#western classics

-Inferno: cringe. you think about hell a lot but don’t believe in god. You like the boiling river of shit. You say you think Paolo and Francesca are romantic but you don’t understand courtly love.

-Purgatorio: pretty good. You probably payed attention to the reading. You should take up endurance hiking with a bag of rocks

-Paradiso: excellent. You’re annoying about the existence of the sublime in music. You were really into string theory in middle school. If I give you a drink you’ll start talking about Hildegard

-Lysistrata: you had a lesbian separatist phase. You're really into your community garden, or you want to be. Every thirteen months, one of your posts goes viral

-Iliad: your meat is huge

-Odyssey: your wife is smarter than you. You're a killer tabletop DM. You would fuck a witch if pressed

-Don Quixote: based. unless it's the picasso illustrations, then you're basic.

-Pascal: if it's math, you're gay. if it's philosophy, you're a stoner

-Aeneid: you also have a tattoo of the Capitoline Wolf. You love the origin story part of superhero movies

-Middlemarch: you don't exist. nobody has a middlemarch tattoo

-Jane Austen's works: you're the person people text "can i be mean." You're good at parties but you hate them. You're think you're funnier online than in person

-just the word "logos" in Greek: you didn't do the reading

-Sappho: you are a trans lesbian

-Proust: you post a lot of "slut in theory" memes. you get anxious going to the seven-eleven

-Euclid: you taught yourself to draw a perfect circle. You think about geological formations a lot. You've memorized that Edna St. Vincent Millay poem

Three Godfathers (1948)

It's a bit strange to see that she can't even pronounce the ancient greek she's using correctly. Of course, since she's not a native speaker she won't have the perfect pronunciation but still, I'd always imagined that she'd have spoken it better. Even the "PatrOklous" feels annoying.

Emily Wilson my behated.. Anglo classicists being Anglo classicists - what did we expect. Also she's talking about Achilles calling Patroclus "philos", a word she doesn't even pronounce right even though it's a two-syllable word and the stressing marks are RIGHT THERE. Thankfully she doesn't say that the "philos" or the text in general shows erotic love between Achilles and Patroclus, which shows at least she has done the most basic research xD

But she also makes an oversight when speaking about a phrase. Achilles saying for Patroclus "I love him like my head" doesn't necessarily translate into "I love him like myself". Once more western writers ignore Greek sentiments. Equating people to body parts in Greek culture and nearby ancient cultures means "he is very precious to me (as precious as this body part is to me)". This affects Wilson's approach and she then thinks that Achilles considers Patroclus "a part of his own body", and that when Patroclus dies Achilles loses "his head / his thoughts". This approach feels a bit lucklaster, ngl.

The phrase is like the English "he's the apple of my eye", and if I were to analyse this English phrase how Wilson and more of her ilk do it for Greek, I would be say""Of my eye" means that Achilles covets this particular fruit as it's the only one in his eyes, and so he desires Patroclus! Plus, so many fruits are consumed during this Epic, so when Patroclus dies Achilles is without food and nourishment!" 😂