🔅•◆Sing,O Muses the delights of queerness◆•🔅

This is the first ever entirely unraveled papyrus scroll from the great Herculaneum library. In its entirety. The technology that allowed us to do this will make it easier to unravel every single one of the thousands of scrolls still waiting to be read within the library.

Herculaneum was buried in ash thousands of years ago, along with Pompeii. The above text is Philodemus’ On Gods, written around the 1st century BC. Other Hellenistic works are expected to follow it. Upwards of twenty-five-thousand scrolls are thought to still be down there. Tantalizing us.

Philodemus is thought to be the owner of the villa and a philosophy enthusiast, hence the abundance of such texts already discovered and partially decrypted before now. In my mind, this is the most important historical innovation of the millennium. This will revolutionize our understandings of Greece and Rome. It’s already helped us discover the precise location of Plato’s tomb.

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List of things I hope are in there:

Lost Thamyris play

Lost Io play

Lost Memnon play

Live footage of Hera and Iris kissing on the mouth

Full Homeric Hymn to Demeter text

Hera, Poseidon, Athena/Apollo coup files

@lief-of-bushtown @lunadoggos @wishmemellon @artandbeauty71 @please-be-nice-im-sensitivee @thecordedbed @fawnblooms @sapocipo @fullyconsumedbywhatlovesme @artefarte@MUTUALSMUTALSMUTALS

Hopefully we can finally get some texts written by Epicurus himself instead of the few fragments of letters that we currently have. It'd also be really cool if we could patch in the missing lines we don't have from Lucretius's De Rerum Natura. More broadly, because Neoplatonism (which was a sort of synthesis of every philosophical system from antiquity except Epicureanism) was the primary philosophical influence on Christianity, when Christians took over Europe they didn't bother to preserve any of the Epicurean texts, causing almost all of them to be lost*. So, if the library at Herculaneum does indeed have more Epicurean texts, it'll be an incredible advance in understanding this ancient philosophical movement that we only have scraps from.

I did tag my post “greek mythology” but that was mostly bc i thought fans of such were the kinda people who’d appreciate this stuff

Which, tbf, I’m sure there’s plenty of Hellenistic mythology in there. Particularly if it’s mythological characters being repurposed to support a particular philosophy (like the Marriage of Cupid and Psyche typa deal).

People also keep mentioning “oh I hope [text from 400s BC or earlier] shows up!” when like. The graph I included clearly shows how unlikely that is.

Deiphobus is also trying to get him because Paris humiliated him in the games lol

I wanna get someone to draw Hera learning about this from Iris, and proceeding to cry tears of joy over it (and maybe going to a Pride parade). After over three-thousand years, people like Sappho, Hephaestion, Alexander, Ianthe, Philolaus, Diocles, and Erinna can finally bask in her domain.

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.