Huh, so dancing really does lead to sex!
Similar to that, but with bigger ripples. If there had not been a storm when Louis XIII was headed to the French forests (When the Seine river was more smelly than now), he would not have bothered to sleep with the queen that night. (it was not a happy marriage). After 23 years of marriage and four stillbirths, the queen, nine months later, finally gave birth to a son; the future and very consequential Louis XIV.
Get one of them to play once and change this.
A cultural one for a change, based on this old OP which utterly died on its arse:
What if the Iliad, instead of glorifying Achilles’ egoism, had cast him as the villain? Yes, he’s the best fighter but he thinks he’s too special to obey the rules, throws a massive sulk that endangers his allies and gets his lover killed, and responds not just by killing Hector but by desecrating his corpse in yet another selfish emotional outburst until he’s shamed out of it by Priam. He lives and dies for personal glory, rather than using his god-given talents to help the common weal.
Boo.
What if Ajax were the hero? Another great warrior, but one who uses his strength to protect others, fighting in the shield wall shoulder to shoulder with his allies. In the original, he is pointedly denied the prize for Best of the Greeks in favour of Achilles and falls on his sword in shame. A travesty.
The shadow Achilles casts is huge. Every cop who hands over his badge and gun and sees his partner killed: Achilles. Every maverick who breaks the rules to get the job done and damn the consequences: Achilles. Every hotshot asshole who gets to be an asshole because they’re a hotshot: Achilles.
In the real world, there are many more assholes who think they’re hotshots than there are actual hotshot assholes. And the lingering Achilles myth means we give them time and space we don’t deserve. So we change the script: the Iliad honours Ajax and shames Achilles. Thus, our culture honours the people who can put ego aside and recognise that they’re not the centre of the universe.
That is a fascinating idea.
As LeGuin said, we need to learn to tell better stories. What if, even now (since we can’t go back, we can only go forward), we cast such tales as anti-war stories? They weren’t meant that way, of course. But they’re all about wasted lives – of the warriors, and of their families.
It doesn’t even take a lot of recasting. For all the Iliad’s dwelling on glory as a virtue, there is plenty of contrary material. The scene where Hector in full armour says goodbye to his infant son and the child flinches away from the looming horsehair plume on his helmet is heartbreaking.
A great example is Marianne Miller’s* Circe which shows Odysseus as a dynamic leader, a brave man, a gifted thinker, a selfless captain who takes on the burden of shielding his men from fear and despair - and an unquenchably violent egotistical horrorshow who is a threat to all who are near him.
*I haven’t read her Song of Achilles, although I clearly should.
I suppose the Iliad wasn’t originated with this in mind, but I found a lot of the characters in the Iliad come across as assholes.
And he knows they’re likely to lose – and that the child will be slaughtered, and his wife will be either raped and slaughtered or raped and enslaved. And that all that’s needed to avoid this is for them not to have the war; and that it can be avoided at the cost of the men’s pride.
If it were written now, it would be an antiwar story.
I mean, the origin of the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon is over who gets to enslave the woman whose father Achilles recently murdered, so yeah.
Beethoven didn’t reach his groundbreaking mature phase of composition (ushering in era of Romantic music) despite his deafness, he did so because of it.
Beethoven’s deafness was gradual and didn’t become profound until the early 1800’s (when he began composing symphonies). Musicologists like Robert M. Greenberg PhD, believe it was Beethoven’s worsening hearing loss, increasing emotional torment, and almost complete social isolation that allowed him to break from the traditional confines of classical era music and bring forth the bold, emotional, highly personal romantic era of music.
Beethoven composed his Symphony #1 in the classical style, and it’s great. It’s as if he said, “yeah, I can do classical, and I can do it better than anyone.”
Beethoven’s second symphony was composed when his deafness significantly worsened, but it stuck to classical form.
But #3 (Eroica*) was truly groundbreaking. It shocked his contemporaries. They didn’t understand this new unorthodox style, and many didn’t like it. It was like Elvis coming out on stage during a string quartet and gyrating his pelvis to Hound Dog, or Jimi Hendrix shredding the Star Spangled Banner at a child’s birthday party. It was pearl-clutching time.
It irked Beethoven that even after he performed his last symphony (# 9, arguably the greatest musical composition of all time), his contemporaries still rated his first symphony his best.
(*) Beethoven originally titled his third symphony “Bonaparte” in dedication to Napoleon Bonaparte whose revolutionary democratic ideals he identified with. But, when Napoleon proclaimed himself emperor in 1804, the disheartened Beethoven re-titled the piece.
I think one* could do a pretty amazing translation/adaptation that really foregrounded the agony, hopelessness, and stupidity of the suffering while making the posturing around glory, and especially glory as reflected in loot and slaves, ring very hollow.
I’m aware this is getting a wee bit Cafe Society so… if “Homer” had written an anti-war Iliad then - well, then the Greeks would have been overwhelmed by a martial society. But if it had been an anti-Achilles, egotism is bad Iliad what then?
