"Good guys" committing perfidy (fake surrender) and it's treated as a clever heroic ploy instead of a war crime or something morally dubious

[u/AporiaParadox]

1. Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Anakin pretends to surrender to the enemy multiple times during the Clone Wars. And no, it's not used to indicate that Anakin is falling to the Dark Side, other characters like Obi-Wan do it too.
2. The Iliad. The Trojan Horse was a real dick move, a fake surrender compounded by a fake peace offering, followed by a massacre. I get that it was a different time, but still, most modern adaptations just treat it as a cool thing. One thing I'll give Nolan's The Odyssey credit for is that Odysseus recognizes that what his "clever plot" was wrong.

Perfidy is a serious war crime, because morality aside, in exchange for one victory, you're dooming all of your allies who might want to legitimately surrender in the future because now the enemy is just going to execute them, not to mention that now the enemy won't surrender to you and will just fight harder.

[u/Basic_Dingo6487]

I dont think Greeks or Troyans are good guys in the Iliad.

[u/LostExile7555 → u/Basic_Dingo6487]

It also wasn't technically Perfidy. They even left somebody to explicitly tell the Trojans not to take the horse because it was an offering for Athena and not them, it just happened to be really effective reverse psychology with the Trojans saying "Screw you! We're taking it!"

[u/HappyMerlin → u/LostExile7555]

If I remember my ancient literature right, that part didn’t exist in the original greek versions, but was rather added afterwards in the roman „fanfic“.

[u/haubowtdemoshon → u/HappyMerlin]

I don’t think we know whether that part was added later. Isn’t the epic by Homer where the horse actually appears lost to us?

[u/Fenix00070 → u/haubowtdemoshon]

Iliou persis Is almost completely Lost, yes. We have 10 original verses and a couple of summaries.

We have a Roman retelling of the events in Virgil's Aeneid, so maybe that's what the commenter was referencing. But the dedicati in of the horse to Athena predates the Epic.

Also calling the Aeneid "Roman Fanfiction" Is highly reductive to both the scope of the work and its true pourpose

[u/GobboTheJojo → u/Fenix00070]

Yeah that doesn't make sense to call Virgil's telling fanfic when Homer isn't the creator to the myth he simply pulled a Brother's Grimm/Charles Perault by documenting the most common tellings of his time into a coherent poem.

[u/TheSuperBunny → u/GobboTheJojo]

Homeros most probably didn't exist in general.
And the first written version is from the 6th century bce after the tyrant Pisistratos commissioned it for the Pan-Hellenic games.

[u/ZealousidealComb7891 → u/GobboTheJojo]

But Homer, like teh Grimms, was using his own people's stories... Virgil was using the stories of a people his own people where simply fans of, to try to make it seem like they where part of the stories they fanboyed over. It's basically just a self insert of a whole nation.

[u/GobboTheJojo → u/ZealousidealComb7891]

Greeks and Romans had pretty similar cultures, if not the Romans being a continuation of Greek culture. The lands of the Odyssey were predicted to be in places of Italy and Sicily. The big point of Virgil's Aeneid was to connect the two cultures with the other common theory that refugees from Troy became the Romans. You can't even say Aeneas was Virgil's Gary Stu because he already existed in the stories surrounding the Illiad.

[u/ZealousidealComb7891 → u/GobboTheJojo]

Heh... if we take teh Romans as "a continuation of Greek culture" we might as well take most of Europe as "a continuation of greco-roman culture". And that's witohut taking into account the guys actually claiming to be a direct continuation, like the Kaisers and Tzars.

But hey, Rome was definitely the ur-ascended-fanboy, and certainly did their part in spreading the culture they lifted off the greeks after CONQUERING them.

But that doesn't change the fact that they where outsiders that took their cosplay as far as possible.

As for Aeneas being an existing character... that's how most fan fiction works.

And the original stories using places in Italy is about as good of an argument as including Ethiopians in the same culture because of Andromeda.

...

BTW, this isn't meant as an insult to roman culture... they did copy a pretty cool culture, and obv. brought their own spins on it. Doesn't change that they where the original weebs.

[u/ZealousidealComb7891 → u/Fenix00070]

It's true purpose makes it worse then fanfic... it's was fanboyism driven paid propaganda...

[u/RSquared → u/HappyMerlin]

Man, calling the Aeneid a fanfic is akin to calling The Divine Comedy one. 

[u/Rezkel → u/RSquared]

I would absolutely call The Divine Comedy Christian fanfiction.

[u/zhibr → u/RSquared]

All Greek and Roman myths are fanfics of the earlier songs. That's how myths work.

[u/CaptainObvious_18 → u/RSquared]

Personally I think they’re both fanfiction, but the divine comedy specifically is a self insert.

[u/ZealousidealComb7891 → u/CaptainObvious_18]

So is the Aeneid, just for the whole roman peoples instead of 1 guy.

[u/Uypsilon → u/HappyMerlin]

The horse is not described in details in Greek sources, so not really.

[u/GobboTheJojo → u/HappyMerlin]

Are you talking about the Aeneid from Virgil?