hades got stuck with the “bad” end in their allotment of ruling domains, and promises Hades a gift for it (I mean we can talk about the unfortunate display of patriarchy in that said gift is “a wife of his choosing” because Zeus as king and father of a number of daughters can offer that but that’s a different issue entirely), and these two are supposed to have a bad relationship?

Orpheus mentions first the reign of Saturnus, then that of Jupiter, then Neptune’s, and lastly Pluto’s. Also some, like the mages, say that there will be a reign of Apollo.

(The translation is mine, so it’s has some mistakes, but this is essentially what it says).

TW: m*rder, s**cide

Niobe- Had more children than the goddess Leto and claimed that she should be worshipped instead. Artemis and Apollo killed all of her children as revenge.

Cassandra- Extremely accurate oracle who promised to marry Apollo, but broke this oath. Apollo cursed her so no one would ever believe her prophecies.

Arachne- Claimed to be a better weaver than Athena. Was challenged to a contest with the goddess, and got her ass clapped for disrespecting the goddess of war. Committed s**cide, was turned into a spider.

Endymion- Was loved by the goddess Selene, who begged Zeus to make him never die. Zeus put Endymion in an eternal sleep.

Paris- Disrespected Athena and Hera by choosing Aphrodite as the most beautiful goddess over them. Stole the wife of a Greek king, which led to the Greeks declaring war on Troy, which led to Paris getting his shit rocked and then dying.

It was Endymion who asked Zeus to put him into eternal sleep, so I doubt this counts as mortals messing up with gods. He got exactly what he wished for - that’s a favour, not a punishment.

Endymion was the son of Calyce and Aethlius [...] A man of unrivaled beauty, he was loved by Selene. When he was given a wish of his choice by Zeus, he chose to remain immortal and unaging in eternal sleep - Apollodorus, The Library

And the fact that this is a blessing by Zeus is reinforced here

Hesiod says that Endymion was the son of Aethlius, the son of Zeus, and Calyce, and received the gift from Zeus : ‘(To be) keeper of death for his own self when he was ready to die - A scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius

There is a version where the sleep is punishment from Zeus, but it’s not connected to Selene.