/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22989447]

What is the point of Diomedes? He just seems to be Homers self-insert, he's the fastest, strongest, smartest best warrior ever, he even beats Ares in a 1v1, pimp slaps Aphrodite and survives a silly little conflict with Apollo. Why is he so OP? Was there a point to it that I'm missing?

[Anonymous No.22989911]

It's basically like a shonen when the main character powers up and starts beating everyone

[Anonymous No.22989917]

If I remember correctly, Minerva breathes her spirit into Diomed and this is why he became so powerful. Minerva wants to help the Greeks but without Zeus noticing, so this is a good method as she technically isn't interfering.

[Anonymous No.22989936]

>>22989447
We had this exact same thread with the exact same wording. This board is fully botted

[Anonymous No.22989945]

no, power level goes Achilles > Ajax Telamonios > others
1v1 no gods making either super sayan Ajax would yeet Diomedes into Ades

[Anonymous No.22990119]

>>22989936
or maybe anons first thread flopped so he made a new one?
also why is diomedes not depicted in pic related or known by the normies?
before reading the Iliad I knew everybody else except Diomedes and Sarpedon

[Anonymous No.22990123]

>>22989945
didn't Ajax KWAB himself becaust society doesn't support the troops (bottom text)?

[Anonymous No.22990143]

>>22989936
This entire website is botted.

[Anonymous No.22990147]

>>22990119
He only appears for some chapters of the Iliad. He doesn't takes a major role in the conflict or in the rest of the greeks.

[Anonymous No.22990164]

>>22989447
Diomedes fathered a dynasty. The Iliad was performed by bards with drone instruments and included improvisation. Why are the Trojans and Achaeans portrayed without moral assertions or prejudging? Because this ballad was performed to people who had descended from these heros in both Greece and Anatolia. Why is Diomedes a badass? There probably was a warrior who chimped out and his deeds were exaggerated.

[Anonymous No.22990172]

>>22990164
*These bards were performing to kings usually too, just so you know

You should ask why Sarpadon is treated so well and heroically - it's because descendants of him (Kings in Lucia) would want to hear about their ancestor in the Trojan war and a bard would positively portray him.

[Anonymous No.22990197]

>>22990119
Diomedes isn’t really central to the plot so it is easy to exclude him. He is a great fighter even against deities but your pic related is an adaptation which takes all the deities and demigods out so it also makes sense to take out Diomedes.

[Anonymous No.22990232]

>>22990197
One of the best books is Odysseus and Diomedes killing the Thracians in their sleep, stealing their horses, and interrogating a Trojan spy who was promised Achilles stallions. I will never forgive that adaptation for killing Menelaus and Ajax and taking the best bits out. You don't even need gods for Diomedes Aristeia, you just need him killing people while rampaging across the battle in a chariot.

[Anonymous No.22990241]

>>22990232
Yes, that is in book ten. I just finished reading that scene. I definitely see why they didn’t include it in the movie because having your heroes murder a bunch of unarmed men in their sleep is one of those things seen as horrifying to the modern person but which was simply a fact of life in antiquity. Looking to big budget Hollywood movies to properly portray Homeric ethics in a non-judgmental light would be a feat of Diomedean proportions.

[Anonymous No.22990255]

>>22990241
Right, I love Hector, and I think he's a fascinating character, but they have him stop fighting once he kills Patroclus and totally remove the fight over the shining bronze armor. The trash talking and self aggrandizement that Homeric heroes do is great, but you're right, it's totally alien to a modern audience.

[Anonymous No.22990262]

>>22990232
Best part of that story is when Diomedes slices the spies head off and Homer describes the falling head's lips still moving as it fell.

[Anonymous No.22990282]

>>22990255
The duality in the original poem is between Paris stealing Helen from Menelaus and also Agamemnon stealing Briseis from Achilles. These two events push forward the plot and they mirror each other. The fighting at Troy over the woman is the same as the fighting between Greeks over the women. To me, the biggest blunder of all in the movie was Agamemnon saying “I am not here for Helen or my brother. I am here to take Troy.” That just completely ruins what the poem is about. It’s not about the city of Ilion itself. It is about the personalities who existed and drove the events of the war to occur.

[Anonymous No.22990330]

>>22990282
In a way, I understand that characterization of Agamemnon. He sacrificed his own daughter to go to Troy but it does ruin the fact that they left Argos because they swore an oath to protect Helen. Removing the gods also ruins the contrast between Apollo and godlike Achilles. Homer only uses the word μενιν for Achilles and Apollo (the word is a kind of taboo wrath that only gods have). Just in the same way Apollo kills Achaeans with disease from his bow, Achilles kills the Trojans is likened more to a natural force than a man. That u understand removing from the movie, but the savagery and otherworldliness of the thinking of the ancient Greeks could still be portrayed in cinema if it were more dreamlike and artsy.

