Ancient Greek language Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

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.

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.

What Is the Correct Plural Form of ‘Octopus’?

It is something of a platitude among native speakers of English to say that our language is a motley one. It is a West Germanic language that has taken in an enormous amount of vocabulary from non-Germanic languages, especially French, Latin, and Ancient Greek. These other languages have systems for the pluralization of nouns that differ from the predominant system in English and, in some cases, users of English have favored pluralizing nouns derived from other languages according to the morphological rules of the word’s language of origin. As a result of this and other factors, pluralizing nouns in English is sometimes a controversial subject.

One of the most controversial of all English nouns to pluralize is octopus, which ultimately derives from the Greek word ὀκτώπους (oktṓpous), which is a compound of the Greek word ὀκτώ (oktṓ), meaning “eight,” and the noun πούς (poús), meaning “foot” or “leg.” English-speakers have tried to pluralize this noun in various ways, with the most popular plural forms being octopuses and octopi. But which plural for this word is the most pedantically correct? In this post, I will delve into the wonderful and exciting world of etymology to answer this question.

Does Classical Studies Really Make People Neurotic and Unhappy?

In March 2023, the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, a German economics research institute, released a discussion paper (i.e., a preliminary paper that is released for the purpose of discussion without being formally published) written in English by a group of four Italian economists Giorgio Brunello, Piero Esposito, Lorenzo Rocco, and Sergio Scicchitano titled “Does Classical Studies Open Your Mind?” The study frames itself as a response to the popular defense of classical studies which claims that studying the classics improves a person’s self-discipline, their ability to work hard, and their openness to others.

Directly contrary to this argument, the paper claims, based on an analysis of data from surveys conducted in Italy, that there is no statistically significant difference in the rate of conscientiousness or openness in students who studied the classics compared to students who studied STEM. Instead, the study claims that studying the classics significantly causally increases the likelihood of a person being neurotic and unhappy. I have already seen people on Twitter sharing this paper uncritically and I have a feeling that, in the coming years, people will probably try to use the paper to argue that people shouldn’t study the classics or even that schools and universities should stop teaching them altogether. The paper, however, has some absolutely glaring methodological problems, which I would like to point out in this post.

The Decline of Cursive Isn’t Historically as Big of a Deal as Most People Think

On 16 September 2022, Drew Gilpin Faust, a scholar of nineteenth-century U.S. history who specializes in the Antebellum South and who served as the president of Harvard University from 2007 until 2018, published an essay in The Atlantic titled “Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive,” in which she conveys her shock, consternation, and sorrow at having recently discovered that the majority of undergraduate students nowadays cannot read cursive and that, of those few who can read it, even fewer can write it. She expresses worry that, as a result of not being able to read cursive, students will not be able to read historical documents written in it and will be cut off from the historical past. This piece set off many conversations about cursive instruction in the U.S.

I am currently a twenty-three-year-old first-semester master’s student who just received my bachelor’s degree in May of this year, so I am very close in age to present-day undergraduates. Contrary to the sweeping declaration in the title of Faust’s article, I did receive full instruction in how to read and write cursive from third through fifth grades. Nonetheless, I think that the ongoing decline of cursive instruction in the U.S. is both less of a tragedy and less historically significant than many people (including Faust) are making it out to be. In this post, I intend to clear up a few popular misconceptions about the history of cursive writing.

Does the Word ‘Dinosaur’ Really Mean “Terrible Lizard”?

When I was growing up, I always read and was taught in school that the word dinosaur comes from Greek roots that mean “terrible lizard.” This is how the current revision of the article “dinosaur” on Wikipedia translates the word also. This translation is not strictly incorrect, but it is not necessarily the most accurate translation either.

The English biologist and paleontologist Richard Owen coined the word dinosaur at a meeting for the British Association for the Advancement of Science in the year 1841 by combining the Greek adjective δεινός (deinós), which is usually translated as “terrible,” with the noun σαύρα (saúra), which means “lizard” or “reptile.”

