Fic: "Manslayer"
Jan. 10th, 2006 03:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amari_zTitle: Manslayer
Warnings: None
Notes: For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
fanfic100 prompt 1 "Beginnings." Claim is for Patroklos, from Greek mythology. My table is here. For the curious or bored, notes regarding this fic appear at the end of the story. General notes are here. However one note feels like it should be made up front: "Ligyron" is Achilleus' childhood name.
Cleitonymus, who was ten, always liked to act like he knew so much more than Patroklos. Today, when they met by the stone bench in the deserted courtyard (the sun god's chariot was high in the sky, and the adults were all inside sleeping), Cleitonymus had managed to bring with him a pair of dice and a jug of wine, and then pretended that having such things was nothing unusual.
Patroklos eyed the proffered jug uneasily. His father only let him have wine when it was well mixed with water (and Patroklos always made him put in lots of honey too, because, really, Patroklos thought it tasted pretty vile).
"Don't be such a baby," Cleitonymus taunted. "If you don't drink it, I'll have to find someone older to play with."
Patroklos frowned, and took the jug. As much as he sometimes did not like Cleitonymus, Cleitonymus was one of the few boys around his age with whom his father would let him play. So Patroklos took a cautious sip and then coughed as it burned his throat. Cleitonymus laughed, which made Patroklos clench his fists. He was seven, not a baby. He didn't like to be laughed at.
"Okay, let's play." Cleitonymus rattled the dice in his hand.
"I don't know how," Patroklos admitted reluctantly. "Why don't we do something else? We can be the Argonauts, I'll be my father and—"
"That's for little kids. I want to play dice. What do you have as a wager?"
Patroklos didn't have anything, and shrugged, feeling sullen. He wanted to run and shout, not stay cooped up in the courtyard throwing stupid bits of bone around.
"How about your brooch?"
Patroklos's hand went up automatically to cover it. His father had given it to him. It was made of intricately worked bronze and gold and it shone like the polished metal of his father's sword. It was his favorite thing—except the bronze dagger he wasn't allowed to carry with him yet.
"No." Patroklos drew down his eyebrows in an imitation of his father when he was angry. He was not even allowed to unpin the brooch himself. The last time he had been caught playing with it, he had been punished.
"Come on. I'll bet my brooch too." Patroklos eyed Cleitonymus’s brooch. It wasn't as nice at all.
"No! I don't want to." Shouting made him realize his head felt strange-- too tight? or maybe too loose?—and his stomach churned a little. He wondered if he would throw up. If he did, he decided he would aim for Cleitonymus’s chiton.
"We'll bet them then—my brooch for yours," Cleitonymus said in an infuriatingly fake grown up tone and he cast the dice down onto the stone of the bench before Patroklos could stop him.
"I said I didn't want to!"
"It's too late, once I've thrown the dice. That’s the rule. Father Zeus gets angry at cheaters, you know."
"I'm not a cheater!" Patroklos shook his strangely heavy head, but glanced uneasily up at the sky. Would the God really think that he was cheating? He peered at the dice.
"Just throw them." Cleitonymus smirked at him, knowing that Patroklos still was not that good at adding numbers.
Patroklos scowled and reluctantly picked up the small cubes. He did not want to be a cheater, so he cast the dice down onto the bench. He squinted at them, trying to count, but Cleitonymus snatched them up. "Hey! I was looking!"
"Too bad, you lost. Are you too stupid to count?"
"I can count! I didn't lose." In fact, though, Patroklos wasn't sure if he had lost or won, but what he was pretty sure that it was Cleitonymus who was the cheater. "I'm not playing with you anymore!"
Cleitonymus sneered. "Too late, baby. Give me the brooch." Cleitonymus held out his hand.
"No! It's mine!" Patroklos leaped to his feet and covered the brooch protectively with both hands while Cleitonymus jumped up and reached for him, trying to pry Patroklos's hands away. Patroklos clutched desperately, but the older boy was bigger and stronger, and Patroklos knew he could not win. But then something sparked in him, something hot and fierce, something heady and brilliant, and he let go of the brooch and shoved the other boy as hard as he could.