[Anonymous No.22990351]

>>22989447
Yet the Greeks still wouldn’t have won without Achilles. Diomedes’ virtue entirely depends on his. If anything, as others have pointed out, he is simply a narrative vehicle.

[Anonymous No.22990399]

>>22990147
he s literally the most badass character in the entire epic and probably the main character in the first half

[Anonymous No.22990402]

>>22989917
>Minerva
>Zeus
Nigga

[Anonymous No.22990422]

>>22989447
It's a demonstration of the power of the gods, like more or less everything in Greek literature.

[Anonymous No.22990434]

>>22989447
He’s just the hulk of the Homeric universe. A strong brute.

[Anonymous No.22990456]

>>22990434
He's more like the manlet of the group. He's described as the shortest of the Achaean heroes but very skilled in "warcraft / spear). I believe Ajax and Achilles are some of the largest Achaean warriors and Hector is the largest Trojan.

[Anonymous No.22990472]

>>22990456
> He's more like the manlet of the group
So Wolverine

[Anonymous No.22990537]

>>22990399
But he doesnt appears on The Odyssey (Maybe in one line) or in any other greek tragedy/comedy which most characters do.

[Anonymous No.22990546]

>>22990241
What movie?

[Anonymous No.22990563]

>>22990537
Probably because his ancestors colonized Italy instead of him returning home. A lot of literary figures in the Iliad had descendants in Greece and Anatolia and would be favorite based off of the location.

[Anonymous No.22990573]

>>22990456
Lends credence to the idea that his character is intended primarily as a vessel/protege of Athena.

[Anonymous No.22990580]

>>22989945
Lol
Lmao
Diomedes is the strongest after Achilles.

Diomedes, Achilles and Ulysses are the most important Greeks.

[Anonymous No.22990605]

>>22989945
Reread the chapters on the contests at Patroclus' funeral. Ajax loses a wrestling match to Odysseus and Diomedes Beats Ajax in the chariot race.

[Anonymous No.22990633]

>>22990580
nuh huh bitch
>Αἴας, ὃς περὶ μὲν εἶδος, περὶ δ’ ἔργα τέτυκτο
>τῶν ἄλλων Δαναῶν μετ’ ἀμύμονα Πηλεΐωνα
>...for Ajax, foremost of all the Danaans after the son of Peleus alike in stature and prowess

[Anonymous No.22990637]

>>22990580
He's important but in an isolated way, both of his main episodes have been flagged as possible grafted-on additions to the core story. Ajax is clearly more important to the main storyline, being the one who injures Hector and who repels the Trojans from the ships.
As I said above, the evidence seems to point towards Diomedes' relevance being very specifically about Athena's patronage (in her aspect as warcraft specifically, as opposed to Odysseus who embodies more general wisdom).

[Anonymous No.22990648]

>>22990637
I would say Diomedes style of fighting is much more reminiscent with anachronistic elements of the Iliad and more archaic bronze age warfare - because he fights primarily from a chariot

[Anonymous No.22990672]

>>22990648
Yeah I know this is an angle people take about the Iliad though I don't know much about the specifics, it could certainly be that the additions were separate works written before the main story.

[Anonymous No.22990687]

>>22990119
No, it is a plot by the matrix

[Anonymous No.22990712]

>>22990672
A lot of the stories in the Iliad and Odyssey are shared in the Mahabharata. I think the stories are an amalgamation of archaic bronze age warfare and Greek dark ages. In the Mahabharata a god returns home, restrings an unstringable bow, shoots through axe handles, and kills suitors just like Odysseus so the mythological elements could be drawn from all kinds of epics.

[Anonymous No.22990727]

>>22990712
I had no idea about this, I knew they had bards who were somewhat similar to the Homeric bards but that's really cool, thank you.

[Anonymous No.22990751]

>>22990727
There's a lot of cool stuff about that time period. We have the Iliad and Odyssey but we're missing 6 other texts from that series - which we may recover with scanning old library texts at Pompe. The Mahabharata is about 10 times as long as the Iliad but it features a war with the gods really similar to the Iliad, with a god choosing to sit out the fighting because his honor was slighted and he only fightd when his friend is killed by his rival. The bardic tradition is likely extremely old.

[Anonymous No.22990799]

>>22990751
Those are generally considered lesser works tbf and we have at least outlines of some of them, but it would be awesome to have the originals, to the extent that you can really single out an "original" for this sort of thing (also they're partially preserved, there's some fragments of Stesichorus' version of the Sack of Troy, dealing with the Trojan Horse).
I've been scared off from the Mahabharata by all the accretion of later additions but I do hope to make my way through an abridgment at some point, that's really crazy that it's so similar though, makes me wonder if the tales came with the Indo-Europeans to Greece originally or if they were transmitted at some later date between different cultures (e.g. the Hittites could maybe have served as an Indo-European bridge? There's a book about Hittite myths I downloaded a while ago, I wonder if they have anything comparable). Or perhaps, since the date of the Mahabharata is potentially post-Alexander, they got these elements from the Greek stories themselves?

