The Aestheticization of Greek Myths
On April 20th, 2024, a tumblr user posted a screenshot of another post that read "that's shitty. We should make ancient Rome 2 where it's no slaves, consensual gay sex only, and women have equal rights" and replied to the screenshot by saying "I'm not sure you know what ancient rome is".
Aside from having a laugh at a silly take of more people idolizing Rome, user peasantexchangeprogram continued- "again shows the common practice of taking certain aesthetics at face value and reverse engineering whole cultures, ideas and ideals from them, and ignoring that historically, it usually worked the other way around. What do you MEAN ancient rome w/o slavery, child exploitation and misogyny. What's next. Roman empire 2 - no imperialism? Like what's the roman empire without imperialism, slavery, child exploitation and misogyny. Aesthetics? What aesthetics? Architecture? Sculpture? Clothing? Who's going to maintain them? Who's going to mix the cement? Mine for marble? Iron? Gems? Who's going to process fibers? Weave fabrics? Sew them? Who do you think was behind those aesthetics?"
This post summed up a lot of things I've been thinking about for a while. Even though this essay is about greek myths and the modern culture surrounding them, I think the same idea applies.
Lots of people were introduced to Greek myths through books like Percy Jackson in 2005 or other similar book series aimed at kids. In online circles they remain popular with teens and adults, often neurodivergent or queer, and everyone who had a greek myths phase back when they were children treat themselves as experts or close to experts in the subject, especially if they read a translation of the Iliad in high school.
I'm going to say something that I think is rare to be said on the internet: I am not any expert. This article is not a lesson on Greek myths or Greek history and should not be taken as one. This should be taken as an observation of a social trend over the last 10 or 20 years online but spans back to the British stealing and vandalizing Greek culture.
A lot of people have an idea of ancient Greece as this queer utopia, and it makes sense.
Queer people often look to find ourselves in history to give us some kind of connection that makes us feel valid. We want to be rooted in history, we want to say that queerness has been around forever, we want to feel like we have something to go back to. Ancient Greece has often been the subject of this. As videos like "The Messy Life of Chaotic Bisexual Lord Byron" by Kaz Rowe goes over, Greek history and myths are considered very homoerotic, either in the fact that it often explored relationships between men who were incredibly close or because the way they wrote and talked about each other was incredibly romantic, and many queer people found themselves while studying Greek classics, using the novel and later movie Maurice as an example. That's certainly one thing that hasn't changed since the early 1900s. People use Greek writing as a framework for understanding of themselves, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that.
Ancient Greece is often interpreted as queer for many other reasons- the poet Sappho being the main one. Again, I won't pretend I know much about her given that I haven't studied Greek classics or read any of her translations, what I know about her is more secondhand. I know she was a woman on the island of Lesbos who wrote poems about loving women and loved many women. I do know that because she lived so long ago and because our records are so old and have been translated so many times, there are questions over whether we should interpret her as lesbian or bisexual or if we should even use these words to describe people who clearly lived outside of our modern conceptions of sexuality. As I stated previously, this is not an article about Greek history or myths, this is about the modern culture surrounding it.
Outside of history, there have been many queer adaptations of Greek myths, most popular or famous being "Song of Achilles" by Madeline Miller. In all accounts it is a fantastic book that a lot of research went into, which can be demonstrated by how much she's said on twitter about something as simple as which words she used to describe Patrocles skin tone in accordance with how the ancient Greeks conceptualized color.
As the video "The Problem With Greek Myth Retellings" by Kate Alexandra goes over, writing adaptations or retellings of something as complicated as Greek myths is rough, especially if you're going into it with the idea that you're rewriting a Greek myth with the idea that you're fixing something that the original writers got wrong. That was her problem with "feminist retellings"- often they weren't much more feminist and in a way just erased the voices of women at the time. It seemed to her, though, that Miller came into it with a great love of the classics and attempted to write an alternate interpretation of Achilles and Patrocles relationship that was often overlooked or dismissed by other academics. While she did fall victim to the marginalized people speaking directly to the audience with Briseis, talking like they're writing a Tumblr PSA about women's rights and making the character feel like a preacher rather than, well, a character. Other than that, the book made some changes to make the protagonists more sympathetic and in order to tell a better story, but after watching that video and reading the book it was my opinion that Song of Achilles is a retelling(or alternate interpretation) of myth of the Trojan War that got it right. I think one of the reasons it's so good is that, for the most part, it is ancient Greece.
