Classics Salon!
Dec. 3rd, 2025 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnSo yeah, anyone who has been around this DW for more than a very little while has known that we had a salon in which we discussed Frederick the Great in particular and 18th-century Enlightenment figures in general.
But nooooow we are going to have a Classics salon!
My Classics background is, er, well, I guess my Classics history is pretty much on par with or somewhat worse than my general non-US historical background (read: I know almost nothing, with some random pockets of slight layman knowledge), and my Classics literary background is signficantly worse than my general literary background (no real reason, it's not like I had a vendetta against it or anything, I think I just didn't happen to have a good entry point). I've read the Odyssey last year and the Aeneid reasonably recently, and the Iliad not so reasonably recently (perhaps this will be the impetus for me to check out the Wilson translation), and Ted Hughes' translation of selected Metamorphoses.
Please feel free to tell me what books I really ought to be looking at next! (I believe there has been some discussion of Plutarch?) Feel free to wax eloquent about your favorite translations, whether it's something I've already read or not! Also please free to tell me any of your favorite Classics history you want, because I probably don't know it :)
(This is not supposed to be just formildred_of_midgard and selenak, although of course I expect them to be prime contributors. I know that many of you, probably all of you, know a lot about Classics that I don't know, so please inform me! Tell me your favorite things! :D )
But nooooow we are going to have a Classics salon!
My Classics background is, er, well, I guess my Classics history is pretty much on par with or somewhat worse than my general non-US historical background (read: I know almost nothing, with some random pockets of slight layman knowledge), and my Classics literary background is signficantly worse than my general literary background (no real reason, it's not like I had a vendetta against it or anything, I think I just didn't happen to have a good entry point). I've read the Odyssey last year and the Aeneid reasonably recently, and the Iliad not so reasonably recently (perhaps this will be the impetus for me to check out the Wilson translation), and Ted Hughes' translation of selected Metamorphoses.
Please feel free to tell me what books I really ought to be looking at next! (I believe there has been some discussion of Plutarch?) Feel free to wax eloquent about your favorite translations, whether it's something I've already read or not! Also please free to tell me any of your favorite Classics history you want, because I probably don't know it :)
(This is not supposed to be just for
mildred_of_midgard and selenak, although of course I expect them to be prime contributors. I know that many of you, probably all of you, know a lot about Classics that I don't know, so please inform me! Tell me your favorite things! :D )
Re: Suetonius: The Lives of the Caesars
Date: 2025-12-19 09:13 am (UTC)Probably. In addition to all the examples of Greek heroes having sex with slaves without the narrative presenting this as bad in the Iliad (what's problematic is Agamemnon taking Achilles' war prize from him, because it is an injury to Achilles, not Briseis), there's as mentioned before the fact Odysseus starts his narrative midst-Odyssey about what happened after he left Troy behind with "so first thing we did, me and the guys sacked another little town and had fun killing the men and sharing the women", and that there's no sense of the narrative seeing this as problematic at all, or as contracting his indignant denial of being a pirate later one.
I'm also reminded that Samuel Butler thought the Odyssey was composed by a woman, and plenty of scholars are still willing to entertain the idea... I could definitely see a female poet deciding that men who honor the dominant female's wishes are to be praised!
True. And seeing this as something completely separate from what the men do to other women when they're at war, sad to say.
Which, Cahn, is not to say that adultery was cool prior to this, just that it wasn't a crime that the *state* punished. The husband could absolutely divorce or even kill his unfaithful wife, while the wife had to just suck it up if her husband cheated on her.
Well, almost, depending on which of the three Roman ways the couple was married. Because in the most popular one, she was technically still a member of her father's household, not her husband's household, meaning her father could if he was on her side divorce the husband and keep her material goods. But again, that entirely depended on the father.* Until Augustus made it a business of the state. (This, btw, is also how he justified executing his granddaughter's husband but not her lover, because according to the new laws, husbands who didn't denounce their wives if they discovered adultery made themselves fellow criminals. (Mind you, how far the Julian laws were really practiced outside the Roman upper class, especially the Imperial family, is questionable, and within the Imperial family, is questionable, given all the complaints by poets and satirists and historians about shameless unfaithful women.
*Trying to think of an example of a father siding with his daughter in a divorce case pre Augustus - Cicero with Tullia? Not sure, will have to look it up.