Cleitonymus stumbled backward and lost his balance. He fell, cracking his head against the edge of the bench. Then he was on the ground.
Patroklos, panting, stood over the bigger boy and knew a moment of pure, shinning exultation.
But the rush of pride faded quickly. The other boy did not get up. Even when Patroklos said his name, Cleitonymus only stared at the sky with unblinking eyes. There was red blood smeared on the bench edge and pooling under his head.
~
The world seemed to be covered in a soft, grey fog. Patroklos barely remembered leaving his house at Opous, or the ride that followed, although he knew they had happened. The had arrived at the house of his father’s kinsman, Peleus, in Phthia and then Patroklos had spent what felt like days with priests and baths and strange smelling smoke. But now, the priests had let him go.
King Peleus's hall was strange and large and Patroklos longed for the familiar rooms of his father's house. He dared not complain though. It was his fault he and his father had to flee and come here to Phthia. Everything was his fault, even if the priests said they had made him clean again.
Father told him that he was not angry, although Patroklos could not see how that could be true. But he was his father's only son, so he supposed his father had to like him. Before, he had wanted brothers to play with, but he should probably be grateful now that he had never gotten any.
Once the priests had said he could go, Father had taken him to see King Peleus. It had taken Patroklos a long moment to make the connection between the smiling king and the stern-faced man who had presided over part of the purification ceremony. King Peleus had patted him on the head and told Patroklos that his daughter, Polymele, who had been Father’s wife and, briefly, Patroklos’s mother before she had died, had loved him as her own child. He told Patroklos that from now on he would be Patroklos’s other father.
His own father had smiled, very pleased; Patroklos was not sure what one did with a second father. He did not really remember Polymele, either, but he did not want to say that to the cheerful king. Father only told him that King Peleus was favored by the gods and that he was the best man alive, so Patroklos should be good in his house.
Despite King Peleus telling Patroklos that he was welcome, everywhere else Patroklos went, he felt invisible. No one but the slaves talked to him, and people's eyes slid away when he looked at them. Sometimes, Patroklos wondered if he had become a shade, just like Cleitonymus.
Unlike at home, here there were a lot of other boys living here. Like their elders, they also seemed not to see him, although they whispered behind their hands--things like "murderer" and "exile." Patroklos did not get mad about it. He had decided he would never get mad again. And it was true after all. He didn't want any more friends anyway—look what he had done to the last one.
So Patroklos drifted through the halls, invisible and thinking of Cleitonymus who was now dwelling in the House of Death. Sometimes Patroklos could not sleep at night because he wondered about things like if the dead slept or if Cleitonymus had made friends in Hades' realm who would play with him there or if he wanted to go home, just like Patroklos did.
Because everything seemed so dull and distant and because Patroklos spent most of his time thinking about Cleitonymus, it took him a while to realize that, beside his father and King Peleus (and the household slaves, but they did not count), there was one other person to whom he was not invisible. It was the king's son, Prince Ligyron. When Patroklos met his eyes, Ligyron did not look away, but just kept staring, like a wild animal might. So Patroklos stared back. Ligyron had hair the color of fire. Patroklos had never seen hair that color before. In a world that had been so grey and colorless, Ligyron’s hair was the brightest thing Patroklos had ever seen.
After that, Patroklos began to pay a little more attention. Watching, he saw that Ligyron, like Patroklos, did not play with any of the other boys. The difference was that the other boys called for Ligyron to join them with loud, cheerful voices, but, still, Ligyron never seemed interested in playing with them.
Instead, Ligyron wandered where he pleased. He left his father's palace whenever he wanted, always alone. No one ever seemed to try to stop him or to chide him afterwards, even when he came home with his clothes muddy and torn. In truth, even the slaves, who would reprimand Patroklos when he got his clothes dirty or did not eat his meals, seemed unwilling to say anything to Ligyron when he tracked mud all over the floors. Watching Ligyron come and go with all the freedom that a wild thing might have, Patroklos began to wonder where Ligyron went and what he did there. Sometimes, when he wondered, Patroklos even forgot to think about Cleitonymus for a little while.
