Ancient Greece Archives - Page 2 of 24 - Tales of Times Forgotten

Most Memorable Opening Lines in Ancient Literature

Today, if one looks around on the internet, one can find all kinds of lists that purport to present the most memorable opening lines “of all time,” but, invariably, these opening lines are always from famous works of English literature written within the past two centuries. I have therefore decided to compile my own list of most memorable opening lines—but only for works of ancient literature.

I have chosen which lines to include in this post based on how impactful and memorable they are, not on how famous they are. As a result, many of the works I have included on this list are not well known to the general public. Meanwhile, I have omitted the opening lines of certain works that are extremely famous, but not especially memorable in their own right, such as the opening lines of Plato’s Republic and Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, which are famous because the works they come from are famous, not because they are especially memorable. I have chosen opening lines from works produced in a range of ancient cultures, including ancient Mesopotamia, the Levant, India, Greece, and Rome, and have chosen openings that I find memorable for a variety of different reasons.

No, the Roman Emperor Hadrian Didn’t Invent Palestine

At this point, I’m sure that all my readers are well aware of the recent events in Israel-Palestine. I don’t intend to talk about those events on this blog, in part because I am not an expert on the present-day geopolitics of the region and, right now, a lot of public information about what is happening there is incomplete or unreliable. The first and foremost purpose of this blog is to inform and educate my readers; the last thing I want to do is misinform or misdirect them. The danger of misinformation is especially great when it comes to present-day political situations that hold serious, far-reaching impacts for a large number of people.

I do, however, wish to address a factually incorrect claim that, for years, I have seen and heard various people make in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict, which pertains directly to my own expertise in ancient Greece and Rome. Namely, a lot of people have claimed that the Roman emperor Hadrian, who ruled for twenty-one years from his accession in 117 until his death in 138 CE, was the first to apply the name Palestine to the entire land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River when he renamed the land that was previously known as Judaea “Syria Palaestina,” supposedly specifically in order to punish the Jewish people for the Bar Kokhba revolt (lasted 132 – 136 CE).

In reality, the name Palestine etymologically derives from the Greek name Παλαιστίνη (Palaistínē), which Greek-language authors were already regularly using as a name for the geographic region of the southern Levant that lies between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River as far back as the fifth century BCE—over six hundred years before Hadrian. Roman authors writing in Latin and Jewish authors writing in Greek were likewise already using this name long before Hadrian was born. Furthermore, although Hadrian did combine Judaea into a province which bore the official name Syria Palaestina sometime around the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt, his precise motives for doing so are far from clear.

No, Emily Wilson Isn’t the First Woman Ever to Translate Homer

If you pay any attention at all to news related to the ancient world (which, if you’re reading this blog, you probably do), you’ve most likely already heard that the publisher W. W. Norton has just released a new translation of the Iliad by Emily Wilson, the professor at the University of Pennsylvania who became a household name for her translation of the Odyssey, which came out in 2018. Both of Wilson’s translations have received widespread acclaim, both have now become commercial bestsellers, and they have gotten people who don’t normally read ancient Greek literature reading and talking about the Homeric epics. It’s definitely an exciting time to be someone who studies ancient Greece.

For better or worse, the media narrative surrounding Wilson’s translations has fixated heavily on the fact that she is the first woman to commercially publish a translation of the entire Odyssey in English. This has led to an incorrect impression among lay readers that Wilson is the first woman ever to translate Homer. In reality, as Wilson herself has repeatedly and emphatically pointed out, this is not true. Read on to learn more about some of the other women who translated Homer before her.

Have Scholars Really Only Just Now Figured Out That Sappho’s Supposed Husband’s Name Is Dirty Joke?

