ancient Greek history Archives - Page 3 of 6

No, Alexander the Great Didn’t See Flying Saucers

If you’ve ever been on the internet or happened to turn on virtually any show that has aired on the History Channel within the past ten years, you’re probably aware that there are tons of people who are, shall we say, highly enthusiastic about so-called “unidentified flying objects” or “UFOs.” These UFO enthusiasts love to repeat a story which claims that the ancient Makedonian king Alexander the Great and his soldiers saw UFOs in the sky that looked like giant silvery shields at some point while he was on his campaigns.

The story that UFO enthusiasts keep repeating, however, is demonstrably entirely fictional. No version of the story ever appears in any ancient or medieval source. In fact, the earliest known mention of the story dates to the year 1959. Other people have debunked this story before, but I am going to debunk it again because UFO enthusiasts keep repeating it.

Alluring Anecdotes about the Olympic Games

The 2020 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo are now officially underway, having been delayed by a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I have absolutely no interest in sports and, in all likelihood, I will not watch any part of the ongoing Olympics. Nonetheless, I do know a little bit about Olympic history, due to my intense study of ancient Greece and Rome and, on account of the occasion, I’ve decided to share a few of my favorite anecdotes about Olympic history.

The first is a legend about why ancient Olympic athletes were required to compete naked, the second is about a woman who disguised herself as a man in order to attend the Olympic Games, the third is about how women were sometimes able to compete in the ancient Olympic Games due to a loophole, and the fourth is about how the modern Olympic Games at one point included competitions for literature and the arts.

Pamphile of Epidauros: A Female Ancient Greek Historian

Nearly all the historical writings that have survived from ancient Greece and Rome were written by men. Women’s voices in the historical record are few and far between. We do, however, know that there was, in fact, an extraordinarily prolific female ancient Greek historian named Pamphile of Epidauros, who lived in Greece in around the middle of the first century CE, when Greece was ruled by the Roman Empire.

Pamphile is known to have written a lengthy compilation of interesting historical anecdotes derived from various sources titled Historical Commentaries, an epitome of the writings of the historian Ktesias of Knidos (fl. c. 400 BCE), a work titled On Controversies that seems to have been perhaps a collection of essays on controversial topics, and a work titled On Sexual Pleasures, which seems to have been a sex manual. Sadly, everything or almost everything she wrote has been lost.

Pamphile is a truly monumental figure in the history of Greek historiography, not only because she is the only female ancient Greek historian about whom we have any significant information, but also because she seems to have been an especially important author in the development of the genre of “miscellaneous history,” which focused on retelling interesting anecdotes from earlier authors and became very popular in the Roman Empire during the second and third centuries CE.

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.

The Debate about Classics Isn’t What You Probably Think It Is

On 2 February 2021, The New York Times published a profile piece written by Rachel Poser titled “He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?” The subject of the article is Dan-el Padilla Peralta, an Afro-Latino associate professor of classics at Princeton University who argues that the field of classics as it is currently constructed is deeply embedded with systemic racism and serves to reinforce white supremacist hegemony. Padilla wants to radically reshape the field by rooting out aspects that reinforce white supremacy and rebuilding the field in a new way.

This profile piece triggered an unceasing deluge of op-eds published on various platforms purporting to “defend” the discipline of classics from Padilla’s supposed attacks. These op-eds almost invariably display complete ignorance of the conversation that has been taking place within the discipline of classics over the past few years and ignorance of what Padilla is actually proposing. They reduce the conversation to a ridiculous caricature according to which evil, radical leftist scholars are trying to bring an end to the study of ancient texts altogether.

Many people who are not directly connected to the field of classics are learning about the controversy solely from these op-eds and coming away with the egregious misimpression that this is really what is happening. In this essay, I want to explain for my general readership what is really going on within the field and what sorts of changes people are really advocating. (I would write an op-ed, but no one would publish it, since I’m just a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate.)