The other boys whispered about Ligyron too. Listening to them, while pretending not to, Patroklos learned that Ligyron’s mother was a goddess. Patroklos also began to realize that the other boys were afraid of Ligyron. Ligyron was stronger, faster and smarter than them, and he grew more quickly. Patroklos had been surprised when he heard that the prince had just had his fifth birthday (on which King Peleus had given him the man's dagger he wore so proudly). Ligyron was already bigger and taller than Patroklos. But then Patroklos remembered that the baby god Hermes had stolen Apollo’s cattle on the very day he was born. Patroklos had always liked that story. He supposed that being half divine, Ligyron could grow up faster than a regular boy.
One day, Patroklos was squatting in the courtyard in front of the king's hall, watching Helios's light flash over his brooch as he turned it from side to side, when Ligyron appeared and sat beside him. He didn't say a word, just watched Patroklos with eyes that didn't seem to blink. Ligyron's eyes, Patroklos realized, as he looked up to meet them at last, were shinning gold, like a lion's.
Patroklos met those fierce eyes levelly. "Why do you look at me?" Patroklos asked bluntly.
The gold eyes just continued to stare. "You're not afraid of me," the other boy said at last.
"Oh." It seemed a fair enough reason. Patroklos had realized that he was not scared of much now—he was already a murderer, so what was left to be scared of? Patroklos returned his attention to his brooch.
There was a long silence before Patroklos finally asked something he had been thinking hard about. "Is it true, what they say? Your mother bathed you in the River Styx, so nothing can hurt you now?"
"I was a baby, but Mother says so. Father says she put me in the fire, though. But look." Ligyron pulled his sharp bronze dagger from his side and pressed it against his palm. No blood flowed.
Patroklos stared, awed. Ligyron offered him the blade and held out his hand. Patroklos first tested the dagger against his own thumb and watched the bright blood well up. He then ran the sharp edge against Ligyron's skin. Nothing. He looked up into Ligyron's eyes and, for the first time since Cleitonymus had died, Patroklos smiled. Fierce Ligyron, oddly tentative, smiled back.
He could allow himself to be friends with this boy, Patroklos decided. He looked down at Ligyron's unblemished skin, unmarked by blood. He could be friends with Ligyron, for nothing Patroklos might do could ever hurt him.
Notes
In the Iliad, the shade of Patroklos appears to Achilleus and requests that his own bones be interred with those of Achilleus:
just as we grew up together in your house,
When Menoitios brought me there from Opous, when I was little,
and into your house, by reason of baneful manslaying,
on that day when I killed the son of Amphidamas. I was
a child only, nor intended it, but was angered over a dice game.
There the rider Peleus took me into his own house,
and brought me carefully me up, and named me to be your henchman.
(Lattimore 23:84-90.) Apollodorus gives Amphidamas’s son’s name as Cleitonymus (3.13.8), although he is named as Aeanes by Strabo (Geography 9.4.2.)
Ligyron is the childhood name of Achilleus, who was given the name “Achilleus” by Cheiron, according to Apollodorus. (3.13.) I have not followed Apollodorous’ account in other ways, which will (hopefully) be discussed later (but for example Apollodorous suggests that Achilleus was sent to Cheiron when he was a baby, which I have ignored), but I am intrigued by the idea that Cheiron named Achilleus, so I have shamelessly cherry-picked what I like.
Menoitios is the name of Patroklos’s father. He was one of the Argonauts who accompanied Jason in the quest for the golden fleece (as was Peleus, father of Achilleus). Who exactly Patroklos’s mother was is unclear. Homer does not say; Apollodorus offers three candidates, one of whom is Polymele, Peleus’s daughter (but not by Thetis). This idea disturbed me a bit (although it really should not given that this is Greek mythology), so I made her a stepmother.
