Classicstober Day 6: Medea 🩸

I wanted to adapt one of my favorite scenes from the Iliad into a comic ✨ the dialogue borrows and takes direction/inspiration from various translations, although pacing, general flow of the words, and page space got the final say in what I ultimately ended up deciding to letter.

(Iliad, book 20, trans. fagles)

(same scene, trans. lattimore)

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actaeon the hunter and king lycaon

valentine doodles

homophrosyne

everyone shhh for a second and look at this ink doodle of diomedes and glaucus hugging by 18th century painter antoine-jean gros

“Please, let him be soft. I know you made him with gunmetal bones and wolf’s teeth. I know you made him to be a warrior a soldier a hero. But even gunmetal can warp and even wolf’s teeth can dull and I do not want to see him break the way old and worn and overused things do. I do not want to see him go up in flames the way all heroes end up martyrs. I know that you will tell me that the world needs him. The world needs his heart and his faith and his courage and his strength and his bones and his teeth and his blood and his voice and his– The world needs anything he will give them. Damn the world, and damn you too. Damn anyone that ever asked anything of him, damn anyone that ever took anything from him, damn anyone that ever prayed to his name. You know that he will give them everything until there is nothing left of him but the imprint of dust where his feet once trod. You know that he will bear the world like Atlas until his shoulders collapse and his knees buckle and he is crushed by all he used to carry. Dear God, you have already made an Atlas. You have already made an Achilles and an Icarus and a Hercules. You have already made so many heroes, and you can make another again. You can have your pick of heroes. So please, I beg you– he is all that I have, and you have so many heroes and the world has so many more. Let him be soft, and let him be mine.”

— Please, let him be happy ( j.p. )

Athena to Penelope when Odysseus and her reunite:

🌿🏺 Classicstober '23 Week 2: Icarus, Achilles, Asclepius, Pandora, Theseus, Arachne, Helen.

watch out for this vase with young-looking hot Menelaus holding Diomedes, to prevent him from killing Achilles (who murdered Thersites who was Diomedes' cousin)

Meanwhile Agamemnon is depicted as older hot papa, very angry at Achilles like "kid, can you stop killing people and work on your anger issues???" - not like Mycenaean daddy could join him for the anger stuff...

and Phoenix like "not this angry kid killing people again" and Achilles giving zero f 🍆cks.

the way that storytelling in the odyssey loops in on itself… everyone in the odyssey wants to know the odyssey. telemachus leaves for sparta in order to hear it. odysseus sits with the phaeacians deep into the night telling it. and he withholds it from people he doesn’t trust, only to reveal himself and tell it again. the sirens and demodocus sing to him about the iliad. penelope tells ithaca's bard phemius to stop singing because he has no songs about odysseus returning; if he can’t sing the odyssey, he shouldn't sing at all