ancient Greek literature Archives - Page 2 of 8

The Ancient Greek Woman Who Dressed as a Man to Seduce Men

Earlier this week, I came across an absolutely fascinating epigram in the Greek Anthology by Asklepiades of Samos (lived c. 320 – after c. 263 BCE), an early Hellenistic Greek poet, whose epigrams are among the oldest that are included in the anthology. In the poem, he describes a beautiful young person named Dorkion (which is the diminutive form of the name Dorkas, which means “gazelle”) who was apparently assigned female at birth, whom he describes using feminine grammatical forms, and whom modern scholars have universally interpreted as woman, who dresses and behaves like a young man while trying to seduce young men.

I was intrigued by this poem, in part because of what it may reveal about ancient Greek attitudes toward gender, sex, and gender-nonconforming behavior. I thought that my readers might find it interesting as well, so I’ve decided to share it here, along with some information about its background and scholarly interpretations of it.

Zeus’s Horrifying Plan for Cosmic Genocide

There are more human beings alive right now than there have ever been at any previous point in the history of the universe. Even so, our population continues to skyrocket. In fact, the human population of the world is predicted to reach eight billion on Tuesday, November 15th, 2022. According to this article the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) released a few days ago, approximately 7% of all the humans who have ever lived are currently alive right now.

Given this historic occasion, I thought I would share with my readers a myth that is referenced in various forms in a number of works of early ancient Greek literature. The myth claims that, once, in the heroic age, humans became so populous that Gaia, the earth, struggled to bear the burden of their combined weight. Zeus, the king of the deities, saw that Gaia was suffering and therefore resolved to create devastating wars to annihilate as many humans as possible in order to bring her relief. Although this is a myth that not many people today have heard, it is referenced in one of the most famous passages in all of ancient literature: the opening proem of the Iliad.

No, Athena Didn’t Turn Medusa into a Monster to Protect Her

One of the most famous stories in all of ancient Greek and Roman mythology and literature is the tale of the origin of the Gorgon Medusa that the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (lived 43 BCE – c. 17 CE), who is better known in English simply as “Ovid,” tells in his long narrative poem Metamorphoses, which he composed in the Latin language in dactylic hexameter verse in around the year 8 CE or thereabouts.

According to Ovid, Medusa was originally an extraordinarily beautiful mortal woman who was known for her gorgeous hair. Then, however, the god Neptunus (whom the Romans equated with the Greek god Poseidon) raped her in the temple of the goddess Minerva (whom the Romans equated with the Greek goddess Athena) and Minerva punished her by turning her into a hideous monster with snakes entwined in her hair and making it so that any mortal who saw her would instantly turn to stone.

A claim has circulated online for years now claiming that modern people have misunderstood this myth and that, actually, Minerva turned Medusa into a monster and made it so that anyone who saw her would instantly turn to stone in order to protect her so that men would never prey on her again. This claim, however, is not supported by any evidence in any ancient source and, in fact, Ovid’s account expressly says that Minerva cursed Medusa in order to punish her for her involvement in desecrating her temple, even though her involvement was totally nonconsensual. Furthermore, the context in which Ovid tells the story strongly suggests that he intended his readers to sympathize with Medusa and question the justice of Minerva’s punishment.

Men Have Been Finding Weird and Unsettling Ways to Describe Women’s Breasts Since Ancient Times

It is common knowledge that cisgender straight and bisexual men frequently possess an overriding fascination with women’s breasts—to such an extent that they often devote more attention to a woman’s breasts than to any other aspect of her person. As a result of this fixation, some male writers have a habit of throwing in references to or descriptions of breasts in places where they are contextually inappropriate. Sometimes they also describe breasts using goofy or perplexing figurative language.

These sorts of references and descriptions have become a subject of widespread memes and satire. There is even an entire subreddit called r/menwritingwomen, which is dedicated to examples of male authors writing about women in incompetent (and often comical) ways. A significant proportion of the examples discussed in the subreddit are breast references and its satirical headline reads: “She breasted boobily down the stairs…..”

One thing some people may not realize is that gynophilic men have been doing this exact same thing for literally thousands of years. In this post, I will discuss three different examples of goofy, weird, unsettling, or just downright creepy descriptions of women’s breasts in texts from the ancient Mediterranean world in three different languages: Biblical Hebrew, Ancient Greek, and Latin.