The god Hermes--who, among his other attributes, was the god of thieves--on the very day he was born, snuck out of cradle and devised a clever scheme to steal the cattle of his brother Apollo. Apollo eventually caught on, and after the baby Hermes told some clever lies, but was caught, the two reconciled when Hermes gifted Apollo with the lyre he had also invented on his birth day.
Helios is the god of the sun. He rides his golden chariot across the sky each day.
Achilleus’ invulnerability
Achilleus’ mother, the goddess Thetis, is said to have dipped her infant son into the dark waters of the River Styx (one of the rivers in the underworld) in order to give him invulnerability. She, however, held him by the heel, and forgot to reimmerse him so his heel could be wetted. Thus, Achilleus’ famous weakness.
In a lesser known version, Thetis tried to make her half-human son immortal by applying ambrosia to him during the day and at night putting him into fire, thus hoping burn away his human side and make him immortal like herself. However, his father, Peleus, saw her one night and, not understanding her purpose, snatched the writhing child out of the fire. In anger, Thetis left Peleus‘s house. (Apollodorus 3.13.) In some versions of this myth, Thetis had in fact killed her six other children by Peleus by burning them in fire (or throwing them into boiling water) either to send their immortal souls to the god’s home on Olympus or to find out if any where immortal. Achilleus alone was saved by his father.
Homer does not reference any of these stories (although Thetis appears to live in her father‘s palace under the sea, while Peleus live alone in Phthia, but Homer also has Thetis suggest that she would have received Achilleus at Peleus’s hall if he returned from Troy). Homer makes no mention of Achilleus being invulnerable.
Warnings: None
Notes: For
fanfic100 prompt 1 "Beginnings." Claim is for Patroklos, from Greek mythology. My table is here. For the curious or bored, notes regarding this fic appear at the end of the story. General notes are here. However one note feels like it should be made up front: "Ligyron" is Achilleus' childhood name.Cleitonymus, who was ten, always liked to act like he knew so much more than Patroklos. Today, when they met by the stone bench in the deserted courtyard (the sun god's chariot was high in the sky, and the adults were all inside sleeping), Cleitonymus had managed to bring with him a pair of dice and a jug of wine, and then pretended that having such things was nothing unusual.
Patroklos eyed the proffered jug uneasily. His father only let him have wine when it was well mixed with water (and Patroklos always made him put in lots of honey too, because, really, Patroklos thought it tasted pretty vile).
"Don't be such a baby," Cleitonymus taunted. "If you don't drink it, I'll have to find someone older to play with."
Patroklos frowned, and took the jug. As much as he sometimes did not like Cleitonymus, Cleitonymus was one of the few boys around his age with whom his father would let him play. So Patroklos took a cautious sip and then coughed as it burned his throat. Cleitonymus laughed, which made Patroklos clench his fists. He was seven, not a baby. He didn't like to be laughed at.
"Okay, let's play." Cleitonymus rattled the dice in his hand.
"I don't know how," Patroklos admitted reluctantly. "Why don't we do something else? We can be the Argonauts, I'll be my father and—"
"That's for little kids. I want to play dice. What do you have as a wager?"
Patroklos didn't have anything, and shrugged, feeling sullen. He wanted to run and shout, not stay cooped up in the courtyard throwing stupid bits of bone around.
"How about your brooch?"
Patroklos's hand went up automatically to cover it. His father had given it to him. It was made of intricately worked bronze and gold and it shone like the polished metal of his father's sword. It was his favorite thing—except the bronze dagger he wasn't allowed to carry with him yet.
"No." Patroklos drew down his eyebrows in an imitation of his father when he was angry. He was not even allowed to unpin the brooch himself. The last time he had been caught playing with it, he had been punished.
"Come on. I'll bet my brooch too." Patroklos eyed Cleitonymus’s brooch. It wasn't as nice at all.
"No! I don't want to." Shouting made him realize his head felt strange-- too tight? or maybe too loose?—and his stomach churned a little. He wondered if he would throw up. If he did, he decided he would aim for Cleitonymus’s chiton.
"We'll bet them then—my brooch for yours," Cleitonymus said in an infuriatingly fake grown up tone and he cast the dice down onto the stone of the bench before Patroklos could stop him.
