Sorry I’ve been away so long! Been working on a number of freelance projects over the past week. One was a project for an old school chum for a website in one of the Logan County KY schools.
Another is a couple of pages (41-42) I did in collaboration with Allen Steadham, who we all know as DueEast for his collab series Off Hours. Check it out at [url]http://www.drunkduck.com/Off_Hours/index.php[/url] and find out if I did justice to Tantz Aerine’s characters. ![]()
Regular updates will resume shortly.
Oh…heh…one last freaking teaser. Gorgo is going off on Sappho, but why is in the book. It’s at the printer’s now, and will be available soon. Meantime, you can advance purchase autographed copies until they go onsale at IndyPlanet.com.
This is the beginning of the legendary smear campaign by Andromeda and Gorgo to destroy Sappho. Many of the accusations they made against the poetess were incriminating by any standard, and the citizens of Mytilene had a lot to speculate about. What, after all this time, is handed down as truth, and what is actually lies? Stay tuned, and you’ll find out. See you in two weeks.
This concludes the online version of House of the Muses #5. For those of you who weren’t sure who the sinister new villainess is, here’s a line or two from good old Wikipedia:
Eris (Greek Ἔρις, “Strife”) is the Greek goddess of strife, her name being translated into Latin as Discordia. Her Greek opposite is Harmonia, whose Latin counterpart is Concordia. Homer equated her with the war-goddess Enyo, whose Roman counterpart is Bellona. Eris, the solar system’s largest known dwarf planet, is named after the goddess.
The most famous tale of Eris (which Dika, being a huge fan of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey can tell you) recounts her initiating the Trojan War. The goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite had been invited along with the rest of Olympus to the forced wedding of Peleus and Thetis, who would become the parents of Achilles, but Eris had been snubbed because of her troublemaking inclinations.
She therefore (in a fragment from the Kypria as part of a plan hatched by Zeus and Themis) tossed into the party the Apple of Discord, a golden apple inscribed Kallisti – “For the most beautiful one”, or “To the Fairest One” – provoking the goddesses to begin quarreling about the appropriate recipient. The hapless Paris, Prince of Troy, was appointed to select the most beautiful by Zeus. Each of the three goddesses immediately attempted to bribe Paris to choose her. Hera offered political power; Athena promised skill in battle; and Aphrodite tempted him with the most beautiful woman in the world: Helen, wife of Menelaus of Sparta. While Greek culture placed a greater emphasis on prowess and power, Paris chose to award the apple to Aphrodite, thereby dooming his city, which was destroyed in the war that ensued.
Oops. She’s HERE? Oh, crap, we’re not in Kansas anymore. Don’t forget–hopefully by February we debut House of the Muses #6: The Last Child of Herakles! DON’T MISS IT!!!
Issue wrap-up: Before Dika can even begin to puzzle over what has just happened, new weirdness pops up: so many of us can attest to incidents where it seems divine intervention has occurred, but in this case, it doesn’t look at all good….
This page was supposed to have gone live on Christmas day, but I, as everyone else, was caught up in the holiday. No one will ever be able to prove if this particular storyline ever happened. But as I was putting it together it struck me that this scene is indeed a culmination of all that Sappho and Alkaios fought for all those centuries ago, in their quest to force the House of Penthilos to be less cruel to the people they served. This is a story that history seems to have been bent on erasing from our memories. Another reader of mine pointed out this past week, despite the immense database of knowledge of this digital age, there seems to be less information available about Sappho now than there was when I was researching this series back in the 80s. The books are still there; but only what is deemed “important” is being disseminated.
This is our lesson for this holiday season: this is what the season was supposed to have been about, back in that bygone era nearly erased by the sands of time.
If we all take a moment to be kinder to one another, it doesn’t matter in the end what religion we subscribe to. Happy Holidays, 2009.
!!! Why, those rotten kids–!!! Dika never saw this one, coming, either. What is it about these oracles, anyway?



















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