[Anonymous No.22990918]

>>22990580
>Ulysses

[Anonymous No.22990930]

>>22990727
The descendants of the Proto-Indo-European poetic tradition are found in all Indo-European languages. Ireland has a very well documented one, for example, complete with an analogous concept to kleos deriving from the same PIE root.

Anyways Diomedes was a prophet in the religions of large amounts of Greece which is why he has to be so cool. tl;dr y'know how Athena lights a fire in his head so that he can see reality as it truly is? She never puts it out.

[Anonymous No.22990936]

>>22990546
Troy with Brad Pitt. The one he posted.

[Anonymous No.22990940]

>>22990637
>both of his main episodes have been flagged as possible grafted-on additions to the core story
Where can I learn more about stuff like this? What are some good books about the writing of the Illiad?

[Anonymous No.22990993]

>>22990930
it makes sense, I'm just surprised I'd never heard of such a clear specific example before. Know anything about primary sources for the Irish stuff? I've looked into it briefly and it seems to all be prose versions which I'm still interested in but it sucks that the poems themselves couldn't be preserved.

>>22990940
Well, the specific wiki citation about the aristeia comes from D. B. Monro, and the one about the Doloneia is from a scholiast. Generally just the books contained in the bibliography of a wiki page for something as important as the Iliad will give you more information than you could ever want to know about it, and each entry in that bibliography will have its own bibliography, etc., so it just self-replicates from there and you're good to go. As for what to start with, I don't know, I haven't spent much time on this particular topic, but if you look at the "Date and Textual History" section of the Iliad's wiki article it mentions a bunch of scholars, Gregory Nagy seems like he might be the one who's most directly focused on what you're asking about.

[Anonymous No.22991001]

>>22990993
Thank you anon! I'm going to dive deep down that rabbit hole tonight.

[Anonymous No.22991010]

>>22991001
Np, sounds like fun although I'm sure they've found a lot more questions than answers.

[Anonymous No.22991015]

>>22990712
You said this in my /his/ thread the other day on Rockall island being Plutarch’s possible location for Ogygia. I don’t really have anything to add to your contribution nor do I wish to dispute it. I just wanted to say Hi!

[Anonymous No.22991016]

>>22991001
>>22991010
Also I'll plug "The East Face of Helicon" by M. L. West who's pretty big in this field, it's been called biased but I just like how it calls attention to lesser-known influences.

[Anonymous No.22991229]

>>22991015
Hi anon! You're browsing good boards :)

[Anonymous No.22991422]

>>22990940
The introduction in the Penguin Classics book of the Iliad has a bit on this theory. Basically the idea is that the Achilles vs Hector battle (books 12 to 18 iirc) were their own standalone poem first and then everything else came later during the Iron Age. The evidence for this theory is incredibly dubious in my opinion.

[Anonymous No.22991443]

>>22991422
That's not really the same as saying individual books were interpolations, statements like the latter are extremely commonplace in philology.

[Anonymous No.22992215]

>>22990456
Ajax's little bow brother is probably shoter

[Anonymous No.22992696]

>>22990119
Man, Sarpedon is my favourite on the Trojan side.

[Anonymous No.22993009]

>>22992696
I like Aeneas best, a descendant of Zeus and of the line of the original founders of Troy, including Ganymede and other mythological figures. Sarpedon is pretty cool too, and an actual direct son of Zeus, but I like Aeneas because of his Roman epic counterpart (even if it were a later invention by Virgil).

[Anonymous No.22993035]

>>22990993
There is a book I have that lists all the similarities between the Iliad, Mahabharata, and between various Celtic myths. I will have to look at the cover for the name when I get home from work. I believe it is Talisman's Map or something like that. The book can be very tedious but the book is insanely thick and full of parallel story telling in those mythologies. Celtic mythology is actually quite close to Greek mythology, even more so than I ever expected.

[Anonymous No.22993192]

>>22993009
I'd have to reread the Aeneid because I only read it once as a child and can't remember a thing. I do wonder whose ancestor Aeneas was "originally" supposed to be. The Etruscans maybe? The later Sicilians?
And speaking of sons of gods, I can't help but wonder whether Achilles was supposed to be the only demigod originally or what, considering there's so much fuss about his parentage via Thetis while you have children of Zeus, Aphrodite, Ares etc running around.

[Anonymous No.22993201]

>>22993192
It depends on what you count as demigods. There was a son of Hercules at Troy named Tolopelemos and Odysseus himself was grandson of Hermes and great-grandson of Zeus which is why he is called “Zeus loved” in the Odyssey.

