Ancient Athens Archives - Page 3 of 10 - Tales of Times Forgotten

Did Ancient People Really Think That Gods People Didn’t Believe in Would “Fade”?

The idea that gods derive their power from people believing in them and worshipping them and that gods whom people stop believing in and worshipping will “fade” or possibly even die out pops up fairly frequently in modern popular culture. Most notably, it forms a major part of the premise for Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novel American Gods (originally published in 2001 by William Morrow in the United States and Headline the U.K.) and the television series of the same name based on it (originally released on the premium cable network Starz from 2017 through 2021).

Some people have wondered, though: Does this idea have any kind of basis in ancient sources? Did ancient people really believe that their deities drew their powers from people worshipping them? As it turns out, although the version of the idea that is best known today through American Gods and other works is utterly contrary to how ancient people normally thought about their deities, similar ideas about deities being, to some degree, dependent on worship, do crop up in ancient literature.

Were Ancient Civilizations Conservative or Liberal?

I have repeatedly encountered questions on Quora asking whether ancient civilizations were “liberal” or “conservative,” so I thought I would write an in-depth response to those sorts of questions here. I think these questions arise from people perceiving what seems like a fundamental paradox: we revere ancient civilizations for things people generally see as progressive, such as technological advancements and the invention of democracy, while, at the same time, it is widely known that basically all ancient societies had slavery, oppressed women to some degree or another, and were often imperialistic, xenophobic, and culturally chauvinistic.

It’s true that ancient civilizations were generally very conservative in the sense that they tended to value traditions very highly, they were usually culturally resistant to change, and people in those civilizations rarely challenged long-established cultural assumptions and social institutions. For instance, as far as we have evidence, few people in the ancient world ever challenged the idea that men are naturally superior to women or the idea that slavery is normal and morally acceptable.

At the same time, though, it would be misleading to describe ancient civilizations as “conservative” or “liberal” without careful clarification because, among individual people in the ancient world, there was tremendous ideological diversity. Furthermore, the normative values of ancient civilizations were often very different from the values of both contemporary people who call themselves conservatives and contemporary people who call themselves liberals.

Was Thucydides Biased?

Thucydides (lived c. 460 – c. 400 BCE)—or, to use a transliteration of his name that is more faithful to the Greek spelling, Thoukydides—was an ancient Athenian general and historian. He is best known today as the author of the work Histories of the Peloponnesian War, a historical account of the famous war fought between the Delian League, led by the city-state of Athens, and the Peloponnesian League, led by the city-state of Sparta. The war lasted from 431 until 404 BCE, with an interlude of peace in the middle lasting from 421 to 415 BCE.

Since the late nineteenth century, Thoukydides has often been held up as a paragon of the “objective,” “unbiased,” “scientific” historian. Although this conception of Thoukydides is, at any rate, no longer as fashionable among scholars as it once was, it persists in popular descriptions of his work and has greatly influenced how the general public perceives him. In this essay, I intend to debunk this perception by pointing out five examples of how Thoukydides’s biases seem to influence his narrative.

Ganymedes: The Adolescent Boy Zeus Abducted and Raped

The ancient Greeks told many stories about their god Zeus raping mortal adolescent girls, often shape-shifting into various animal and human forms in order to do so. Just to name a few examples, he is said to have abducted the Phoenician princess Europe in the form of a bull and raped her, raped the Aitolian princess Leda in the form of a swan, raped the Boiotian princess Antiope in the form of a satyr, raped the Argive princess Danaë in the form of a shower of gold coins, and tricked his own great-granddaughter Alkmene into having sex with him by impersonating her husband Amphitryon (which is, of course, another form of rape).

There’s a popular modern joke that 90% of the problems in Greek mythology are caused by Zeus not being able to “keep it in his pants,” but, even in ancient times, Zeus’s rapacious habits were already the subject of mockery. The Athenian playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BCE) wrote a comedy titled The Clouds, which was first performed at the City Dionysia in Athens in 423 BCE and later revised at some point between 420 and 417 BCE. In the play, an amoral character gives advice on what a man should do if he is caught in the act of adultery, saying, in lines 1080–1081, that he should “. . . ἐς τὸν Δί᾽ ἐπανενεγκεῖν, κἀκεῖνος ὡς ἥττων ἔρωτός ἐστι καὶ γυναικῶν:” (“. . .point at Zeus, and how he is also overcome with lust for women!”)

Many people, however, are not aware that Zeus’s habit of raping adolescents was not exclusively heterosexually oriented. In fact, in ancient times, one of the most famous stories about Zeus abducting and raping someone was about how he abducted a handsome adolescent boy named Ganymedes in the form of an eagle and forced him to become his catamite.

What Would Socrates Say about Modern Things?