"I said I didn't want to!"
"It's too late, once I've thrown the dice. That’s the rule. Father Zeus gets angry at cheaters, you know."
"I'm not a cheater!" Patroklos shook his strangely heavy head, but glanced uneasily up at the sky. Would the God really think that he was cheating? He peered at the dice.
"Just throw them." Cleitonymus smirked at him, knowing that Patroklos still was not that good at adding numbers.
Patroklos scowled and reluctantly picked up the small cubes. He did not want to be a cheater, so he cast the dice down onto the bench. He squinted at them, trying to count, but Cleitonymus snatched them up. "Hey! I was looking!"
"Too bad, you lost. Are you too stupid to count?"
"I can count! I didn't lose." In fact, though, Patroklos wasn't sure if he had lost or won, but what he was pretty sure that it was Cleitonymus who was the cheater. "I'm not playing with you anymore!"
Cleitonymus sneered. "Too late, baby. Give me the brooch." Cleitonymus held out his hand.
"No! It's mine!" Patroklos leaped to his feet and covered the brooch protectively with both hands while Cleitonymus jumped up and reached for him, trying to pry Patroklos's hands away. Patroklos clutched desperately, but the older boy was bigger and stronger, and Patroklos knew he could not win. But then something sparked in him, something hot and fierce, something heady and brilliant, and he let go of the brooch and shoved the other boy as hard as he could.
Cleitonymus stumbled backward and lost his balance. He fell, cracking his head against the edge of the bench. Then he was on the ground.
Patroklos, panting, stood over the bigger boy and knew a moment of pure, shinning exultation.
But the rush of pride faded quickly. The other boy did not get up. Even when Patroklos said his name, Cleitonymus only stared at the sky with unblinking eyes. There was red blood smeared on the bench edge and pooling under his head.
~
The world seemed to be covered in a soft, grey fog. Patroklos barely remembered leaving his house at Opous, or the ride that followed, although he knew they had happened. The had arrived at the house of his father’s kinsman, Peleus, in Phthia and then Patroklos had spent what felt like days with priests and baths and strange smelling smoke. But now, the priests had let him go.
King Peleus's hall was strange and large and Patroklos longed for the familiar rooms of his father's house. He dared not complain though. It was his fault he and his father had to flee and come here to Phthia. Everything was his fault, even if the priests said they had made him clean again.
Father told him that he was not angry, although Patroklos could not see how that could be true. But he was his father's only son, so he supposed his father had to like him. Before, he had wanted brothers to play with, but he should probably be grateful now that he had never gotten any.
Once the priests had said he could go, Father had taken him to see King Peleus. It had taken Patroklos a long moment to make the connection between the smiling king and the stern-faced man who had presided over part of the purification ceremony. King Peleus had patted him on the head and told Patroklos that his daughter, Polymele, who had been Father’s wife and, briefly, Patroklos’s mother before she had died, had loved him as her own child. He told Patroklos that from now on he would be Patroklos’s other father.
His own father had smiled, very pleased; Patroklos was not sure what one did with a second father. He did not really remember Polymele, either, but he did not want to say that to the cheerful king. Father only told him that King Peleus was favored by the gods and that he was the best man alive, so Patroklos should be good in his house.
Despite King Peleus telling Patroklos that he was welcome, everywhere else Patroklos went, he felt invisible. No one but the slaves talked to him, and people's eyes slid away when he looked at them. Sometimes, Patroklos wondered if he had become a shade, just like Cleitonymus.
Unlike at home, here there were a lot of other boys living here. Like their elders, they also seemed not to see him, although they whispered behind their hands--things like "murderer" and "exile." Patroklos did not get mad about it. He had decided he would never get mad again. And it was true after all. He didn't want any more friends anyway—look what he had done to the last one.
So Patroklos drifted through the halls, invisible and thinking of Cleitonymus who was now dwelling in the House of Death. Sometimes Patroklos could not sleep at night because he wondered about things like if the dead slept or if Cleitonymus had made friends in Hades' realm who would play with him there or if he wanted to go home, just like Patroklos did.