Stronger roots for democracy? A deeper anti-oligarchic tendency? Do we develop more communitarian societies? Does this mean fewer great achievements or more?
*Not me, someone clever
Though is that a cause or effect? I would argue that the Iliad has been so successful over the millennia as its description of toxic masculinity strikes a cord with the dominant patriarchal elite that decided what makes good culture for most of those millennia. Not that the dominant elite’s penchant for fiction about toxic masculinity was because of the success of the Iliad.
I’d also argue that the portrayal of Achilles (as a sexually ambiguous, pouting, narcissist) is actually far more nuanced portrait than the standard hero archetype in modern western culture. He is never a “hero” in the modern sense of the word, is desecration of Hector’s corpse is not “heroic” is a serious transgression that directly leads to his death.
Nit: Her brothers were murdered by Achilles. This is an important plot point, in some tellings, as her father was a priest who was able to interject to the gods on her behalf and bring about the plagues that caused Agamemnon to take her from Achilles and send her back to her family.
As an aside this what I find fascinating about classical literature. You have some scenes that could have been written yesterday, word for word, about themes in modern life and culture. And then the next scene is (to modern readers) completely batshait psychotic craziness that sounds like it was written by a serial killer.
If one of the greatest playwrights of all time, writing his greatest comedy as an antiwar work, AND insisting the cast wear giant erect fake penises, wasn’t able to pull that off, I don’t think a play would be able to do it 
Though bringing it back to counter-factuals the reason nothing like this is in the illiad, is it’s just one chapter of a much longer epic, of which only two chapters survive (the Illiad and Odyssey). The part which that point would have been mentioned (specifically should Priam return Helen to avoid war) only survives in later, mainly roman, references and retellings. Another part details an attempt a black Ethiopian prince to rescue troy (so a full seventh of what is universally recognized as the founding epic of Western culture has black lead character)
So one alternative reality I’d like to see is one when some rich late antiquity Roman aristocrat donates a full set (or three) of the trojan war epic to his local monasteries.
It’s definitely a game to play with a creative group.
The moment of greatest delight was when the psychic velociraptor impersonating Jesus appeared before Carrie Nation, spread his illusory human Jesus hands, and solemnly declared, “Praise be to Allah!”
After all the players burst out laughing, the player explained that the velociraptor was a little fuzzy on the details of 19th century American religious traditions.
FAir, an anti-war Iliad wouldn’t have made the Greeks anti-war, it would have left space for an alternative “glory and honour” epic. (Also, here’s a counterfactual: what if the enthusiasm for giant erect fake penises as stage costume, home decoration and good luck charm had never died out? What a world we would be enjoying now!)
I have got to start fact-checking myself.
Culture is tricky like that. Yes, the patriarchy get to select what gets cultural cachet, but that then transmits itself to the next generation and becomes (at least part of) their model for heroism/kingship/general awesomeness, a tendency which is then reinforced by all the living role models banging on about how great these ancient heroes were.
I.e. did Alexander the Great identify with Achilles because he’d internalised the Iliad’s values of glory and prowess, or was he always liked that and used Achilles as a way of justifying his lust for conquest and personal renown? (Or did later historians draw parallels with Alexander and Achilles because Achilles gave them a model for interpreting Alexander?)
The Iliad is a great and sophisticated work, and so it is actually quite easy for me to use its portrayal of Achilles to point out his flaws, because they are there to be seen. And of course in the Odyssey, dead Achilles gets to speak and is pretty clear that in retrospect his youthful decision to live a short life full of glory was a bad one: he’d rather be a live swineherd than a dead hero. So yes, Iliad Achilles is a lot more complex than the maverick cop whose captain demands his badge, or the arrogant surgeon etc. etc.
But, those are still the legacy of a view of heroism that has its roots in Achilles - that greatness and excellence are not compatible with any surrender of individuality to rules, hierarchy or system. And that is better even to make terrible errors in the pursuit of ones glorious destiny than to just take direction and get on with the job alongside everyone else.
Oh so much this.
The thing is, that that actually is in the Iliad.
I’m not at all sure that it has its roots in Achilles. I think instead it’s that the story of Achilles was interpreted, and has been interpreted through centuries, through the lens of that view of heroism. The framework of that view has been so strong that the saga wasn’t seen, and wasn’t taught, as a story of how war is both terrible and stupid, and how men’s pride can lead them to destroy the very things that they’re proud of, so they should stop behaving like that; but instead has been seen, and was quite probably meant, as a blunt depiction of ‘this is how men are and always will be, and it is right and proper that they should be this way’.
– I find myself now tempted to write a story in which there’s an actual Homer, spending their life working on a great anti-war saga meant to turn all of their known civilization towards peace – except that nobody understands what they’re doing, and their work is used to accomplish exactly the reverse of what was meant.
See this trope Do Not Do This Cool Thing