Aside from a few parts, it doesn't really implement modern understanding of sexuality onto historic characters. Although with it blowing up on TikTok, I wonder if that was lost on everyone.
I have my own grievances with BookTok- mostly that it often strips books down to an aesthetic of reading, is often very selective with the kind of books it reads, and as it's TikTok it's very algorithmist. I also think that with short form video content, the same way I feel about tweets, it limits the ability of people to share their thoughts on complex books aside from silly fandom things. While those are fun, it's irritating how little it seems that there is opportunity or attention given to analysis and complex understandings of fiction.
So queer people like to see themselves in ancient myths, often ones like Greek myths. While this does have some basis, the problem I start to have with it is when people begin to write their own interpretations of Greek history in an ahistorical way and get upset when people try to introduce nuance to the conversation.
Ancient Greece was not a queer utopia, and the myths around it weren't incredibly revolutionarily queer. The reason it's ridiculous that the origanal screenshotted post says
"rome 2" should have "consensual gay sex only" The "very queer history of ancient Greece" was very often unfortunately rape, child sexual abuse, or a political/class dynamic between men. The upper class man was the "top", the lower class man was the "bottom". And there's a reason it's laughable to make a "rome 2" without any misogyny! Women were effectively property of their husbands, and as the video on Greek retellings says, the only time they were permitted to be viewed in public was often when people saw their gravestones.
It's very tempting to romanticize Greek history. Those Instagram slideshows can be very beautiful, the Tumblr post with a quote from the Odyssey #dark academia is very attractive, the TikTok of a person in tweed and round glasses walking down an old European road surrounded by beautiful architecture described as greekgoddesscore is fun. Moodbords are fun to make and they look nice on your homescreen.
But it's self referential. When you strip Greece or Rome of its violent classism, imperialism, and misogyny, what do you have left? You can take everything away aside from the feeling you get when you look at old Greek structures, but then what do you have left?
A self referential aesthetic with no real meaning or attachment to the world. A nice post.
That's the process of aestheticization. Since Greek(and Roman) myths and histories are very rich and fascinating, it's natural that it won't be reserved for rich academics forever(and trust me, they have their own problem with how they treat other cultures, even the ones they say they respect and admire). As it becomes accessible to everyone, that means everyone is an expert.
"Percy Jackson's Greek Gods and Goddesses" is often people's only real exposure to the myths. And, as Kate Alexandra talks about, what do authors owe people reading their series? While anyone can write anything, shouldn't we hold it to a standard of being good or accurate to what it's trying to do? That's a bigger topic that I think could be an essay of it's own, but it's the same way I feel about the idea of writing about real world events in fiction, even if it is there to play a fictional role- authors have some kind of duty to not lie to the reader, even if it is the readers responsibility to check that they are not being misinformed and not blindly believe everything they're told.
It's important to remember that these myths were around long before they were transcribed, told through oral tradition, and they were real things people worshiped and still do to some extent. They were a real part of Greek history, not something silly that exists for entertainment purposes only.
The process of aestheticization as I conceive of it is the ways in which people take something beautiful but complicated, strip it of its meaning, and turn it into a handful of pretty pictures or something for consumption, and it's a very worrying phenomena.
I've seen it more closely happen to punk rock. Instead of being a music scene popularized by working class people with an aesthetic arising from that, from DIY anarcho punk to pop punks to hardcore to mo to skinheads, it seems as though it's now been a social group people want to get into in order to be cool. Whether or not you like the music or go to shows is considered irrelevant: it's an identity they want to project to others to symbolize how they want to be perceived. The same goes for the way people conceive of Greek and Roman "aesthetics", except it's not a group or a scene they're aestheticizing, but it's an entire culture.
People don't remember this is a real culture, sure, but they also don't think much of it beyond fun stories and beautiful collections of photos. When they do, it's only to fit an idea or a narrative.
I want to be careful to say I don't think aesthetics are inherently bad. They're fun and I do think they're an inevitable part of culture and society, but I think the process of turning something into an aesthetic with no meaning is where it becomes impossible to watch and not think it's such a waste.
Although it's not something I'm deep into, Greek culture and myths are incredibly interesting and there is so much content(for lack of a better word)- translated texts, books about the real mythology and its impact, books on it's history, videos and documentaries and podcasts and it's a shame people would settle for a hollow aesthetic of greek myths and culture over the increasingly accessibility to the real thing, messy complexities and realities and all.