ancient Greek history Archives - Page 5 of 6

Carl Sagan Was Really Bad at History

Carl Sagan’s thirteen-episode documentary series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which originally aired on PBS in 1980, is the most watched PBS documentary series in history. The miniseries, which is, broadly speaking, about the history and importance of science, has had a massive influence on both our culture as a whole and on individual people’s lives. Many people say that watching Cosmos growing up was what inspired them to go into STEM.

Unfortunately, while Carl Sagan may have been a brilliant scientist and a great science popularizer, he was an unbelievably terrible historian and, in the show, he gets a boatload of facts about history blatantly wrong. Because Sagan was a scientist with an established reputation, though, many people have assumed that everything he says in the miniseries must be correct and, as a result, these misconceptions have spread and become embedded in popular culture.

Perhaps the most influentially wrong segment in the whole series is a twenty-two-and-a-half-minute segment in the last episode about the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria and the murder of the Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia. In this one segment, Sagan manages to promote what seems like roughly half of all the misconceptions about the ancient world that I have ever debunked.

I wrote an article in August 2018 debunking misconceptions about Hypatia and another article in July 2019 debunking misconceptions about the Library of Alexandria. In both of those articles, I have noted that many of the misconceptions I debunk originated from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, but, in those articles, I did not address Carl Sagan’s PBS miniseries directly.

I have therefore decided to undertake the ambitious task of going through the entire segment about Hypatia and the Library of Alexandria and correcting all the inaccuracies I come across. This should give you some impression of how historically accurate Carl Sagan’s documentary really is.

If You Like Ancient Greek Texts, Thank the Byzantines for Preserving Them

There is a widespread belief among members of the general public that ancient Greek texts were mostly only preserved by the Arabs through Arabic translations. The Byzantine Empire is rarely mentioned in the context of the preservation of classical texts. When the Byzantines are mentioned in this context, it is usually by writers who see them as ignorant fundamentalist Christian obscurantists.

Contrary to what popular culture would lead you to believe, however, the Byzantine Empire did retain Greco-Roman knowledge. In fact, the vast majority of ancient Greek texts that have survived to the present day are primarily known from Greek manuscripts that were either copied in the Byzantine Empire or copied from texts that were copied in the Byzantine Empire.

The idea that the majority of ancient Greek texts have only been preserved because they were translated by Arabic scholars is largely a misconception. There are a few lesser-known classical Greek texts that have been preserved only through Arabic translations, but the vast majority of the really famous texts that people still study today have actually been preserved in the original Greek.

The widespread ignorance of the Byzantines’ role in the preservation of classical Greek and Roman texts is just one small part of a centuries-old, systematic effort by westerners to marginalize the Byzantine Empire and minimize its importance in European history.

Did King Porus Defeat Alexander the Great?

According to all surviving ancient historical sources, King Alexandros III of Makedonia (most commonly known in English as “Alexander the Great”) defeated King Porus (whose name is conjectured to have been Puru in his native tongue) of the Indian kingdom of Paurava in the Battle of the Hydaspes in May 326 BC.

Although Alexander was ultimately victorious, Porus and his men fought valiantly. The Battle of the Hydaspes was the closest one Alexander ever came to losing and he was reportedly so impressed by Porus’s valor that he asked him how he wished to be treated. Porus replied that he wished to be treated the way Alexander would have wanted Porus to have treated him. Alexander therefore appointed Porus as satrap of his own kingdom and the lands to the southeast as well.

Until I started writing answers on Quora, I had never heard anyone try to argue that Porus actually defeated Alexander in battle. We have nothing in our sources to suggest that and, as I shall explain in a moment, we have very good reason to doubt this assertion. Nonetheless, since I started writing answers on Quora around a year ago, I have discovered that there seems to be something of an obsession among Indian and Pakistani nationalists with “proving” that Alexander really lost and that the accepted narrative is a fabrication by the Greek historians who idolized Alexander.

In the answer, I intend to examine the historical evidence supporting the historical consensus that Alexander really did win the Battle of the Hydaspes. I doubt I will convince any hardcore Indian or Pakistani nationalists, but I am not writing this answer for them; I am writing it for those who are genuinely interested in knowing what really happened.

Spencer Ruins “Adam Ruins Everything”

Adam Ruins Everything is a comedy television series on TruTV starring comedian Adam Conover. It has been on air since September 2015 and has had, to date, three seasons, amounting to a total of sixty-five episodes. The basic premise of the show is that Adam Conover is an obnoxious know-it-all who cannot help ruining everyone around him’s favorite things by revealing to them the dark truths and common misconceptions surrounding them.

This premise provides a sort of framing narrative for a series of information-based comedy segments, which make up the bulk of each episode. Each episode usually consists of three segments debunking common misconceptions related to a particular topic, followed by a final “positive takeaway” segment in which Adam tries to make the audience feel better by putting a positive spin on everything he has said throughout the episode. Along the way, Adam cites various sources (some more reliable than others) and calls in people identified as experts to testify.

