Diomedes Nutz

the trojan horse: empty belly for men to hide in. dedicated to athena on the pretense of her providing safe passage back to greece. brings greek destruction upon the trojans by bringing them within troy's walls. invented by odysseus

There’s other instances of people randomly punching slaves that they didn’t even know because they got in their way or something. This was just normal behavior.

And slaves didn’t rebel en masse because if even one slave committed an act of violent rebellion it was common practice to kill every slave and former slave in the household.

People only took notice for posterity when these mass executions got into the hundreds of people. One of the few recorded for the history books is of over 400 people being killed because one guy stabbed his enslaver.

Paris: A wife!

There are many depictions of the iconic fight about Troja in artworks though history. One of the best in my opinion is a unique vase of the Berlin painter (505 to 460 BC) you can find in the British Museum today. It was painted in the early classical Attic red-figure style (the one we automatically associate with greek vase paintings today). He depicted the epic climax of the Trojan War, the battle between Achilles and Hector. Both heroes are supported by their patrons, Athena and Apollo.

I tried to use every element you can find on this vase and include it in my fore-edge painting. So, this fore-edge painting is my attempt to change my favourite vase into book form.

[...]

worse, the principle that one set of half-siblings may help and support another is a contradiction of the principle of amphimetric strife so prevalent in Greek culture." (Women and Bastardy in Ancient Greece and the Hellenistic World by Daniel Ogden)

Including the first quote for context, but it's the bolded I'm more concerned with.

It got me thinking of Ajax and Teucer, see.

Half-brothers, and it's not as if, in the myths especially attached to Teucer after Ajax's death, the idea of this sort of antithesis of cooperation wasn't there. It's expressed loud and clear in Sophocles' Ajax, in the imagined/and past words and actions of Telamon regarding Teucer.

It's right there in the mythic structure where Teucer coming home without Ajax gets him thrown under suspicion of having lacked in due diligence (intentionally). The illegitimate brother now in a position to usurp his legitimate brother.

And yet, mythwise? In the Iliad itself? There's clearly no conflict between Ajax and Teucer. They are a team, a cooperative unit. (I've even read some suggestion that earlier, "the Aiantes" was about Ajax and Teucer, not the two Ajaxes.) There's not a whiff of Teucer ever having any ambitions other than helping and supporting his brother!

Mycenaean boar tusk helmet 1450-1400 BCE

"And Meriones gave to Odysseus a bow and a quiver and a sword, and about his head he set a helm wrought of hide, and with many a tight-stretched thong was it made stiff within, while without the white teeth of a boar of gleaming tusks were set thick on this side and that, well and cunningly, and within was fixed a lining of felt." — Homer, Iliad 10.260–5

Pyrisous, “saved from the fire”, his first name, which seems to favour the tradition in which his mortal parts were burned by his mother Thetis

Aeacides, from his grandfather Aeacus

Aemonius, from Aemonia, a country which afterwards acquired the name of Thessaly

Aspetos, “inimitable” or “vast”, his name at Epirus

Larissaeus, from Larissa (also called Cremaste), a town of Thessaly, which still bears the same name

Ligyron, his original name

Nereius, from his mother Thetis, one of the Nereids

Pelides, from his father, Peleus

Phthius, from his birthplace, Phthia

possible aliases on Skyros.

shoving sthenelus out of the chariot b/c she’s going to drive diomedes into battle and she can’t be bothered to like ask him to get off

punching aphrodite in the boob

saying that aphrodite scratched her hand on a brooch when she’d in fact been stabbed on athena’s orders

making a deal with ares to stop interfering in the fight and then immediately giving diomedes special shiny powers

convincing pandarus to shoot menelaus in book four and then guiding the javelin to kill pandarus in the book five

the many, many ways she cheats during the funeral games to make sure diomedes and odysseus win

everything to do with hector’s death and deiphobus 

tell me, muse, about a twisted man