I’m in the midst of several large tasks at the moment, both devotional (in terms of trying to finish the Devotio Antinoo book), work-related, and also administrative in other respects–getting in proposals for conferences and anthologies in the near future, etc. As a result, there was likely not going to be enough mental space to make a decent, lengthier post on the blog today about something of useful substance, or even of something lighter, a real possibility today.
So, I had hoped to just rely on my earlier idea of the Homo Bonus series to get me through. And, I got out the reliable ol’ Cassell’s and did my bibliomancy…and, three times, came up with pages that had no Greek, Roman, or Egyptian figures on them whatsoever. So, I paged around, and finally found one on an adjacent page, and it turned out…the persons referred to really have no definite traditions attached to them of being homoerotic or gender-atypical. So, I paged through and tried to find another, and got one that turned out to be listed (after subsequent looking about) as only attested in Ptolemy Chennos’ work. Ptolemy Chennos has a really good track record of having obscure, singly-attested episodes of homoeroticism. And, this one wasn’t one of them, and in fact there’s nothing to indicate anything homoerotic about it at all (which is all the more sad, because it was a winged child of Achilleus and Helen from when they got married on the Isles of the Blessed! The kid’s name was Euphorion, by the way…but I found nothing about him rejecting Zeus, or Zeus falling in love with him, or anything–only that Zeus killed him, rather randomly…).
Which, all things considered, is really bad luck on my part. I am glad that I’m as thorough and careful in my researches as I happen to be, but at the same time, I deprived myself of four or five possible posts if I had just gone with what the Cassell’s happened to say on those figures. Alas…
So, this is putting the kybosh on my entire idea a bit. I’ll keep trying in the future, but I can’t guarantee the series will be as long or as interesting and varied as I had hoped, alas.
In the meantime, have this:
