Ancient Greece Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Advice on Reading Homer in Translation

The Iliad and the Odyssey are often regarded as being among the greatest works of world literature and many people have an interest in reading them—but how does one go about starting? Which translations are the best? In what manner should one read them? In this post, I will give advice in response to all these questions and discuss both the strengths and shortcomings of the most widely read translations, drawing on my experience as someone who has a master’s degree in classics, knows Ancient Greek, and has read the epics in the original Greek as well as in multiple translations.

What’s the Problem with Elon Musk’s ‘Iliad’ Advice?

On August 24th, 2024, Elon Musk, who is currently one of the richest, most powerful, and most influential human beings on the planet, tweeted, “Can’t recommend The Iliad enough! Best as Penguin audiobook at 1.25 speed.” He accompanied these words with a link to the audiobook edition of E. V. Rieu’s 1946 prose translation of the Odyssey (a different poem from the Iliad), published by Penguin Classics. This tweet has created a lot of discourse in the online classics community, with many classicists criticizing Musk while others are left wondering what there is to criticize. In this post, I will explain what the problems are with Musk’s recommendation, which basically break down into two separate issues: right-wing dog whistling and bad practical advice.

Why Greece Hasn’t Rebuilt the Agora

Almost every tourist who has ever visited Athens has at some point thought about how amazing it would be if the city’s monuments were restored to how they looked when they were new in classical antiquity. A couple of months ago, the website UnHerd, which has right-wing and libertarian political leanings and specializes in what it calls “slow journalism,” published an essay by Nicholas Boys Smith titled “It’s time to rebuild ancient Athens,” in which Smith proposes that Greece should fully restore the Athenian agora (the ancient central market and meeting place of the city) to how it looked in antiquity. This is a fairly common sentiment, so I wanted to take this opportunity to address it.

In this post, I will discuss why restoring Athens’ ancient ruins to how they looked in antiquity hasn’t already happened in the way that many tourists like Smith have hoped and the problems that such a restoration would certainly entail. Most ancient historians and archaeologists do support the idea of restoration to some degree or another, but we also recognize that restoration must be balanced with other concerns.

New Fragments of Euripides Discovered!

As I previously discussed in this post I wrote back in 2021, the vast majority of ancient Greek drama has not survived to the present day. Of the hundreds of Greek tragic playwrights who flourished in antiquity, only three have any plays that have survived to the present day complete under their own names: Aischylos, Sophokles, and Euripides. At least ninety-five plays attributed to Euripides circulated in antiquity. Of these, only nineteen have survived to the present day complete and only eighteen of them are actually his work. (One of the surviving plays attributed to him, Rhesos, is generally agreed by modern scholars to be the work of a different playwright wrongly attributed to Euripides.)

Many of Euripides’s lost plays, however, are not totally lost; fragments of them survive. Some of these fragments are preserved through quotation by later ancient writers in surviving works, while others survive on papyri that have been discovered in Egypt over the past roughly century and a half. Some of these fragments are as long as whole scenes, while others are as short as a single word. A new expansion to Euripides’s surviving corpus, however, has just arrived. On August 1st, 2024, two classics professors at the University of Colorado Boulder announced that they have identified substantial previously unknown sections from two of his lost tragedies on a papyrus recently discovered in Egypt. This is a positively electrifying discovery for the field of classics.

In Defense of Hegelochos

The Athenian tragic playwright Euripides (lived c. 480 – c. 406 BCE) is known for adapting traditional myths in highly innovative and sometimes controversial ways. In spring 408 BCE, his perhaps most iconoclastic tragedy Orestes premiered at the City Dionysia in the Theater of Dionysos Eleuthereus on the south slope of the Athenian akropolis. The play addresses the same myth as Aischylos’s earlier tragedy Eumenides, but radically alters the plot. In Aischylos’s play, the character Orestes stands trial before a jury of Athenians and is acquitted of the crime of murdering his own mother. In Euripides’s adaptation, by contrast, Orestes (along with his accomplices Pylades and Elektra) are convicted and sentenced to death in Argos and attempt to escape through murder and hostage-taking.

The play’s radically revisionist treatment of a classic myth, however, is not the only reason why its first performance is famous. Several ancient scholarly commentaries, known as scholia, attest that, in the first performance of the play, Orestes was portrayed by an actor named Hegelochos, who messed up one of his lines and won eternal ridicule. In this post, however, I will argue that Hegelochos may not be entirely (or perhaps at all) to blame for the infamous slip-up, which may owe just as much or more to the audience’s mishearing.

What Do the Newly-Read Herculaneum Papyri Actually Tell Us about Plato?

