What if I told you that in order to tell its story and build its world, the latest season
of Young Justice draws inspiration not just from DC comic-books, but also from the politics
of ancient Greece, and some of the oldest literary works in European history? And it
all comes down to Atlantis. But first just to warn you, this video contains spoilers
for Young Justice Phantoms, up to episode 17 but pretty much just Kaldur s arc. Anyway
what am I talking about? Well, midway through Season 4, as the narrative
begins to follow Kaldur ahm, the former Aqualad and current Aquaman the show did something
which kinda confused some viewers. It had Kaldur start to refer to the previous Aquaman,
the current king of Atlantis, as Anax . This was confusing because well, by this point,
this character had amassed a lot of different names and titles. His Atlantean name is Orin,
but he s also addressed as High King. His human name is Arthur Curry, but on the surface?
He s best known as his long-time superhero identity, Aquaman. And now, on top of this,
he s Anax, too? It s understandable that some viewers were beginning to lose track. But
it s worth digging into this so in this latest episode of Older Than You Think, the series
where I make MY literature degrees YOUR problem, I ll explain what this new term, Anax, means,
but also WHY it s such an interesting inclusion. At it s most basic, Anax means king, or ruler,
in ancient Greek. But we re not talking standard ancient Greek, from the time of, say, Plato
or Socrates. No, we re talking *ancient* ancient Greek, pre-classical Greek. Because there
are other words with similar meanings in ancient Greek, like basileus , but Anax stopped being
used centuries before most of the ancient Greek history you re probably familiar with.
There s also a little more nuance to this definition the Anax wasn t merely a local
ruler, he was the real head honcho. He was the king that got to boss the other kings
around. So returning to Young Justice, we might consider it just a Greek equivalent
of Orin s title, High King . Orin s king of Poseidonis, but he s also the guy with the
most authority when the other undersea rulers all get together and this is exactly the sort
of authority that Anax connotes. But it gets way more interesting than this. You might
be thinking, why would Greg Weisman and co. just grab an obscure old Greek word and add
it in , and the answer is that as archaic Greek vocabulary goes, Anax is fairly high-profile,
and that s due mainly to the role it plays in Homer s Iliad.
For those of you who fell asleep during Ancient Greek Epic Poetry 101, the Iliad is many things,
and I could genuinely ramble about it for hours, but in a nutshell: it s considered
by many to be the single oldest piece of European literature. It s a colossal tale of war, glory,
and loss, which was passed down by generations of oral bards, until one anonymous fellow
had the good sense to take the poem out of his head, and put it into some scrolls. So
he invented the alphabet and wrote the poem down. I m not joking, and I m only kind of
exaggerating there is some evidence that the Greek alphabet was developed in order to transcribe
the Iliad specifically. But the relevant part here is the structure of political authority
depicted in the Iliad, because a lot of the main characters are kings, who ve all joined
together in a fun little alliance to go dumpster the mighty city of Troy. These kings are figures
you may have heard of Achilles, Odysseus, Ajax, and so on but, broadly speaking, they
re led by one guy Agamemnon. He s the king among kings and so, fittingly, the vast majority
of the times the word Anax crops up in the poem, it s used to describe either the gods
themselves or Agamemnon. The differing structures of monarchical authority designated by the
word choice Anax, as opposed to other alternatives, have interested scholars for, like, a really
long time. At this point it s probably worth pausing,
and asking ourselves if this is overthinking things. Couldn t it be just a little reference,
or a little worldbuilding easter-egg, just for the sake of it? Well, maybe - but Young
Justice doesn t really do references for the sake of it. Just look at the Artemis arc in
Phantoms. Each episode is anchored around a classic piece of literature, and these pieces
typically become thematically relevant companion pieces by the end of each episode. So I don
t think it s overthinking it to ask WHY the show s writers included this juicy little
lexical nugget, and it seems to me we have two possible answers to choose from.
The slightly more boring, though still interesting option, comes down to worldbuilding. Season
4 had gone pretty deep into the origins of Atlantis tying it to some prehistoric battle
between Vandal Savage and the Lords of Chaos, but if we set all that new lore aside for
a moment, there s always been a lot of links suggested between Atlantis and ancient Greece
like, for instance, the capital being named for Poseidon himself. Introducing this particular
piece of ancient Greek vocabulary could be a subtle way of developing this link. Remember
when I said that Anax was a particularly old word? Well, the longer version of that is
that the word seems to be a holdover from the old Mycenean civilisation, which collapsed
in around the 12th century BCE, within which it referred to kings with the sort of centralised
authority we see in the Iliad and with Orin. One could reasonably conclude, then, that
Young Justice is implying whatever historical links connect this version of Atlantis and
Greece took place not in the more historically-attested classical period, but, like, a whole millennium
beforehand, back in the Mycenean era an era we still know very little about, an era when
the world of the gods seemed somehow closer to the world of men. And that this is why,
in-universe, archaeologists studying ancient Greece hadn t detected any evidence of Atlantis
reality. You could take this even further. Mycenean civilisation disintegrated around
the time of the so-called bronze age collapse a short but intensely chaotic space of time
in which a whole bunch of civilisations mysteriously fell, in and around the eastern Mediterranean.