As many readers are already aware, I am a queer woman who is currently a graduate student in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies. For a couple of years now, I have been following the subreddit r/SapphoAndHerFriend, which is named after the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho, who is known for her homoerotic work, and is dedicated to showcasing humorous or mildly infuriating examples of queer erasure. It’s an amusing space. Unfortunately, people are constantly making posts in the subreddit about Sappho that are, shall we say, factually dubious. For instance, users frequently make posts in which they make fun of “historians” for having supposedly believed for ages in total earnestness that Sappho had a husband named “Kerkylas of Andros,” which they say translates as “Dick Allcock from the Isle of Man.”

Posts of this kind are a frequent occurrence, but this one happens to be the most recent. These posts regularly ignore the fact that the claim they mock “historians” for having supposedly believed only occurs in one extremely late, notoriously uncritical premodern source and modern scholars have generally recognized it as an obscene joke for nearly 170 years. Additionally, I think that people should be aware of some rather discomforting information about the man whose translation of the name they keep sharing.

How Did Ancient Greek Women Make Themselves Look Seductive?

Imagine that you’re a woman in ancient Greece and, for some reason, you find yourself in a situation where you need (or want) to seduce someone. How would you go about doing it? What kind of clothes or cosmetics would you wear to do it? Some readers may be surprised to learn that there are actually a significant number of surviving texts from ancient Greece that describe in considerable detail how goddesses and mortal women made themselves look sexy in order to seduce people and, in this post, I will put my years of classics education to excellent use by introducing all my wonderful readers to them.

In general, these texts indicate that, if a woman wanted to look sexually attractive in order to seduce someone, she might engage in preparations such as bathing herself, anointing her skin with oil, putting on perfume, dressing herself in beautiful, expensive, and sometimes diaphanous clothing, putting on ornate and expensive jewelry, powdering her face with white lead to make herself look paler, painting alkanet dye rouge on her cheeks to make them look rosier, and removing her body hair.

The Most Twisted Scene in Any Ancient Greek Novel

It’s no secret that ancient Greek literature is full of all kinds of twisted and disturbing stories. I even previously wrote a post on this blog about some such stories in classical myth back in September 2019. There are, however, some truly messed-up incidents in ancient Greek literature that are not well known. In this post, I want to discuss an obscure episode of this nature that I think more people should hear.

Sometime around the second century CE or thereabouts, the Greek writer Xenophon of Ephesos (who is not to be confused with Xenophon of Athens, the much more famous Athenian writer of the fourth century BCE) wrote a novel known as the Ephesiaka or Ephesian Tale. The novel is, for the most part, not especially interesting. In fact, I think it’s probably the least interesting overall of all the surviving Greek novels; it mostly consists of a monotonous repetition of the same tropes that other ancient novelists do better. In book five, chapter one, however, Xenophon unexpectedly drops what is perhaps the freakiest moment in any surviving ancient Greek novel. It involves a man, a mummy, and some casual necrophilia.

The Lost Ancient Greek Novel with a Lesbian Love Plot in It

As I wrote about previously in this post from January 2020, the literary form of the novel (by which I mean a long work of narrative prose fiction) is vastly older than a lot of people believe. In fact, a significant number of novels written in the Ancient Greek and Latin languages by various authors from the first century BCE onward have survived to the present day. In fact, as of the time I am writing this, I have just completed a graduate-level course on the ancient Greek novel.

The central theme of many of the ancient Greek-language novels that have survived is ἔρως (érōs), which refers to sexual and romantic desire. (The ancient Greeks did not distinguish between the two.) The novels in which ἔρως is a central theme center around a pair of protagonists—invariably a young man and a young woman—who deeply and passionately erotically desire each other.

Many of the surviving novels, however, feature side characters who also have experiences with ἔρως, including some who either currently have or have previously had a partner of the same gender as themself. For instance, in the novel Leukippe and Kleitophon, written by Achilleus Tatios, a Greek-language writer from Alexandria in around the late second century CE, the male protagonist Kleitophon initially learns about ἔρως from his older male cousin Kleinias, who has a boyfriend. Fascinatingly, one ancient novel that has not survived—the Babyloniaka or Babylonian Tale, which a Syrian writer named Iamblichos wrote in the Greek language sometime between c. 165 and c. 180 CE—is known to have included a subplot involving two women characters who erotically desire one another and possibly end up marrying each other.

