Tales of Times Forgotten

Is Persephone the Main Ruler of the Underworld in Greek Myth?

Most people who know about Greek myth think that Hades is the ruler of the underworld. This is not wrong per se; early Greek poems do describe Hades as “ruler of those beneath the earth.” But, for the ancient Greeks, Hades was surprisingly not very important. Instead, across ritual, mythic, literary, and artistic contexts, Persephone, the queen of the underworld, occupies a far more prominent and authoritative position than her husband. She is the one who sends up the shades of the dead to speak to Odysseus in Book 11 of the Odyssey, the one whom Greeks honored through rituals and holidays, the one who was central to the Eleusinian mysteries, and the one who Orphic initiates believed would intercede for them in the afterlife.

By contrast, Hades was never a very developed figure for the ancient Greeks. Early poems mostly use his name as a metonym for the underworld itself and say very little about him as a personal god. He had very little significance in Greek ritual, and the only early myth in which he appears as a real character with his own agency and desires is that of his abduction of Persephone. Hades is vastly more prominent in contemporary retellings and adaptations of Greek myth than he ever was in the actual ancient sources.

I originally started writing a blog post on this topic around 2021, but I never finished it. Recently, the discussion around the depiction of the underworld in Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey, which I posted a review of last week, reminded me of it, so I decided to return to the topic. In this post, I will explore in depth the evidence for Persephone and Hades’s relative importance in early Greek religion and myth, as well as their possible origins.

An Ancient Historian’s Breakdown of Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is perhaps the most highly anticipated new film of the 2020s. It has already received near-universal acclaim from film critics and earned more at the box office in its opening weekend than any of Nolan’s previous films, including The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and Oppenheimer (2023). It has only been out for one week and is already fueling a culture-wide resurgence of interest in ancient Greek myth and literature.

Although Nolan’s creative decisions for the film raised controversy even before the film was released, I promised myself early on that I would not weigh in on the film until after I had seen it myself. And I will be honest: I went into Nolan’s Odyssey with the expectation, based on my previous experience with big Hollywood adaptations of Greek myths and the images and previews that I had seen beforehand, that it would be unconscionably bad. As I watched it, I found some things I disliked, but, overall, I was pleasantly surprised. By the time I was about an hour or so into it, I found myself really enjoying it and actually liking some (although certainly not all) of the creative decisions Nolan made.

If I had directed a film adaptation of the Odyssey, I would have done it very differently, but, as I have reminded myself repeatedly, I am not the target audience of this film; this film is for normal people who like movies, spectacle, and mythic fantasy, not a nerd like me who has spent over a decade studying ancient Greek history and literature, can read Ancient Greek and Latin, has a master’s degree in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies, and has been writing an ancient history blog for the past decade. In this post, I will lay out my thoughts on the film itself and some of the criticisms other people have made of it.

My Position Regarding Use of Generative AI

Because generative AI is in everything now, a shockingly high number of other blogs have adopted it, and, on Reddit, other people have occasionally accused my comments on that platform of being AI-generated, I’ve decided to make this short post clarifying my own position regarding its use.

I began writing this blog in November 2016, long before the emergence of generative AI. I write every post I make on this blog entirely myself, and it takes me many hours to research, write, and edit each post. I’m sure that, if I did use generative AI, then I could produce many more posts in far less time, but I don’t want to do that. I want every post on this blog to be as accurate as possible and to reflect my own actual thoughts, and I believe that using generative AI would compromise both of these goals. Moreover, I still firmly believe that presenting AI-generated content as one’s own work without disclosure is intellectually dishonest, despite how normalized it has become in the past three years.

How Medieval Are the Dragons in ‘House of the Dragon’ Really?

The new season of HBO’s epic fantasy series House of the Dragon is about to release its fourth episode. The show is set in the fantasy land of Westeros, which is loosely inspired by England in the High and Late Middle Ages. The story is based on the second half of George R. R. Martin’s 2018 fantasy novel Fire & Blood, which describes a fictional civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons, which is, in turn, loosely inspired by the real medieval English civil war known as the Anarchy (lasted 1138 – 1153), in which Empress Matilda, King Henry I’s daughter and appointed heir, fought over the English throne with her cousin Stephen of Blois. House of the Dragon takes the general premise of this war and adds many fantastic elements; most notably, in this story, both sides have dragons that they deploy in battle against each other.

Because the series draws both aesthetic and narrative inspiration from medieval England, and dragons appear in medieval legends, many viewers may assume that the dragons they see on screen in House of the Dragon resemble what medieval people imagined when they told stories about dragons. This assumption, however, is incorrect. The dragons in Martin’s novels and the television shows based on them are awesome to read about and watch on screen, but they bear only a partial physical resemblance and essentially no behavioral resemblance to dragons in real medieval literature and art.

Where Does the Canonical Image of Satan Come From?

If I told you to imagine what the Devil looks like, you would probably have a very clear image in your head: a man with horns, red skin, a goatee, cloven hooves, and a tail with a point on the end, holding a pitchfork. This image of Satan is ubiquitous in popular culture. But where does it come from? The Bible never describes Satan’s appearance, so our image of Satan clearly doesn’t come from the Bible—or at least not directly. It must come from other sources.

As it turns out, the conventional image of Satan developed gradually over the course of many centuries. Some aspects of Satan’s iconography (in particular the cloven hooves, horns, and pitchfork) are very ancient, while others (such as him being red and having a goatee and a tail with a point on the end) are fairly recent developments.

Is Edward Gibbon’s ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ Worth Reading Today?

