#tagisthus

melantho and melanthius are not [just] servants, they are slaves

i just don't think you can genuinely make achilles out to be an oppressed soldier/worker in the iliad when he doesn't experience any disciplinary consequences for retaliating against agamemnon by leaving the battlefield. does achilles feel exploited? i'm sure he does. the iliad makes no bones about the fact that agamemnon abused his authority by taking briseis. but the power dynamic is such that achilles can still leave, and that's not considered disobedience or insubordination. in point of fact, there are lower classes on the battlefield: the common soldiers. there may even be a commoner who rebels against the kings: when thersites insults agamemnon, odysseus beats him and the narrative clowns on him happily. but when achilles insults agamemnon, the other kings supplicate him. (do you want gifts? do you want your sex slave? do you want even more women? do you want his daughter's hand in marriage? please please come back!) that is a privileged position. it isn't situated in a modern military or modern capitalism, and it doesn't make sense to act like that's how the achilles/agamemnon conflict operates.

people tend to assume that the enslaved woman who betrayed penelope's weaving ruse to the suitors was melantho, which makes sense, but the odyssey never actually exploits that dramatic potential. it leaves it unsaid: the suitors never name their source explicitly, and penelope may not even know (though surely she has her suspicions). i'm haunted by the possibility that it wasn't. what if it wasn't even one of the enslaved women who were sleeping with the suitors? what if she had completely different reasons?

there should be a trojan war adaptation for girls who don't care about "historical accuracy" or about trying to make characters heroic by modern standards, but portrays an ancient world with unfamiliar norms as populated by complex human beings, experiencing love and grief and fear and anger very deeply, and that lets you glimpse the sometimes contradictory layers of storytelling traditions. & it should be an epic poem. maybe even 2 poems