Readers who have been paying attention to the news may have seen that a group of researchers led by Graziano Ranocchia of the University of Pisa in Italy have recently used modern technology to read portions of a carbonized scroll from the library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum bearing a history of Plato’s Akademia written by the Epicurean philosopher and poet Philodemos of Gadara, who lived in the first century BCE and died sometime between c. 40 and c. 35 BCE. The newly-readable parts of the scroll include an anecdote about how Plato supposedly died and more specific information than was previously known about where he was buried.

In this post, I will briefly discuss the actual historical, literary, and philosophical significance of these findings. While the findings are genuinely significant, a lot of media coverage has been rather sensationalistic and has perhaps raised some false assumptions and hopes about what these discoveries mean. This post will serve as a scholarly counterpoint to these assumptions.

Why Prehistoric Matriarchy Wasn’t a Thing (A Brief Explanation)

If you are interested in religion and gender in the ancient world like I am, there is a fairly strong likelihood that, at some point, you’ve encountered some version of the claim that, at one point in human prehistory (variously conceived as sometime in the Upper Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, or all three), either all human societies worldwide or at least the majority of human societies in Europe belonged to a matriarchal social order, in which women were supreme over men, and that this system preceded the imposition of the current patriarchal order.

The kinds of arguments and evidence that various proponents of the hypothesis of “prehistoric matriarchy” have tried to invoke over the years are so wildly disparate that it is impossible to address all the supposed evidence comprehensively in a single post. At the end of the day, the common denominator of all the arguments is that all the “evidence” they try to cite is weak, irrelevant, and/or open to many other interpretations. In this post, I will very briefly address the arguments that the man who originally formulated the hypothesis used and explain why those arguments do not hold up to scrutiny.

Don’t Blame “Paganism” for the United States’ Problems

On December 25th, 2023, The Atlantic published an op-ed by David Wolpe, a prominent American rabbi, titled “The Return of the Pagans.” In the op-ed, Wolpe asserts that both the political left and right in the United States have embraced fundamentally “pagan” ideas about the world (by which he means ideas derived from and characteristic of the traditional non-monotheistic religions of the ancient Mediterranean, particularly Greece and Rome) and that this supposed “pagan” influence is the cause of many of the problems that the United States faces today.

For those who don’t know, I’m a graduate student in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies and my main research focus is ancient Greek religion. Given this interest, I was quite intrigued to see an article published in a major news outlet with a title proclaiming that “paganism” has returned. Sadly, I soon found that Wolpe’s idea of “paganism” is a wildly inaccurate caricature that has more to do with nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophies than with the non-monotheistic religions of the ancient Mediterranean world. The op-ed got under my skin, so I decided to let it furnish an opportunity to educate interested readers about what ancient polytheistic religions were like—and, just as importantly, what they weren’t like.

The Ancient Greeks Invented the Fashion Doll Over 2,500 Years Before Barbie

In my characteristic fashion, I am behind on contemporary popular culture. The movie Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig, came out in July of this year while I was in Greece. It attracted much discussion online and became both the highest-grossing film of this year and the highest-grossing comedy film of all time, but I only just recently watched it for the first time on HBO Max, over five months after it came out. Overall, I found it entertaining and surprisingly thoughtful for a comedy based on a brand of children’s toy.

The film begins with a parody documentary sequence in which the disembodied narrator (played by Helen Mirren) hyperbolically claims that, before Barbie, the only dolls that ever existed were baby dolls. I expect that most viewers will easily recognize this claim as satire, but, in case anyone takes it seriously, I thought I should point out that dolls of adult women with fully articulable joints who could be dressed in various outfits were actually all the rage among children in ancient Greece two thousand five hundred years ago. We know this because literally hundreds of dolls of this kind have survived to the present day and, today, they are held in museum collections all over the world.

Persephone Is in the Underworld During the Summer, Not the Winter

For those of us who live in the northern hemisphere, winter will soon be upon us. The ancient Greek myth of the goddess Persephone, who spends one third of the year in the underworld and the remaining two thirds of the year with her mother Demeter, is a well-known etiological myth (i.e., a myth that explains how things came to be the way they are) for the changing of the seasons.

Most modern people who know the myth of Persephone think that the ancient Greeks believed that she was in the underworld during the winter and with Demeter for the rest of the year. Even many professional classicists think this. I, however, like some other scholars, am convinced that this is incorrect. The surviving ancient sources for the myth are unclear about which part of the year Persephone spends in the underworld and it makes far more sense given everything we know about the ancient Greek agricultural and religious calendars to conclude that the Greeks believed that she was in the underworld during the summer, not the winter.