Apart from Jesus, the ancient Athenian philosopher Socrates (lived c. 470 – 399 BCE) is possibly the one person who lived in ancient times who is most widely venerated today. Many people see him as a figure who is worthy of contemporary emulation. In the same way that Christians have often tried to justify their own actions and opinions by insisting that Jesus would be on their side, philosophers have tried to justify their actions and opinions by insisting that Socrates would be on their side—whatever their side happens to be.

Contemporary professors and philosophers have tried to posthumously marshal Socrates as a supporter for all kinds of contemporary causes, including going to graduate school in the humanities, opposing supposed university “cancel culture,” and even opposing vaccine mandates—but what was the historical Socrates like and what would he think of all the causes people are invoking his name in support of? More importantly, would Socrates’s opinion on any of these issues actually be worth listening to?

The Shocking Truth about Ancient Greek Makeup

There are tons of articles, blog posts, and YouTube videos online about ancient Greek makeup. Unfortunately, I have found that all of them are of utterly abysmal quality. None of the articles that I could find contained any citations to specific passages in ancient sources and all of them contained wildly egregious errors of fact and misconceptions seemingly derived from earlier online sources that, in turn, did not cite any ancient sources.

I have decided to remedy this situation by writing my own article about ancient Greek makeup. Everything I am about to say in this article will be concretely supported by specific passages from actual ancient Greek texts. If you’ve ever wanted to make yourself look like an ancient Greek beauty, or simply wondered what Greek women would look like in movies if they were portrayed historically accurately, then this is exactly the article for you!

Ancient Greek Men Were Not All Buff

One of the most common misconceptions I have encountered about the ancient Greeks is the notion that ancient Greek men were all incredibly buff, muscle-bound bodybuilders. This misconception seems to arise from the naïve assumption that ancient Greek statues depict how average ancient Greek men really looked, perhaps also influenced by the similarly naïve assumption that the 2007 epic fantasy action film 300, written and directed by Zack Snyder, is a historically accurate depiction of ancient Greece.

The reality is that there was never a time when the majority of Greek men really looked like the physical specimens portrayed in Archaic and Classical Greek sculptures. These sculptures represent what upper-class Greek people regarded as physically ideal, not what the average Greek person actually looked like.

Why Did the Patriarchal Greeks and Romans Worship Such Powerful Goddesses?

It is widely known that the ancient Greeks and Romans worshipped many powerful goddesses, whom they held in extremely high regard. At the same time, it is also widely known that ancient Greek and Roman societies were deeply patriarchal. Misogyny and machismo were rampant among men of all social classes. Women’s lives were, in general, strictly socially controlled and women were excluded from holding most official positions of power.

As a result of this, one of the most common questions people have asked me about classical mythology is how the Greeks and Romans were able to accommodate such powerful goddesses within their respective pantheons while simultaneously denigrating human women. In this essay, I will try to answer this question to the best of my ability. I will give several different plausible explanations in the hope that some of them, or the combination of all of them, may be satisfactory.

Sparta Was Not a Paradise for Women

It is extremely common for people who write about ancient history on the internet to claim that ancient Sparta was, by ancient Greek standards, a paradise for women. I’m frankly sick and tired of this narrative because it is, in many ways, deeply misinformed. It is, of course, dangerous to overgeneralize, but I would argue that a randomly selected woman of unspecified social status in Athens would actually be far more likely to be happy than a similarly selected woman in Sparta.

It’s true that Spartiate women (i.e., women who belonged to the Spartan citizen class) generally had more freedom and privileges than women of the citizen class in most other Greek poleis (i.e., city-states). Nonetheless, life for Spartiate women wasn’t nearly as good as it is often made to sound. Their rights were still severely limited and the rights that Spartiate women had that women in other Greek poleis lacked were actually fairly normal for women in other ancient civilizations, such as Egypt and Rome.

Furthermore, the popular discourse around Sparta almost always completely omits mention of the fact that the overwhelming majority of all women in Sparta were enslaved helots, for whom life was almost certainly an absolute living Hell. While all Greek poleis had enslaved people, in Sparta, they made up a vastly larger share of the overall population than in any other polis and they were notoriously ill-treated, even by ancient Greek standards. Helot women were forced to do an overwhelming amount of manual labor, they lived in constant fear of being whipped or murdered by the krypteia, they were kept perpetually starving and malnourished, people they loved were constantly dying, and many of them were regularly being raped.

How Have Works of Greek Drama Survived?

It is widely known that the vast majority of all works of ancient drama have been lost forever. We have record of literally hundreds of playwrights who wrote plays in the Greek language in ancient times, but only five of these playwrights have any plays that have survived to the present day complete or nearly complete under their own names. Three of these playwrights were tragedians: Aischylos, Sophokles, and Euripides. The other two playwrights—Aristophanes, and Menandros—were both comedians. All five were Athenian citizen men who lived in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.

Many people who do not have any degrees in classics have heard these authors’ names and maybe even read some of their plays in translation, but very few people who do not have degrees in classics know how and why any of these authors’ works have survived to the present day when so many other works of ancient Greek drama have been lost.