Bill Weintraub

The Comradeship of Wounds

2-7-2007

Hey guys

I've posted a new photo essay called The Comradeship of Wounds, and you can read it by clicking here.

I originally intended to post it on this board, but it's graphically very intense -- lotsa pix -- and I think it's easier to view as a webpage.

However, you can still reply to that page as though it were a message on this board.

At the end of the article there's a button which says "Add a reply to this discussion," and all you have to do is click on it and post a reply.

The mechanism is exactly the same.

Or you can reply on this page.

Now, The Comradeship of Wounds is in some ways a continuation of the discussion about Statius.

I know that some of you don't like dealing with a Roman poet, and/or poetry, even if it's in translation.

But there are reasons I want you to look at Statius -- and I discuss those reasons in the opening lines of The Comradeship of Wounds.

As I said in the Statius message thread, Statius was very popular in antiquity and the Middle Ages.

But he isn't much read nowadays.

The question is -- why?

Because he's a bad poet?

No -- by any reasonable standard, he's a good poet.

So if it's not his style, it has to be his content.

Let me suggest to you then that maybe the reason he's not more popular today is that he's a Masculinist.

He writes about Men.

And Warriors.

In glowing terms.

And there's no "love interest" in his work.

No heterosexual love interest, that is.

People do get married, but what drives the epic is not those marriages.

In the case of the Thebaid, it's the conflict between the two birth-brothers, Eteocles and Polynices -- and the devotion of the two brothers-of-the-heart -- Polynices and Tydeus.

Those are the guys who meet in a fight.

They get into an argument, they strip, they fight, and then they become best buddies.

Not "boyfriends" in the contemporary "gay" sense of top and bottom.

But rather -- bonded Warrior brothers.

Not the sort of thing which necessarily appeals to a heterosexualized culture.

When Statius died, he was at work on an epic life of Achilles -- the Achilleid.

There's no heterosexual love interest in that story either.

Achilles does get at least one girl pregnant, and Achilles is pissed when Agamemnon takes away a slave girl who's basically a spoil of war.

But the big love story in the Achilleid is between Achilles and Patroclus.

So in the Thebaid you have Polynices and Tydeus, and in the Achilleid, Achilles and Patroclus.

And, presumably, no one forced Statius to choose those themes.

We can assume that, like any other writer, he picked subjects which interested him and which he thought would interest his audience.

Who was his audience?

Roman men.

Establishment men.

Guys who knew how to read and had enough leisure time to read and/or listen to -- very often these poems were declaimed -- an epic poem.

And that's another reason I want you to read Statius.

I want you to experience the sort of literature that mattered to Men in a Warrior culture like Rome.

Now, also in The Comradeship of Wounds there's an extended excerpt from Eastman's An Indian Boyhood -- to which Frances first alerted us.

So in the essay you get an ancient Roman and a 19th century Sioux warrior.

You might be surprised to see how much they have in common.

The Comradeship of Wounds.

Great reading.

Here, on The MAN2MAN Alliance.

Bill Weintraub