Characters who are almost absent from a work named after them

Cafe Society
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The Greek myths are a source of never-ending wonder to me. Sometimes they are wonderfully thought out stories, with details and ephemera worked out to give it an air of verisimilitude. And sometimes the actions of characters seem outrageously absurd.

Cassandra, of course, famously had the gift of prophecy, and TOLD the Trojans there were Greeks hiding in it. But part of her curse was to not be believed.

Helen was supposed to have suspected a trick, and walked around the horse, calling out the names of Greek warriors she suspected were inside in imitation of the voices of their wives, and almost got Anticlus to cry out. Odysseus, though, clapped his hand over Anticlus’ mouth to keep him from crying out.

Laocoon famously guessed the truth, but Poseidon sent two sea snakes to kill him and his sons before they could blab, this giving us the famous Roman sculpture now in the Vatican Museum

And there’s your story about the spear chucker.

You can see all of these accounts (undoubtedly from different traditions. It’s hard to believe that Helen, Cassandra, Laocoon, and Spear Guy were all saying at the same time that the Horse was a fraud. Even a dumb Trojan would start to suspect something if that were the case) as attempts to show why the Trojans were oblivious to the threat – You see, they had a chance to be warned, but the bearer was killed by a god /disbelieved/thwarted by Odysseus’ hand.

But the obvious question is – Why not just open up a hole in the horse and look inside?

Too obvious, I guess.

It’s like the relatively late story that Thetis didn’t want her son Achilles to go to the Trojan War (where she knew he would be killed), so she hif him among the daughters of Lycomedes on the island of Skyros. Odysseus found him out, though, by the strategem of sending in a peddler with a cart of beauty items and weaponry. Achilles was the one who went for the sword, and ignored the perfumes and Botox.

It’s a wonderfully ludicrous story, which brings up a bunch of questions

Achilles could hide among Lycomedes’ daughters? Really? Achilles was the mightiest warrior of the Greeks. How built and buff were Lycomedes’ daughters? Did any of them have beards, too?Did it really take the cleverest and raftiest of the Greeks that long to figure out which daughter was really a guy? And did he really have to come up with a trick in order to find out?

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That’s an especially on-point typo when talking about Odysseus.

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This excerpt from Wiki makes it sound like it was never intended to be a gift from the Greeks to the Trojans in the first place. It was supposed to be a gift from the Greeks to Athena, to ensure a safe voyage home. Funny how million year old oral narratives can’t stay consistent :slightly_smiling_face:

“Sinon tells the Trojans that the Horse is an offering to the goddess Athena, meant to atone for the previous desecration of her temple at Troy by the Greeks and ensure a safe journey home for the Greek fleet. Sinon tells the Trojans that the Horse was built to be too large for them to take it into their city and gain the favor of Athena for themselves.”

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The Television show Taggart, a police drama set in Scotland, ran from 1983 until 2010 and initially starred Mark McManus as the titular police detective DCI Taggart. McManus died in 1994 and the producers also killed off the character. Hence for a majority of its existence there was no Taggart in Taggart.

TCMF-2L

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Ned Devine only shows up for a scene or two in Waking Ned Devine, as a corpse (and in another character’s dream).

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I was speaking sloppily of course about the fact that they use the Trojan Horse to get inside the walls.

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Rosemary’s Baby doesn’t show up until the end of the movie; and I believe not until the end of the book too. But Rosemary’s Pregnancy (which is what both are mainly concerned with), wouldn’t make for a catchy title.

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I am impressed that you got that far if you are not reading some abridged version.

You could try an unabridged Treasure Island if you enjoy this kind of literature. Les Miserables is another. Actually, that might be another thread.

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It’s not inconsistent - it was part of the plan. The Greeks pretended they’d built it as a gift for Athena, then couldn’t take it with them on their ships because it was too big.

That’s one of the things that explains why the Trojans didn’t just break open the horse to check inside - damaging a gift to a Goddess would displease the Goddess greatly. That’s not fanwanking, it’s just the way people thought at the time, so much so that it wouldn’t have been mentioned in the poem because none of the listeners would ever have contemplated breaking a gift to a powerful Goddess. Hence them believing that the spear-thrower was killed for attempting to do just that.

The other thing is that the Greeks managed to trick everyone except those a bit more in the know that they’d all sailed away. All their ships were gone (and would usually need the left-behind Greeks as crew just to sail away), and a supposed turncoat convinced the Trojans that he’d been left behind while everyone else went.

It’s also not implausible at all that the city-state’s leaders would ignore people warning them of danger - I mean, we’ve seen enough of that in modern life. And two of the people with doubts died (one before he could even give a warning), and the other two were women, one of whom cursed to never be believed, and the other a foreigner who’d started all the mess in the first place. Them giving warnings would make the Trojans believe the opposite of what they were saying more than anything else.

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“Not all of the Greek soldiers are in that horse!”

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“There might be enemy soldiers in there, but let’s all go to bed. We’ll find out in the morning”.

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Beware of gifts bearing Greeks!

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Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera, The Consul.

The title character doesn’t sing or speak, and we never see him. His single “appearance” is his shadow on a translucent window in his private office door as a visitor leaves his office.

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Does The Iceman ever Come(th)? Not being snarky, I’ve never seen it.

Also, and this is a bit of a stretch, in “The Exorcist,” Father Merrin (one of two exorcists) doesn’t show up until the third act, save for a bit of exposition at the beginning.

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I find this sort of comment hard to understand, yet I’ve encountered it from a lot of people.

I like reading Moby Dick. I like Melville’s writing, weird digressions and all. I find it an easy read, in fact. The version I’m reading now actually seems longer than the one I read many years ago, because I don’t recall that copy having all the quotations at the beginning.

I’ve never read Treasure Island, but I’ve read lots of Stevenson. I think Dr. Jeckyll and Mister Hyde is similarly a great read, if not as long. I haven’t yet read Les Miserables, although I started reading it a little while ago before I was distracted by something else. It’;s still on my “to read” shelf.

I’ve read unabridged versions of War and Peace and a slightly abridged version of The Fall of the Roman Empire. Length doesn’t daunt me. There are still some classics I don’t really care for. I can’t get through James Fenimore Cooper, and I’m bored top death by about half of Charles Dickens’ output (although I love the other half.)

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Mark Twain agreed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenimore_Cooper%27s_Literary_Offenses

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Just like a Trojan computer virus which forcibly uninstalls your antivirus

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Haven’t you ever heard that you shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth?

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Twain wrote a second piece about Cooper’s style which is not as well known, but which I think is funnier:
http://strangebeautiful.com/other-texts/twain-coopers-prose-style.pdf