Jordan Peterson Does Not Understand Ancient Languages

I have written before on this blog about Jordan B. Peterson, a professor emeritus of psychology from the University of Toronto who rose to fame in 2016 when he publicly spoke out in opposition to an act passed by the Parliament of Canada to prohibit discrimination on the basis of “gender identity and expression.” Over the past seven years since then, he has attracted an enormous number of devoted followers as a self-help author and YouTube personality, appealing primarily to an audience of young, mostly white, straight, cisgender men from middle-class backgrounds who hold conservative political opinions. Peterson has used the platform he has built to publicly promote misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, and occasionally even white supremacist ideas.

In a blog post I wrote back in April 2021, I discuss in detail how Peterson routinely tries to use ancient myths and the Bible to support his various noxious viewpoints, despite the fact that he has absolutely no understanding of the academic study of these subjects and his interpretations of them display a profound ignorance of the historical and cultural contexts from which they originate and how ancient audiences understood them. I would recommend that readers who have not already read that post from two years ago go back and read it before continuing with this one, since this post is something of an addendum to that one.

In this post, I want to discuss the troubling way in which Peterson often tries to support his positions by making wildly unsupported claims about ancient languages, mainly Hebrew and Ancient Greek, despite the fact that he has never studied either of these languages in his life and he does not know them or any real information about them.

The Shocking True Origin of Dionysos

The ancient Greeks from at least the fifth century BCE onward commonly believed that the worship of the god Dionysos originated in Asia and was introduced to the Greek world relatively late. For most of the twentieth century, scholars simply accepted this belief at face value and deemed the elements of Dionysos’s cult that they perceived as strange and exotic as definitive marks of his cult’s eastern origin. If you pick up any book about Greek religion that was published before around 1960, it will almost certainly claim that Dionysos was a late addition to the Greek pantheon. Even today, people online still commonly repeat this claim as though it were fact.

For at least the past thirty years, though, scholars of ancient Greek religion have known for certain that Dionysos was not, in fact, a late entry to the Greek pantheon from the east at all. Instead, extremely ancient clay tablets written in a very early form of Greek definitively attest that the Greeks were already worshipping Dionysos as early as the fourteenth century BCE—a thousand years before Plato was even born. In light of this fact, the fact that the ancient Greeks believed that Dionysos was a recent addition to their pantheon takes on new meaning and potentially reveals much about how the Greeks thought about foreignness.

At What Age Did Ancient Greek Women Typically Marry?

It is well and widely known that ancient Greek parents typically compelled their daughters to marry at a shockingly young age, one at which they would legally be considered minors in most countries in the twenty-first century. Greek men, by contrast, typically married much older, usually when they were in their late twenties or thirties. As a result, the groom at an ancient Greek wedding was usually at least a decade older than the bride he was marrying—and in many cases much older than that.

Unmarried girls were effectively considered their father’s property. Marriages were usually arranged primarily between a girl’s father and her male suitor. The extent to which a father allowed his daughter to decide which man she would marry probably varied significantly depending on factors such as time period, region, and the specific father in question’s personality and attitudes; in some cases, girls probably had significant say over which man they married, but it is likely that, in other cases, they had little or no say.

Exactly how young did ancient Greek women really marry, though? Popular histories and even many academics routinely assert as fact that Greek parents typically forced their daughters to marry as soon as they began puberty, before they even turned fifteen. In this post, however, I will argue that this is based mainly on one literary passage describing a bride who was probably unusually young and was not typical for most city-states. Instead, a more comprehensive view of the evidence suggests that Greek girls actually most commonly married when they were a bit older, broadly between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. The ages at which girls married also varied significantly across regions; ancient authors record that, in certain parts of the Greek world, girls typically married significantly younger or older than they did in other parts.