[Anonymous No.22993399]

>>22990993
>Nagy's series of articles about Herakles and the Master Impression

[Anonymous No.22993405]

>>22993192
I think all the figures existed, and then we're mythologized. As far as sons of Zeus, I am on the fence as I think it is entirely likely an actual human can be declared a god after they die and his lineage may declare him a deity later on. There is an entire period of Mycenaean history where sons of Herakles are raiding the Peloponnes and an anochronistic appearance of Herakles where he founds the Olympic games and lived on a mountain in the Greek dark ages. Zeus was father of king Dardanius who founded Troy and his lineage were the leaders of the Trojans - almost every hero in the Iliad has mythological origins and i think a lot of Achaean and Dardanian family trees interweave. The question of God or not a god or a Demi God is extremely confusing.

[Anonymous No.22994019]

>>22993192
>>22993405
As with anything in a mythological age, it wasn't an exact science. You're overthinking it. There's the story about Thetis putting him in the fire, that could've been a later invention though, idk. It may also be that an immortal mother is supposed to impart more power than an immortal father. But it's just not that important of a question because no such reason was necessary, he could just as easily have been stronger because that's what the story was, full stop.
As for being considered gods after death, if people thought a particular mythical hero was connected to their homeland they would more likely than not sacrifice to said hero because hey why not, he might give you blessings and good fortune.
If anything it's the earlier myths (myths of earlier civilizations, that is) that make more sense, because they haven't been transmitted and repurposed multiple times across cultural boundaries.

>>22993035
Yeah ok I found it, Taliesin's Map. Looks amazing, thank you very much. Will be interesting because I've been doing a lot of reading on Bronze Age/ANE myths, so I feel like that and the PIE background will combine to give a more or less full picture of the origins of Greek myth.

>>22993399
This looks really interesting too, and probably serves as a good example of why we shouldn't look too hard for consistency and logic (a concept not yet invented) in myth, but also how historical study of myth can still be fruitful.

[Anonymous No.22994211]

>>22990605
more like Ajobber am i right ladies?

[Anonymous No.22994267]

>>22990633
Diomedes has the best feats, by far.
And in the end, Ulysses was the one who won the war with his treachery.

[Anonymous No.22994278]

>>22994267
It's pretty cool the Greeks don't have divine intervention as one of their foundation myths, but Odysseus' trickery. A lot of modern people don't realize Odysseus and Achilles were favorited over a lot of heroes by their aristocracy despite Odysseus' and Achilles' character flaws.

[Anonymous No.22994293]

>>22994278
You're trolling, right? Odysseus and Diomedes are vessels for Athena. Arete is the expression of the gods' favor. They were a warrior culture but during their foundational period they didn't entertain the idea that they could compete with the gods, that's literally the biggest theme throughout all of their literature.

>>22994267
See my second sentence above.

[Anonymous No.22994300]

>>22994019
>he could just as easily have been stronger because that's what the story was, full stop
Pretty much. I stopped wondering about the whys when I realised the answer is just "because". The super real answer was probably unknown to the singers as well and the listeners sure as hell didn't think about it.

[Anonymous No.22994375]

>>22994293
Yeah, the Odyssey is all about Odysseus not honoring Poseidon / him admitting he needs the gods but Odysseus' Trojan horse idea is an act of trickery, not divine intervention in a god causing an earthquake to knock down the walls. It's kind of a unique foundational myth to Greeks.

[Anonymous No.22994568]

>>22994375
It's a multilayered question. Ultimately, the Greeks would say, everything comes from the gods. If a man is intelligent, strong, talented, etc., his arete is god-given. But you're right that a story where the gods' will is accomplished through a human medium, rather than directly, begins to muddy the waters a little bit, begins to introduce subtle confusion. This can be seen most pointedly (no pun intended) in the other example you mention, that of Odysseus and Polyphemus, where it clearly *is* about an idea he had with no direct help from the gods. The horse is not a good example because our main source doesn't even mention Odysseus as being involved in the idea for the horse (there may be others that support your statement, idk).
The direct divine intervention you describe is also not as common as you might think, even in much earlier stories. In the Eridu creation myth of Sumer, it's the god of wisdom who advises their "Noah" on how to evade the flood caused by their chief god (we can see significant echoes of this in the Odyssey: the god of wisdom helps the favored hero navigate nautical danger caused by another god directly trying to kill him).

[Anonymous No.22996052]

>>22990930
Diomedes also had a hero cult.

[Anonymous No.22996980]

>>22993192
there was a prophecy that a very strong child will be born out of Thetis and that s why her Wedding was so important and Achilles is stronger than the other Demigods.

[Anonymous No.22997044]

Is Hercules the only mortal who could beat Achilles in a fight?