Because everything seemed so dull and distant and because Patroklos spent most of his time thinking about Cleitonymus, it took him a while to realize that, beside his father and King Peleus (and the household slaves, but they did not count), there was one other person to whom he was not invisible. It was the king's son, Prince Ligyron. When Patroklos met his eyes, Ligyron did not look away, but just kept staring, like a wild animal might. So Patroklos stared back. Ligyron had hair the color of fire. Patroklos had never seen hair that color before. In a world that had been so grey and colorless, Ligyron’s hair was the brightest thing Patroklos had ever seen.
After that, Patroklos began to pay a little more attention. Watching, he saw that Ligyron, like Patroklos, did not play with any of the other boys. The difference was that the other boys called for Ligyron to join them with loud, cheerful voices, but, still, Ligyron never seemed interested in playing with them.
Instead, Ligyron wandered where he pleased. He left his father's palace whenever he wanted, always alone. No one ever seemed to try to stop him or to chide him afterwards, even when he came home with his clothes muddy and torn. In truth, even the slaves, who would reprimand Patroklos when he got his clothes dirty or did not eat his meals, seemed unwilling to say anything to Ligyron when he tracked mud all over the floors. Watching Ligyron come and go with all the freedom that a wild thing might have, Patroklos began to wonder where Ligyron went and what he did there. Sometimes, when he wondered, Patroklos even forgot to think about Cleitonymus for a little while.
The other boys whispered about Ligyron too. Listening to them, while pretending not to, Patroklos learned that Ligyron’s mother was a goddess. Patroklos also began to realize that the other boys were afraid of Ligyron. Ligyron was stronger, faster and smarter than them, and he grew more quickly. Patroklos had been surprised when he heard that the prince had just had his fifth birthday (on which King Peleus had given him the man's dagger he wore so proudly). Ligyron was already bigger and taller than Patroklos. But then Patroklos remembered that the baby god Hermes had stolen Apollo’s cattle on the very day he was born. Patroklos had always liked that story. He supposed that being half divine, Ligyron could grow up faster than a regular boy.
One day, Patroklos was squatting in the courtyard in front of the king's hall, watching Helios's light flash over his brooch as he turned it from side to side, when Ligyron appeared and sat beside him. He didn't say a word, just watched Patroklos with eyes that didn't seem to blink. Ligyron's eyes, Patroklos realized, as he looked up to meet them at last, were shinning gold, like a lion's.
Patroklos met those fierce eyes levelly. "Why do you look at me?" Patroklos asked bluntly.
The gold eyes just continued to stare. "You're not afraid of me," the other boy said at last.
"Oh." It seemed a fair enough reason. Patroklos had realized that he was not scared of much now—he was already a murderer, so what was left to be scared of? Patroklos returned his attention to his brooch.
There was a long silence before Patroklos finally asked something he had been thinking hard about. "Is it true, what they say? Your mother bathed you in the River Styx, so nothing can hurt you now?"
"I was a baby, but Mother says so. Father says she put me in the fire, though. But look." Ligyron pulled his sharp bronze dagger from his side and pressed it against his palm. No blood flowed.
Patroklos stared, awed. Ligyron offered him the blade and held out his hand. Patroklos first tested the dagger against his own thumb and watched the bright blood well up. He then ran the sharp edge against Ligyron's skin. Nothing. He looked up into Ligyron's eyes and, for the first time since Cleitonymus had died, Patroklos smiled. Fierce Ligyron, oddly tentative, smiled back.
He could allow himself to be friends with this boy, Patroklos decided. He looked down at Ligyron's unblemished skin, unmarked by blood. He could be friends with Ligyron, for nothing Patroklos might do could ever hurt him.
Notes
In the Iliad, the shade of Patroklos appears to Achilleus and requests that his own bones be interred with those of Achilleus:
just as we grew up together in your house,
When Menoitios brought me there from Opous, when I was little,
and into your house, by reason of baneful manslaying,
on that day when I killed the son of Amphidamas. I was
a child only, nor intended it, but was angered over a dice game.
