Most people are aware that the ancient Greeks made a lot of significant contributions to modern civilization, but not everyone knows exactly what they contributed. I cannot possibly hope to list all of the ancient Greek contributions to civilization here, since I could write a whole book on the subject and still not cover everything. Nonetheless, here are just a few of the ancient Greeks’ most famous—and, indeed, most obvious—contributions. These are numbered in no particular order:
Continue reading “What Did the Ancient Greeks Contribute to Modern Civilization? A Lot, It Turns Out.”Category: Ancient Athens
How Accurate Is Plato’s Portrayal of Socrates?
The Athenian philosopher Socrates (c. 470 – 399 BC) changed the way philosophers thought about the world. Yet, puzzlingly to modern audiences, for some reason, he himself never wrote any of his own ideas down. Nearly everything we know about him comes from what his students Plato (lived c. 428 or c. 424 – c. 347 BC) and Xenophon (lived c. 431 – 354 BC) wrote about him. Of these two, Plato is by far the more influential and generally agreed to be the more accurate. Consequently, we must question how accurate Plato’s portrayal of Socrates really is.
Continue reading “How Accurate Is Plato’s Portrayal of Socrates?”A Guided Tour of Raphael’s “School of Athens”
The School of Athens is a fresco painted between 1509 and 1511 by the Italian Renaissance artist Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, commonly known in English as “Raphael.” It depicts a scene of famous philosophers and thinkers of the past from different time periods, all standing around conversing and debating with each other. It is located in the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City and is widely considered to be one of the greatest masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. It has been the background image for this website since I first created it. Nonetheless, the fresco is filled with all sorts of fascinating symbolism and iconography that is often lost on the average viewer, so I thought I would take this article to give a quick guided tour of Raphael’s School of Athens.
Continue reading “A Guided Tour of Raphael’s “School of Athens””No, Throwing Apples at People Was Not Considered a “Marriage Proposal” in Ancient Greece
Internet memes are a notoriously unreliable source of information about the historical past. It should therefore come as little surprise to most people that a popular meme in widespread circulation on the internet claiming that throwing apples at people was “considered a marriage proposal” in ancient Greece is largely inaccurate. It may come as a surprise, though, that this meme actually does have some remote grounding in factual reality and—as is often the case—the truth is far stranger and more fascinating than the fiction. While it is true that the ancient Greeks had no custom of proposing marriage by pelting someone with apples, throwing apples was really considered a ploy at seduction.
Continue reading “No, Throwing Apples at People Was Not Considered a “Marriage Proposal” in Ancient Greece”Most Bizarre Deaths from Classical History
Classical history is kind of notorious for its menagerie of stories about bizarre and humiliating deaths. Today we will hear stories about a philosopher who covered himself in cow manure and was devoured by wild dogs, a military leader who committed suicide by drinking bull’s blood, a playwright who was killed by a falling tortoiseshell, a poet who jumped into a volcano to make people think he was a god, a tragedian who was killed like a character in one of his tragedies, a tyrant who was assassinated with a poisoned toothpick, a Stoic philosopher who literally laughed himself to death, and even a Christian religious leader who pooped out his own internal organs. All of these stories are almost certainly apocryphal, but they are still interesting to retell!
Continue reading “Most Bizarre Deaths from Classical History”Three Times the Winners Did Not Write History
“History is written by the victors” is a saying so commonplace that it has become almost a platitude. It seems as though everyone has simply come to accept it and believe it. The problem is that it is not actually always true. Strictly speaking, history is not, in fact, written by the victors. History is written by the people who write history. These people are often the victors, but not always and not necessarily. There are examples throughout history of history being written by the people who lost. In this post, we will explore just a few of the occasions when the victors did not write history.
Continue reading “Three Times the Winners Did Not Write History”Three Bizarre Stories from Ancient Greece
Like many people, I am deeply fascinated by the obscure, the bizarre, and the perplexing. Thankfully, I happen to study the classics, which is a subject that is full of obscure, bizarre, and perplexing stories. There are so many such stories, in fact, that I cannot even count the number of them that I have read. Nonetheless, I thought I would share a few of my favorites here. Here are three stories I picked out as being among the most bizarre stories told by classical writers: a story of a dying man who allegedly stayed alive for three days by sniffing a loaf of bread, stories of a man with a golden thigh who could make rivers greet him by name, and a historical event in which an oligarchy was overthrown by conspirators disguised as prostitutes.
Continue reading “Three Bizarre Stories from Ancient Greece”Cats and Weasels
Everyone knows that, in ancient times, the Egyptians worshipped cats, but across the Mediterranean over in Europe, the situation was much different. During the Archaic Period (lasted c. 800 – c. 510 BC), housecats seem to have been almost completely absent from the Greek world; they do not appear in Greek art and not referenced in works of Greek literature from this time period.
During the Classical Period (lasted c. 510 – c. 323 BC), housecats seem to have been gradually introduced to Greece and southern Italy from Egypt and the Near East, but they seem to have been seen as strange, exotic pets—in the same way that keeping a parrot as a pet might be seen as unusual today.
Eventually, starting during the Hellenistic Period (lasted c. 323 – c. 31 BC) and continuing into the Roman Period, housecats as pets gradually became more and more common in the Greco-Roman world. Curiously, though, weasels seem to have been much more commonly kept as pets in ancient Greece than cats and the words for “cat” and “weasel” seem to often been conflated.
Continue reading “Cats and Weasels”The Bizarre Origins of the Word Idiot
The 2016 election cycle in the United States has been one of the most bitter and divisive in recent memory. Both of the candidates—Hillary Rodham Clinton (D) and Donald J. Trump (R)—are regarded as so thoroughly unlikeable in every way that many people are outright refusing to vote for either of them. If you decide not to vote in this election, though, you are an idiot. I do not necessarily mean you are unintelligent or even ignorant for that matter; I merely mean that you are an idiot.