Why Are Dragons Obsessed with Treasure?

The trope that dragons are naturally obsessed or infatuated with treasure is absolutely pervasive throughout modern fantasy literature. You can pick up just about any modern book that has dragons in it and, more likely than not, the dragons will be obsessed with hoarding treasure of some kind. In this post, I will discuss where this trope originates from and how it became so ubiquitous.

In ancient Greece and Rome, drakontes (the ancient precursors of dragons) were primarily thought to serve as guardians, sometimes of treasure. The notion that dragons are obsessed with treasure seems to have arisen in classical antiquity or earlier as one of several different explanations for why they guard it. Thanks primarily to the Old English epic poem Beowulf and J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1937 children’s fantasy novel The Hobbit, which drew extensive inspiration from Beowulf, this explanation has now become accepted as standard in western popular culture.

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.

What Powers Do Demigods Really Have in Greek Mythology?

The most prominent portrayal of demigods in recent years occurs in the American author Rick Riordan’s mythology-based middle-grade children’s books, which include the series Percy Jackson & the Olympians (published 2005 – 2009), The Heroes of Olympus (published 2010 – 2014), Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard (published 2015 – 2017), and The Trials of Apollo (published 2016 – 2020). Since Riordan’s books have an enormous fanbase and Percy Jackson & the Olympians is currently being developed into a new series for Disney+, I thought I would write this post in which I will explore how the portrayal of demigods and their powers in ancient Greek mythology and literature differs from the portrayal in Riordan’s novels.

Riordan’s novels portray demigods as having supernatural powers that correspond to specific aspects of the domains their divine parents preside over. The reality, though, is that, in actual ancient Greek and Roman sources, demigods do not typically possess any special powers or abilities that correspond in any way to the specific domain of their divine parent. Instead, what they typically inherit from their divine parent are more general exceptional qualities that correspond to the demigod in question’s gender more than their divine parentage.

Demigod men are typically said to display exceptional qualities that the Greeks and Romans considered inherently masculine, such as extraordinary physical strength and skill at fighting. Meanwhile, demigod women are typically said to display exceptional qualities that the Greeks and Romans considered inherently feminine. Notably, although both demigod men and women in general are said to possess extraordinary physical beauty, the sources tend to emphasize this aspect more for women than for men. Both demigod men and women are said in some cases to possess extraordinary cunning. By far the most important thing that makes demigods in the Greek tradition special, though, is that their divine parents look out for them and are willing to give them things they ask for.

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.

Were the Sophists Really So Bad?

The word sophist comes from the Greek word σοφιστής (sophistḗs), which originally meant “one who is highly skilled or learned in his craft.” In the fifth century BCE, various professional teachers of public speaking began to emerge in the Greek world calling themselves σοφισταί (which is the plural form of σοφιστής).

These teachers would typically come to a city and court wealthy patrons, offering to teach them how to speak persuasively in exchange for a tuition fee. Sometimes they would teach other subjects as well, such as philosophy, music, poetry, or mathematics. They would stay in a given city long enough to teach any wealthy people who were willing to pay them for lessons and then move on to the next city to teach anyone who was willing to pay for lessons there.

The sophists have a bit of a bad reputation nowadays. The very word sophist itself has come to mean a person who uses rhetorical trickery and fallacious arguments to deceive people into believing falsehoods. In this post, I want to peel back the millennia of negative portrayals to explore who the sophists really were and what they really wrote (for most part in their own words). By the end of it, hopefully it will be clear what the real differences were between the sophists and the philosophers like Plato (lived c. 428 – c. 347 BCE) and Xenophon (lived c. 430 – c. 354 BCE) who vilified them.

Fascinating Obscure Texts from Ancient Greece and Rome

People often talk about the texts from ancient Greece and Rome that have been lost, but it is worth noting that there are many fascinating texts from ancient Greece and Rome that have survived that are totally obscure and seldom ever read. In this post, I would like to highlight some of these works and hopefully bring them to somewhat greater attention.

Some of the texts I am about to list are better known than others, but the vast majority of them are texts that a person could at least in theory go through an entire undergraduate degree in classics without ever encountering. You will notice that this list skews heavily toward Greek texts over Roman; this is because my main area of interest is in Greek history, so I tend to be more familiar with obscure Greek texts than with obscure Roman texts. Without further ado, let’s dive in.