And historians have developed various theories as to what may have caused this ranging from
climate change to natural disasters but one key piece of the puzzle has always been the
appearance of the sea peoples vast armies of ocean-borne raiders who appeared seemingly
out of nowhere and destroyed a bunch of mighty cities. Now, I m not saying that in Earth-16,
there s a chance that these sea-peoples were actually early Atlanteans, but wait, no that
s exactly what I m saying. At the very least it seems reasonable to speculate that this
might be the case. And, if nothing else from a worldbuilding perspective, the inclusion
of Orin s title of Anax suggests a possible period of historical contact between Atlantis
and Mycenean civilisation a contact which could have furnished modern Atlantean civilisation
with this word and this specific conception of monarchical power.
That s one explanation for why the show s writers decided give Orin this new title.
But it s not my favourite one. No, as I suggested above, to me if you re bringing the word Anax
into a modern media property, and using it to designate a kingly figure like Orin there
s a sort of implicit linkage being made specifically to the Iliad and to Agamemnon. And in the
case of Young Justice, I think this is intentional, given the similarities between Orin s political
position in Phantoms and Agamemnon s at the beginning of the Iliad. Both of these kings
start off as top-dog, but these positions as the foremost authority come into question.
In Atlantis, this comes as the delegation of other kings express their displeasure at
the seemingly privileged conditions enjoyed by Orin s own city of Poseidonis. In the Iliad,
Agamemnon s rule starts to look a little shaky after he falls out with Achilles, the Greeks
best fighter, and another, perhaps more fitting, candidate to lead the armies. As a result,
the war starts to go badly, and Agamemnon starts to look like an increasingly silly
man. If this is the reference being made here, then, what s the purpose? How does this add
to Young Justice? Well, I think it s a sort of warning sign to the viewer or, at least,
to the viewer familiar with the Iliad. Because things don t go great for Agamemnon after
this point. To TL;DR a whole bunch of the Iliad and other related tales the Greeks take
L after L until Achilles re-enters the fight, and strikes a decisive blow against the Trojans,
before getting killed himself. As a result of this, though, the Greeks ultimately win
the war, but at a heavy cost. They leave Troy, but they ve been there for 10 years at this
point, and on their way back home, a lot of them meet gruesome fates not least Agamemnon.
Agamemnon s ultimately killed back in his own city arguably due, in part, to his own
poor decision-making. If you re looking at these events from a modern perspective, a
reasonable conclusion to draw would be that Agamemnon s obsession with remaining number
one, the top dog, the Anax as well as his devotion to chasing this power and glory,
led to his ultimate fate, as well as the deaths of various other Greek heroes such as Patroclus
and Achilles. Returning to Young Justice, then, there s a kind of similar situation
with Orin s rule. Orin s primacy, too, is being questioned not just by his fellow kings,
but also by his city. There also emerges a clear pretender, Arion. But here s the thing
Orin doesn t make the same mistakes. Sure, he tries to retain his high kingship when
challenged by the council, but when the prophecy about the true king of Atlantis comes to light,
when Arion emerges, Orin isn t trying to hold on to power for his own sake no, he avoids
conceding power because of some pretty reasonable suspicions about the agenda of his would-be
replacements. And crucially he does give up his power, when it becomes clear that the
true subject of the prophecy isn t Arion after all.
With all this in mind, I think the show introduces this new term of authority Anax at the start
of the Phantoms Atlantis arc to subtly suggest the Iliad, and Agamemnon s hubris, before
we re launched into this story about a high king struggling to retain his authority. As
we see Orin struggle with these challenges to his rule, this reference and the case of
Agamemnon hangs above the narrative, like a ghastly vision of Orin s future if he make
thes wrong decisions. The Iliad acts as an intertext a sort of narrative foil to this
story, and acts to affirm Orin s choice to abdicate as the correct and righteous move.
It makes Orin s return to the mantle of Aquaman appear correct, and the way this story concludes
is made more satisfying for any viewer who bears in mind the last time an Anax chose
his power above all else. And, in my opinion, that s why the young Justice writers included
this new term, and why it works. Thanks for watching this video and if you
found any of the stuff we talked about interesting go pick up a copy of the Iliad and give it
a read. I recommend either the Robert Fagles or Stanely Lombardo translations myself, or,
if you want to challenge yourself a little more, try Richard Lattimore s version. There
s also tons of great online resources to help you dig into the text. And if you re interested
in the real history of the Trojan War, or of that bronze age collapse I mentioned at
one point, then try reading Eric Cline s book 1177BC the year civilisation collapsed. I
genuinely cannot recommend it highly enough. And if you re just hungry for more Young Justice
content, then as always I am working on plenty more videos on this show. These Older Than
You Think videos don t tend to do great, though, so if you fancy liking this one just to give
it a little boost, that d be awesome. Thanks to all my Patrons onscreen now, especially
Kevin Douglas, Ian Fyfield, and Thrawn7, and hey, why not check out the rest of the Older
Than You Think series, onscreen now?