Athenian Democracy Wasn’t Really That Great

Athenian democracy was one of the earliest well-documented governments of its kind in human history. It is hard to convey how radical and amazing it was in the context of the ancient Mediterranean world. Unfortunately, as a result of the significance it held in its historical context, today, people often misguidedly regard it as the ideal, original democracy that all modern democracies should strive to imitate. We should admire Athenian democracy as one important early step in the development of democratic government, but we should also recognize that it was not totally unique even in the Greek world for its time and that it was deeply flawed in ways that are, unfortunately, often overlooked in modern panegyrics of its greatness.

Contrary to popular belief, Athens was not the first Greek polis (i.e., city-state) to adopt a democratic constitution. Moreover, the vast majority of the Athenian population was formally excluded from participating in the democracy. Democratic Athens was also aggressively imperialistic and routinely sought to dominate and oppress other Greek poleis and, on multiple occasions, it even committed outright genocide. Finally, Athenian democracy was much shorter-lived than many people realize.

Fascinating Facts about Ancient Sparta

Most people today are familiar with the idea of the ancient Spartans as a warrior people who spurned luxury and devoted themselves to military training. The Spartans have a substantial presence in modern popular culture, partly due to the 2006 fantasy action film 300, which, as I discuss in this article I published in November 2019, greatly distorts the true history of Sparta in order to convey a deeply racist, misogynistic, ableist, and fascist message.

In this article, though, I don’t want to talk about 300. Instead, I want to talk about some aspects of ancient Spartan history, society, and culture that are, for the most part, fairly obscure that I think should be more widely known. For instance, did you know that there are surviving works of ancient Spartan poetry? Or did you know that Spartiate men were known in antiquity for wearing their hair in long braids that came all the way down to their mid-backs? Or did you know that other Greek people in antiquity stereotyped the Spartans as anal fetishists? Read on to learn more!

Did the Dorian Invasion Really Happen?

If you read any book about ancient Greek history written before the 1970s, there’s one event that will probably be discussed at length that any book about Greek history written after the 2000s will probably tell you never even happened at all. The event I’m talking about is, of course, the so-called “Dorian invasion.” The story goes that, in around the twelfth century BCE, a warrior people from the north known as the Dorians invaded mainland Greece and conquered large areas of it, replacing the peoples who had been there before and eventually becoming the ancestors of many Greeks, including the Spartans.

This narrative of the Dorian invasion was largely cobbled together in the nineteenth century by German philologists using vague and contradictory tales recorded in various ancient Greek sources as evidence in order to explain the distribution of Classical Greek dialects. In the twentieth century, white supremacists and Nazis exploited the narrative in order to portray northern Europeans as the true Greeks while denying the Greekness of actual Greek people. In the mid-twentieth century, however, scholars began to question the evidence supporting the narrative and, by the end of the twentieth century, most scholars came to accept that the Dorian invasion was a figment of the scholarly imagination.

Did Leonidas Really Say “Molon Labe”?

Ancient Greek is not like Latin. There are dozens of Latin phrases—such as et cetera, ad hoc, alias, alter ego, de facto, de jure, and so on—that are commonly used in everyday conversation. By contrast, there are very few phrases from the ancient Greek language that ordinary people can even recognize in the original language. μολὼν λαβέ (molṑn labé) is one of those phrases. Literally, it means: “Having come, take.” More idiomatically, it can be translated as: “Come and take them.”

Most people have heard a story about this phrase. The story normally goes a bit like this: in 480 BCE, the armies of the Achaemenid Empire were attempting to conquer mainland Greece, so King Leonidas I of Sparta brought an army of three hundred brave Spartan warriors to stop the invading armies at the pass of Thermopylai in central Greece. Then, when King Xerxes I of the Achaemenid Empire ordered Leonidas and his soldiers to hand over their weapons, Leonidas supposedly replied with two words: “μολὼν λαβέ”—”Come and take them.”

This makes for a rather fine story. Historically speaking, however, this incident almost certainly never really happened. In fact, the earliest version of the story is not attested until over four hundred years after Leonidas’s death and that version of the story is very different from the version that most people know today—for one thing, it doesn’t even include the phrase “μολὼν λαβέ.”