In general, most of the show’s main points are usually broadly correct. The show clearly really does strive for factual correctness, as demonstrated by their repeated warnings that the show is fallible and their multiple “corrections segments.” Sadly, they do not always live up to their aspirations. Often the errors on the show are errors of omission resulting from the fact that it is only a thirty-minute show and they try to cram no less than three different debunking sessions into each episode, which results in a series of extremely rushed information segments that end up leaving out a lot of really important information.

The Movie ‘300’ Is Fascist Propaganda

For those who don’t know, the 2006 fantasy action film 300, directed by Zack Snyder, written by Snyder, Kurt Johnstad, and Michael B. Gordan, is based on the 1998 limited comic book series 300, which was written and illustrated by the American comic book artist Frank Miller. Both the film and the comic book are very loosely based on the story of the three hundred Spartans who allegedly fought and died in the Battle of Thermopylai in 480 BC.

The film is almost entirely a work of fiction with very little basis in historical reality. Unfortunately, not everyone realizes this. Zack Snyder himself has boasted about how historically accurate the film supposedly is; he said in an interview with MTV: “… the events are 90 percent accurate. It’s just in the visualization that it’s crazy… I’ve shown this movie to world-class historians who have said it’s amazing. They can’t believe it’s as accurate as it is.”

I don’t know which “world-class historians” Snyder has been showing the film to, but I hope to demonstrate here that the film is not in any way an accurate reflection of historical reality and that it deviates markedly from the historical record in ways that clearly promote a message that is overtly racist, homophobic, ableist, and fascist.

Were There Any Female Rulers in Ancient Greece?

We are often accustomed to hearing how utterly oppressed women were in ancient Greece. To a large extent, it is true that the rights of women in ancient Greece were extremely restricted. Nonetheless, the picture we have of women in ancient Greece being totally excluded from any semblance of power is not completely accurate. Although female rulers were certainly very rare in ancient Greece compared to the number of male rulers, there were, in fact, surprisingly many of them overall.

Several of the ancient Greek female rulers on this list, such as Artemisia I and Artemisia II of Karia, are still relatively famous today. Many of the others on this list, such as Kratesipolis of Makedonia, are fairly obscure, but deserve more attention. For the main part of this list, I am confining myself strictly to Greek female rulers who ruled in their own names in Greece or western Asia Minor during the Classical and Hellenistic Periods, although there will be section at the end briefly listing some others who ruled outside of Greece. I am sure there are probably a few others that I have missed as well.

The “Great Man Hypothesis” Briefly Debunked

If you have much interest in history, you have probably heard of the so-called “Great Man hypothesis,” which holds that history is completely—or at least primarily—shaped by the deeds of a small number of so-called “Great Men.” If you have heard of this hypothesis, chances are you have probably heard why most modern historians reject it. In case you haven’t, though, here is a quick look at the so-called “Great Man hypothesis” and a few of its shortcomings.

Ancient Greek Murder Mysteries

Murder mysteries are always a subject of popular fascination. From Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories to modern CSI television shows, everybody loves a good whodunit. Today, we are going to be looking at three famous murder trials from ancient Athens. We do not know the outcomes of any of these trials, which means that, from our perspective, you could classify these murders as technically “unsolved.”

Heinrich Schliemann Debunked

Anyone who has studied archaeology has heard of Heinrich Schliemann. He is popularly acclaimed as the bold, talented, German-American amateur archaeologist who discovered the lost city of Troy at Hisarlık in what is now northwest Turkey. In truth, this image is largely a fabrication of Schliemann’s own making. The real Heinrich Schliemann was a lying, cheating, grifting, thieving charlatan and overall scumbag who only became famous because he was extremely rich and highly skilled in the art of lying to make himself seem more impressive than he really was.

Even though Schliemann is popularly credited as the “discoverer” of Troy, he was not the first person to identify Hisarlık as Troy. He was not even the first person to excavate there. Furthermore, his attempts to excavate the ruins of Troy were so hopelessly incompetent that he ended up actually destroying most of the ancient site.

What Evidence Is There for Atheism in Ancient Greece?

A frequent question I have encountered is the question of whether there were atheists in ancient Greece. This is a question that is surprisingly difficult to answer and I think the most appropriate answer is something along the lines of “sort of, but not exactly.” Although it is certainly possible that there were people in ancient Greece who rejected the existence of all deities, the historical evidence for the existence of such individuals is extremely limited to say the very least.

We have solid evidence for the existence of people in ancient Greece who criticized certain aspects of traditional Greek religion and we even have solid evidence for the existence of people in ancient Greece who might be termed “agnostics,” but we have no clear, unambiguous, contemporary historical evidence for the existence of people in ancient Greece who outright denied the existence of all deities altogether.