Why did I think the caladrius was marrying them with magic?

🕊️ “These are good humans, I approve this match! Let’s add some ✨ SPARKLES ✨ and warm fuzzies to encourage them!”

My wife is a Classicist (and part-Greek) and provided context I thought would be helpful for the forum. Mind you, we’ve both been out of school for over a decade at this point.

1. The Odyssey is among a handful of Greek epic poems that survived to the modern era. However, this version that survived was the Athenian version, told by Athens, which colonized most other Greek islands.

The “original” Mycenaean era version is lost to time since they pre-dated even Ancient Greek and kept most of their records on fabric or other materials that did not survive.

There were probably 3-4 other epilogues after the Trojan war that followed other prominent characters and have since been lost.

What few fragments samples we do have of the Mycenaean language are indecipherable at this point in time and have frustrated linguists.

I didn't follow this advice, but she recommends reading the Iliad first in order to get the context of The Odyssey and the background for most of these characters.

2. The Greek pantheon and their roles have been split and consolidated over the centuries between the height of Mycenaean culture and the rise of Greek culture.

Poseidon would have been the head of the pantheon at the time the Mycenaeans’ first iterations of The Odyssey.

The “original” Odyssey existed before Zeus had been elevated to the head god when Greek culture shifted from the islands to the mainland, and therefore both he and Athena likely did not appear as often as they do in the Athenian version we have now.

3. The translations out now often adjust for more modern sensibilities and culture, rather than explain what the context in which they were written.

For example, the famous “rosy fingers of Dawn” line. The words are better translated as the “bloody fingers of dawn” because the Greek language suggests that Dawn literally tore itself from the womb of Gaia, rose skyward to become the sun, and died at the end of the day. Each day would have involved the literal death and rebirth of a new sun.

But of course that’s a lot more violent and while there are no surviving sources to confirm this belief of the Ancient Greeks, the language surrounding the daily event of Dawn support such a translation.

Oh, I’m 💯 convinced Dove’s dead. Everyone is shocked Thomas came back to the school this year. No one else but Thomas sees or talks to Dove, she’s still wearing her summer uniform when Thomas describes her as a girl who loves cozy cardigans, and Lana has a new roommate.

Lana and Chloe clearly see his asking for Dove as a mental breakdown, so they bring him to their club meeting to try socialize him in a low-pressure environment.

Lana hates Thomas for “hurting Dove” and Andrew had giant swaths of memories he just can’t tap into.

What neatly ties all this together is that Dove was last year’s tithe sacrifice. Andrew got to choose between Thomas and Dove, and he chose for the monsters to take his sister and not the boy he loves.

The Antler King said Andrew needed to sacrifice something. The forest will only be satisfied once it takes Thomas or kills Andrew himself.