The meaning of the word σαύρα is more-or-less straightforward, but the word δεινός is a bit more complicated than the simple translation of “terrible” might lead a person to believe. In some contexts, “terrible” is an adequate translation, but, unlike the English word terrible, which has exclusively negative meanings, δεινός can also have positive meanings. As such, “formidable” is probably a better translation of the word in general.

Why Do We Call Certain Prejudices “Phobias”?

The English language has many words that describe different kinds of prejudices. Some names for specific prejudices end in the suffix -phobia, such as: xenophobia (hatred or prejudice against foreigners), Islamophobia (hatred or prejudice against Muslims), homophobia (hatred or prejudice against gay and bisexual people), lesbophobia (hatred or prejudice against lesbians specifically), biphobia (hatred or prejudice against bisexual people specifically), and transphobia (hatred or prejudice against transgender people).

The suffix -phobia comes from a Greek root meaning “fear” and, in English, it is most commonly used in words that describe extreme, irrational, abnormal, or obsessive fears. As a result of this, often, when one person accuses another person of having a -phobia prejudice, the accused person will object to the term by making some variant of the assertion: “I can’t be [insert -phobia prejudice word here] because I’m not afraid of foreigners/Muslims/gay people/lesbians/bi people/trans people.”

This objection is, of course, invariably either extremely ignorant or disingenuous; words like xenophobia, et alii refer primarily to prejudices or hatreds and do not primarily indicate literal fears. This, however, raises the interesting question: Why does our language have so many words for prejudices that end in -phobia? To answer this question, I will explore the history of how the suffix -phobia entered into the English language and how the words with this suffix we know today arose. Surprisingly, the earliest attested English word with this suffix did not indicate a literal fear, but rather an aversion to water in patients with rabies.

Did Ancient Poetry Rhyme in the Original Languages?

A lot of people who have never studied any ancient language have a tendency to assume that works of ancient poetry must rhyme in the original language. It’s fairly easy to see why some people might think this, since many old poems written in English rhyme and it’s easy for people to assume that this is how all poetry—or at least all “traditional” poetry—is just supposed to be. The reality, though, is that rhyming lines of the kind that most twenty-first-century western readers would recognize are virtually absent from ancient poetry altogether.

Poems in ancient languages operate on different rules from traditional modern English poetry. In this post, I will attempt to survey some of these rules for poetry in various ancient languages. Be forewarned that I am not a poetry specialist, of the various ancient languages I will be discussing Ancient Greek and Latin are the only ones I can personally read, and this post is by no means meant to be comprehensive. Nonetheless, I hope it will serve as a rough guide to help interested members of the general public to understand at least some forms of ancient poetry.

Why Are Some Names Used in the ‘Iliad’ Used in English Today While Others Are Not?

If you have ever read the Iliad, you have probably noticed that there are many characters in it who have names that are not commonly used as given names in countries that are predominantly English-speaking today. I’m talking about names like Agamemnon, Menelaos, Patroklos, Idomeneus, Hekabe, Andromache, and so forth. Meanwhile, there are also names like Alexandros, Helene, Hektor, and Kassandra that are still used today in Anglicized forms like Alexander, Helen, Hector, and Cassandra. Many people have wondered why some of these names are commonly used today in English, while others of them are not.

As it turns out, the vast majority of the names that are used in the Iliad have never been widely used in English, but a handful of these names have passed into English through various channels, mostly not through the Iliad itself. Of all the names of characters in the Iliad, the two that have been in continuous use as names for people in English the longest are Alexander and Helen, which passed from Greek into Latin and from Latin into English very early due to both of these names having been held by particularly famous and revered ancient figures. The names Hector and Cassandra first passed into English a bit later via the medieval “Matter of Rome” (i.e., the corpus of romances based on ancient Greek and Roman stories), but they didn’t become popular until the eighteenth century.