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a short passage which suggests that Pandora’s jar is full of good things rather than bad. When the jar is opened, everything good – Self-control, Trust etc. – flies away, which is why we so rarely find them among mortal men. Only Elpis – Hope – remains, as one good which did not abandon us.
Ooh interesting
Thankfully the hypocrisy of censuring women’s behaviour in general while maintaining an entirely different set of standards for the actual women you know has now died out.
LMAOOOOO
(Oedipus Tyrannos must be the earliest example of a tragedy caused by road rage).
BYE
Helen’s name has even been used as a tongue-in-cheek unit of measurement: if one Helen is so beautiful that she launches a thousand ships, then a millihelen is the unit of beauty required to launch a single ship. Isaac Asimov claimed to have coined the term.2
Nice
But the winged shoes, cap and special knapsack seem to reveal a second level of ambivalence: Perseus is a hero favoured by the gods, but he is also an insufficient hero, one who needs copious divine assistance to complete his quest He is not being presented as a giant-slayer, a monster-killer. The ingenuity we might see in an image of Odysseus blinding the Cyclops or the strength of Heracles killing the Hydra is missing.
Ooooooh interesting, I've never thought of it that way. Homeboy was all tricked out with gadgets and gizmos
Modern versions of the Medusa story have tended to focus on Perseus; she is a relatively minor monster in Rick Riordan’s bestselling novel Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, for example, although at least she was played by Uma Thurman in the 2010 film adaptation.
PJO SHOUTOUT WOOOOO!
It is a horrible moment in the story: the concern Perseus takes to avoid harming Medusa’s head – which has proved so useful to him – could not be more different from the way he treated her when she was alive. She is more valuable to him as a weapon than she was as a living creature.
Man.......
Indeed, we’re hard-pushed to find an asexual depiction of Medusa in contemporary culture, although The Lego Movie manages it beautifully, if briefly.45 Her Lego snake hair is particularly good.
I'm dead
we would do well to remember that Heracles is performing his labours only as a penance for the murder of his wife and children during temporary insanity (this part of his story was wisely omitted from the Disney animated film Hercules, which is by far my favourite cinematic adaptation of any Greek myth, omissions notwithstanding).
Natalie you are a woman of TASTE
The theme of nets and woven fabrics runs throughout Aeschylus’ play, from the tapestries that Agamemnon walks across to the robe which – if it was like the one on the pot – apparently has the ends of the sleeves sewn together, or perhaps no sleeves at all. The imagery is consistent: Clytemnestra is the hunter, Agamemnon her prey. And weaving, which is the idealized task of ‘good’ women in myth (we’ll look at Penelope, later on, and her weaving and unweaving of a shroud), has become something darker, much more dangerous.
LOVE this subversion
Agamemnon had sacrificed her daughter like an animal; Clytemnestra has treated him the same way.
They could never make me hate you queen!
And she literally has the last words in the play: I, and you, rule this house now. The word order may pain English grammarians, but Clytemnestra means it. I rule the palace, the city, its people, and so do you. Aegisthus is not quite an afterthought, but she certainly isn’t giving him top billing. The play concludes with yet another motive for killing Agamemnon: the acquisition of power.
Very interesting ..... Micro-feminism at work
why is Agamemnon’s life valued more highly – by everyone except Clytemnestra – than Iphigenia’s? Why was Agamemnon not pursued by the Furies for the unforgivable crime of killing his daughter? Why was it left to Clytemnestra to avenge her? Why do Electra and Orestes have so much more respect for the wishes of their dead, murderous father than for their living, murderous mother, and indeed their dead, blameless sister?
REALLY MAKES U THINK HUH!!!!
So Clytemnestra is a byword in the ancient world, and ever since, for a bad wife, the worst wife even. But for wronged, silenced, unvalued daughters, she is something of a hero: a woman who refuses to be quiet when her child is killed, who disdains to accept things and move on, who will not make the best of what she has.
Legend queen icon etc
One last flurry of insults passes between them: he calls her a child-killer, she tells him to go and bury his wife. He wails over his lost children, she reminds him that he will be a childless old man. He yearns to hold them and love them, she remembers that he was perfectly content to see them sent into exile.
Okay wait bc why did she kinda eat here....
