Would Zeus really care?
Only for no one else fucking them instead of him part
Zues: “By the way, if you hear anything from my bedroom that sounds like a swan being choked that’s fine.”
As if Zeus would have the courtesy to take things to the bedroom.
I thought Artemis was definitely ace?
Maybe it’s splitting hairs, but I recall the “chaste goddess of the hunt” and one of the three goddesses whom Aphrodite had no power. Additionally, goddess of healing, midwifery, and children. So I don’t know if the contemporary understanding of Ace matches that or not, as she is unaffected by love or lust.
To add to what krellor already mentioned: It’s hard to find one definitive image of a specific Greek deities, because they were worshipped over hundreds of years and not only in Greece, but also in Greek colonies (for example Sicily) and places that were heavily influenced by Greek culture (for example around the Black Sea). Most of these places had their own particular interpretation of what a Greek deity was or wasn’t.
So it was no contradiction that Artemis could be a “man hating, out lesbian” in one place and an “aro-ace ascetic” in another. Unlike in modern monotheism, there was no overarching dogma people could refer to and places often had their very own myths and stories about the deities. Only some of those have survived until today.
So our modern interpretation of Greek deities is something of a puzzle with many pieces missing and no way to confirm if the pieces that we have ever were part of the same picture in the first place.
That’s a good point. One of the things people struggle with I think is understanding the full scope of what was considered Greek and over what period of time. That and the competing representations of figures and the timeline of events means it really is like taking in a series of vignettes, each with its own take.
Stephen Fry did an excellent job making an updated and streamlined version of the mythology, effectively choosing from the myths what to accept as cannon in his retelling. If you haven’t read his books I would recommend them as being a wonderful story. He also narrated them himself on audible, which were also excellent.
experiencing no sexual attraction no matter if one is sex-repulsed or sex-positive still lands you somewhere in the ace spectrum. and tbh you don’t need to have kids of your own to be a midwife, or just in general care about them
Yes, but what about love? As in, the emotion? Because Artemis is supposed to be unaffected by love, hence one of the three the goddess of love, Aphrodite, had no power over. But being ace doesn’t preclude someone from being in love.
Then she is also aromantic
Right. It just seems worth pointing out specifically rather than just using the term ace like the thread OP, because lumping those together doesn’t seem fair to ace folks. And at least for people like me who have read a lot of the Greek mythology, her aromantic nature is at least, if not more prominent in her personality than her chaste nature.
Is ace short for asexual? Im not hip with the lingo
Yes
thank you!
She could be interpreted that way
Greece was an extremely patriarchal society where a woman’s sexuality wasn’t acknowledged without reference to their husband. If a woman’s sexuality is mentioned without mentioning her husband, it was meant to be a sly way of calling her a whore.
Pretty much all ancient Greek men saw women as being devoid of sexual wants or needs until they married a man. Anything outside of that was considered as engaging in fellate aka “playing the whore”.
So any unmarried woman of high standing would have been described by “respectful” men at the time as someone we would recognize as Ace today.
A lot of modern interpretations of ancient Greece come from a lack of historical context, namely that the men at the time were unimaginably sexist. Sexist in an extreme that really just doesn’t exist in modernity.
Considering this is ancient GREECE (one of the gayest countries ever) we’re talking about, there has to be a story of a woman attempting to court her.
Ancient Greece was very gay, but only for the men. There are very few surviving accounts of female sexuality in general, let alone female homosexuality. The men of ancient Greece only documented female sexuality in a context that served to further explain a man’s story. Sappho’s writings on the island of lesbos is one of the single historical account from ancient Greece that alludes to female homosexuality.
I think people forget how patriarchal ancient Greece was. Of course there were likely plenty of lesbian relationships at the time, but they wouldn’t have been acknowledged, let alone celebrated by the people of the time.
Western history likes to celebrate the liberal aspirations of the ancient Greek. However, in actuality ancient Greek society was run by patriarchal slavers, who treated anyone who wasn’t a wealthy male Greek aristocrat like property.
Almost all the gods did was fuck. I doubt he’d buy it.
My understanding of the classical concept of sex was that yes, sex was specifically the penetrative act, so it’s entirely possible Zeus and Bros couldn’t fathom what mischief women could get to on their own.
Artemis could totally go to Funkytown with her huntress desciples all she wanted without affecting her virtue, or brother Apollo feeling jealous. (That whole affair with Orion was, according to OSP, a Victorian era fantasy, with no prior primary sources.)