There the rider Peleus took me into his own house,
and brought me carefully me up, and named me to be your henchman.
(Lattimore 23:84-90.) Apollodorus gives Amphidamas’s son’s name as Cleitonymus (3.13.8), although he is named as Aeanes by Strabo (Geography 9.4.2.)
Ligyron is the childhood name of Achilleus, who was given the name “Achilleus” by Cheiron, according to Apollodorus. (3.13.) I have not followed Apollodorous’ account in other ways, which will (hopefully) be discussed later (but for example Apollodorous suggests that Achilleus was sent to Cheiron when he was a baby, which I have ignored), but I am intrigued by the idea that Cheiron named Achilleus, so I have shamelessly cherry-picked what I like.
Menoitios is the name of Patroklos’s father. He was one of the Argonauts who accompanied Jason in the quest for the golden fleece (as was Peleus, father of Achilleus). Who exactly Patroklos’s mother was is unclear. Homer does not say; Apollodorus offers three candidates, one of whom is Polymele, Peleus’s daughter (but not by Thetis). This idea disturbed me a bit (although it really should not given that this is Greek mythology), so I made her a stepmother.
The god Hermes--who, among his other attributes, was the god of thieves--on the very day he was born, snuck out of cradle and devised a clever scheme to steal the cattle of his brother Apollo. Apollo eventually caught on, and after the baby Hermes told some clever lies, but was caught, the two reconciled when Hermes gifted Apollo with the lyre he had also invented on his birth day.
Helios is the god of the sun. He rides his golden chariot across the sky each day.
Achilleus’ invulnerability
Achilleus’ mother, the goddess Thetis, is said to have dipped her infant son into the dark waters of the River Styx (one of the rivers in the underworld) in order to give him invulnerability. She, however, held him by the heel, and forgot to reimmerse him so his heel could be wetted. Thus, Achilleus’ famous weakness.
In a lesser known version, Thetis tried to make her half-human son immortal by applying ambrosia to him during the day and at night putting him into fire, thus hoping burn away his human side and make him immortal like herself. However, his father, Peleus, saw her one night and, not understanding her purpose, snatched the writhing child out of the fire. In anger, Thetis left Peleus‘s house. (Apollodorus 3.13.) In some versions of this myth, Thetis had in fact killed her six other children by Peleus by burning them in fire (or throwing them into boiling water) either to send their immortal souls to the god’s home on Olympus or to find out if any where immortal. Achilleus alone was saved by his father.
Homer does not reference any of these stories (although Thetis appears to live in her father‘s palace under the sea, while Peleus live alone in Phthia, but Homer also has Thetis suggest that she would have received Achilleus at Peleus’s hall if he returned from Troy). Homer makes no mention of Achilleus being invulnerable.
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Date: 2006-03-29 06:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-29 05:04 pm (UTC)I debated quite a bit over the whole invulnerability issue, and in the end decided to go with it. Since I'm supposed to be writing a total of 100 stories (I think I have like 97 to go!), I thought the idea of invulnerablity would be interesting to explore.
Thanks for reading!
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Date: 2006-04-23 10:47 pm (UTC)It was a very stirring piece, and I hope you don't mind if I add it to my memories.
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Date: 2006-04-24 02:10 am (UTC)OMG, I can't believe I never noticed that I had used the wrong word. I only used the work 100 times. *headdesk* Thanks so much for pointing that out.
And I'm honored that you want to add it to your memories. Please feel free. There are other stories I'm working on about Patroklos, and so there will be more. (I'm supposed to write a hundred stories for fanfic100. We'll see if I ever get there-I've only written 3 so far. )
Thanks for reading!
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Date: 2006-11-20 07:37 am (UTC)He looked up into Ligyron's eyes and, for the first time since Cleitonymus had died, Patroklos smiled. Fierce Ligyron, oddly tentative, smiled back.
I loved this line!
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Date: 2006-11-20 05:46 pm (UTC)