Ep. 19 Sermon on F.S. (Trojan War)

Excerpts from Aesthetical Sermons

In episode 19, we continue with another story excerpted from Joris' Sermon on Familiar Stories. This time, we examine his retelling of the Trojan War.

Transcription of Joris:

Imagine instead that your daughter's liquid insides were spread upon an altar to Poseidon, and imagine the aspect of your wife's, the queen's, face as you dedicated this sacrifice to ten years of war: ten years of blood and savagery, and spears piercing jaws and ribs, and rapacious men and their many paramours, and great machines of destruction, and in their wake heaps of fallen soldiers flowering as their festering wounds bloomed a great phalanx of flies; ten years of venomous oaths against foreign men and ten years of incensed incantations to inconstant gods and their constant attacks on our fevered brains and pained hearts that yearn for glory as they do for omnisexual passions. Such was Achilleus' heart and wrathful brain, whose actions, to this day, we celebrate by dragging men in our own time through the streets behind horses until they are nothing more than tatters. And why not? Such was his celebrity that, e'en after death, gods and men wept and adorned his corpse with flowers plucked from the fields watered in their comrades' humours; and they strummed upon the lyre epic chants lasting many weeks, and kissed him, his body black and bloated and reeking of old meat, which caused the children to scream in disgust.... If you imagine all this and gasp, my fellow congregants, I beseech you to fret not, for the screaming children were all slapped by their parents for this impropriety.