ancient Greek literature Archives - Page 6 of 9

What Was Really in the Library of Alexandria?

It is no secret that I spend a lot of time debunking popular misconceptions about the Library of Alexandria. I do this because modern people are absolutely obsessed with the Library of Alexandria and all the amazing documents they believe it must have contained. Today I’m going to revisit the Library of Alexandria yet again to debunk some ideas about what was in it.

Lots of people like to imagine that the Library of Alexandria was filled with amazing scientific information that has been lost. They like to imagine that it could have housed all sorts of breathtaking secrets about the universe that even modern scientists might not know. These ideas, though, are wrong.

I’ve addressed this subject before, but today I want to address it in-depth, debunking some specific claims about the Library of Alexandria’s contents and bringing people’s expectations more down to Earth.

Why Did We Start Using Greek Names for Greek Deities?

Today, in the English-speaking world, the classical deities are most widely known by their Greek names. Up until the late nineteenth century, though, the deities of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds were almost exclusively known in the west by their Roman names. The Greek names were almost totally obscure among English-speakers and they were almost never used.

What is it that changed? Why did we stop using the Roman names and start using the Greek names? The answer to this question is complicated and there are a lot of cultural factors that go into it, but I think that a large part of the motivation for the switch came as a result of the belief that the Greeks were culturally superior to the Romans because they were supposedly more “western.”

No, Aristotle Is Not Telling You to Unleash Your Inner Rage

Most people today believe that the word catharsis refers to the necessary release of negative emotions and destructive impulses for the sake of “purging” oneself of those emotions and impulses. Many people see this “purging” of negative emotions—usually specifically anger—as healthy or even necessary. This idea of catharsis as emotional purging is usually traced back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (lived 384 – 322 BC).

Psychological experiments, however, have shown that unleashing your anger does not cause that anger to go away. In fact, actually has a tendency to make people even more angry than they were originally. Furthermore, while Aristotle did use the Greek word κάθαρσις (kátharsis) in his Poetics, he certainly didn’t use that word to mean what many people today think he meant by it.

Yes, Kratos Is a Real Deity in Greek Mythology

I have never played any of the games in the video game series God of War. I don’t really have any interest in video games and, even if I did have an interest in them, I would never have time to play them. Nonetheless, as a Hellenist, I like to pay attention to how Greek mythology is portrayed in modern popular culture and I find it interesting that Kratos, the main character in the God of War series, is actually very loosely based on a real figure in Greek mythology.

In Greek mythology, Kratos is the divine personification of strength, the son of the Titan Pallas and the Okeanid nymphe Styx. Ironically, in ancient Greek sources, Kratos is portrayed as a dumb, overly violent thug who is unquestioningly loyal to Zeus and whose job is to enforce Zeus’s authority over all the other deities; whereas I’ve read that, in the video game series God of War, Kratos is apparently portrayed as a renegade demigod who kills all the major deities in the Greek pantheon, including Zeus.

Did Hades Abduct Persephone or Did She Go with Him Willingly?

In many sanitized modern adaptations of the story of Hades and Persephone, Persephone is portrayed as going with Hades to the Underworld willingly. This is the version of the story that is found in many books about Greek mythology intended for children and in the award-winning music Hadestown. This is not, however, how the story is portrayed in ancient Greek sources.

The ancient Greek and Roman accounts of Persephone universally agree that Hades abducted Persephone against her will and raped her. Both literary and artistic representations of the event unambiguously portray it as a forcible abduction. Ancient Greek and Roman poems give graphic descriptions of Persephone being brutally snatched and carried off, crying and screaming in desperation.

I don’t necessarily see the modern sanitization of the story of Hades and Persephone as a problem strictly speaking, but I do think that it is important to keep in mind that the versions of the story that were told in ancient times were much darker than the versions many people are telling today.

Are Modern Greeks Descended from the Ancient Greeks?

One thing I’ve discovered from reading questions and answers on Quora is that people are bizarrely obsessed with the question of whether modern Greeks are descended from ancient Greeks. It’s a subject that inevitably sparks a great deal of heated debate, with various non-Greek westerners on one side insisting that modern Greeks are not true Greeks at all while Greek people and various others insist that modern Greeks are truly descendants of the ancient Greeks.

The question of whether modern Greeks are truly descendants of the ancient Greeks has a long, sordid history that goes all the way back to the nineteenth century. I have decided to weigh in on this discussion to give some relevant background information, correct some prevailing false assumptions, and, finally, give what I consider to be a sound answer on the matter.

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.

What Was the First Novel?

There seems to be a lot of confusion about when the novel as a literary form developed. Many people think that the novel arose at some point during the Early Modern Period (lasted c. 1450 – c. 1750). Many works dating to this period, such as Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, and Le Morte d’Arthur are often cited as “the first novel.” The popular perception, however, is incorrect.

The novel as a literary form definitely dates at least as far back as the second century BC and probably dates to long before that. Not a single one of the works usually cited as “the first novel” is even close to being old enough to actually be “the first novel.”

The fact is, we don’t know exactly what the first novel was, but, since we have record of works that can only be described as novels dating as far back as at least the second century BC, anything written within the past 2,200 years can’t possibly be “the first novel.”

The Problem with Percy Jackson

The book series Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan, originally published from 2005 to 2009, is one of the most popular series of children’s fantasy novels of the twenty-first century so far. According to the Wikipedia article on it (which may or may not be reliable here since the source it cites is a Fox Business article from 2010 with a dead link), over sixty-nine million copies of books in the series have been sold worldwide.

In case you haven’t read the series, the basic premise is that the Greek gods are real, they live in the United States, and their demigod offspring live among us. According to the series, these demigods have special powers that they have inherited from their parents. The main character of the series is Percy Jackson, the demigod son of Poseidon and a mortal woman. Major supporting characters introduced in the first book include Annabeth Chase (a daughter of Athena), Grover Underwood (a satyr), Luke Castellan (a son of Hermes), and Chiron (a wise centaur).

I first read the series when I was in late elementary school and, at the time, I loved it—although I never quite got as obsessed with it as I did with Harry Potter or The Spiderwick Chronicles (probably because I read it at a significantly older age). As I grew older, though, there was something about the series that really started to bother me. I was in around seventh grade when I really started to notice it and, ever since then, it is something that I have found very disturbing about the series and the message that it sends.

This article will be just as much an account of my personal experience with the books and how they have affected me, as well as an assessment of them and a reflection on how my sentiments towards them have changed over the years.

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.