Even if you know nothing else about the historiography of the late Roman Empire, there is one work of scholarship on the subject that you’ve probably heard of: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, which was originally published in six volumes from 1776 to 1789. At the time, it was at the very cutting edge of historical scholarship. In the two and a half centuries since its first publication, it has been reprinted in dozens of editions and has been continually referenced in popular culture in a way that almost no other work of academic history can boast, from the (often-cut) opening song of the 1971 Stephen Schwartz musical Godspell to the titles of countless other works, such as William L. Shirer’s 1960 nonfiction book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Chappell Roan’s 2023 album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.

To this day, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire holds great historiographical, literary, and cultural significance, and it may be worth reading for those reasons. But people often ask: How well does it hold up as history? The short answer is that, if you want to learn about the later history of the Roman Empire as modern scholarship understands it, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is extremely outdated. This post will briefly discuss some of the work’s merits and shortcomings and provide a list of more up-to-date works that cover some of the same history.

Did Ancient Civilizations Have Organized Crime?

It is a fact of life that, for as long as people have been making laws, there have been people who have tried to break those laws and get away with it. Laws, of course, are extremely ancient; the oldest surviving formal, written law code is the Code of Ur-Nammu, which King Ur-Nammu of the Sumerian city-state of Ur promulgated around 2100 BCE. Humans have probably had informal laws for far longer. The obvious corollary to this is that crime is also very ancient—and, when the law becomes organized, criminal organizations tend to follow.

To modern readers, the phrase “organized crime” may conjure up images of recent historical gangsters like Al Capone or fictional criminals like Walter White from the AMC television series Breaking Bad, but various kinds of criminal organizations have existed in various civilizations since at least the Bronze Age. In this post, I will discuss examples from pharaonic Egypt, Classical Greece, and ancient Rome.

How an Obscure Character in the ‘Iliad’ Gave Us the English Word ‘Pander’

In the Iliad, Pandaros, son of Lykaon, is a Lykian archer who is allied with the Trojans. In Book 4 of the epic, the goddess Athena tricks him into firing an arrow at the Akhaian king Menelaos, which breaks a truce between the Trojans and Akhaians and causes fighting to resume. Pandaros briefly shows up again in Book 5 when the Akhaian warrior Diomedes knocks him from his chariot, and he quietly disappears from the epic after that. He’s a fairly minor character, and most people have never heard of him. Even if you’ve read the Iliad, there’s a decent chance you don’t remember him.

Many people may, therefore, be surprised to learn that there is a common word in English derived from Pandaros’s name: the verb pander. The fact that Pandaros is the source of this word may be even more surprising to people because the word’s meaning—to appeal to the base desires or prejudices of a particular person or group—has nothing to do with anything Pandaros does in the Iliad or in any other ancient source. The story of how we got from Pandaros the Lykian archer in the Iliad to the English word pander is a very strange one, which involves Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and. . . pimps.

Ancient and Medieval People Believed that Unicorns Were Real—and Murderous

No one can deny that Death of a Unicorn, released in March of this year, is a very strange film. It is a horror comedy in which a man and his daughter driving their car through a remote forest accidentally hit and fatally injure a unicorn. Soon, the unicorn’s body ends up in the hands of Big Pharma executives, who discover its horn and blood can miraculously cure all ailments, and want to sell its ground-up horn and blood to wealthy customers for big profits—until the unicorn’s angry parents come to seek violent revenge for their child.

Readers may, however, be surprised to learn that this film, for all its surreal imagery, is actually much closer in important ways to how ancient and medieval sources describe unicorns than perhaps any other recent media depiction. While twenty-first-century popular culture generally portrays unicorns as friendly, docile creatures and associates them with plush toys and backpacks for young girls, in premodern traditions, the most consistent traits associated with unicorns are their fierceness, their impossibility to tame, their devotion to their foals, and their ability to kill humans who would seek to capture them in large numbers.

Scholars Have Discovered How to Pronounce the True Name of God

Today, most Jews, Christians, and Muslims simply call their god “God,” but it is fairly common knowledge that the texts of the Hebrew Bible refer to the God of Israel by his proper name, which, in Hebrew, is written as four letters: יהוה (YHWH), known as the tetragrammaton. At the time when the texts of the Hebrew Bible were written, the people of Israel and Judah regularly used this name to refer to their god. By the first century CE, however, a taboo forbade ordinary Jews from saying the proper name of God aloud. Instead, when a Jewish person was reading the Hebrew Bible and came across this name, they would substitute either the word אֲדֹנָי (ăḏonāi), which means “my Lord,” or הַשֵּׁם (ha-shem), which means “the name.” For this reason, English translations of the Hebrew Bible traditionally render the proper name of God as “the LORD.”

At the time of the Hebrew Bible’s composition, the written forms of the Hebrew and Aramaic languages recorded only consonants, not vowels. Much later, between the seventh and tenth centuries CE, the compilers of the standard text of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Masoretic Text, added symbols known as “vowel points” to indicate the vowels of most words, but, when the tetragrammaton occurred in the text, they gave it the vowel points of ăḏonāi, because that was the word a reader was supposed to substitute for it, and did not preserve the vowels of the name itself. For this reason, most Christian seminaries and Jewish rabbinical schools teach that no one today knows how the name of God was pronounced.

This makes for a good story, and it was actually true at one time. For roughly the past century now, though, scholars have actually had compelling evidence that the ancient peoples of Israel and Judah pronounced the proper name of their god Yahweh. There is slight ambiguity about the exact vowel qualities, but not much. In this post, I will explain the ancient evidence supporting this scholarly reconstruction. To do this, I will have to use some linguistics jargon, but I will do my best to explain the meanings of all the terms I use.