ancient Greek religion Archives - Page 2 of 2

The Ghost of Achilles on Snake Island

By this point, I imagine that most of my readers have probably already heard that, on 24 February 2022, the first day of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, a pair of heavily armed Russian warships attacked Snake Island, a small Ukrainian island in the western Black Sea that was protected at the time by only thirteen Ukrainian border guards.

One of the Russian warships ordered the Ukrainian border guards to surrender and one of the Ukrainians replied: “Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй,” which means “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.” This reply has become famous around the world and has widely become seen as emblematic of Ukrainian defiance. It was initially reported that the border guards were all killed, but the Ukrainian military has now publicly confirmed in a post on Facebook that they are actually “alive and well” in Russian captivity.

One thing that many of my readers may not know is that Snake Island—the exact same island where all the events I have described above took place—was known to the Greeks in ancient times as Λευκή (Leukḗ), which means “White Island.” This island is prominent in Greek literature, mythology, and folklore, chiefly because the Greeks believed that Achilles’s mother, the immortal goddess Thetis, transposed his mortal remains, along with those of Patroklos, and interred them in a hero shrine on this island, making it their final resting place.

Several classicists have already written posts about Snake Island’s classical connections, including Mateusz Stróżyński in the online open-access journal Antigone, Peter Gainsford on his blog Kiwi Hellenist, and Christopher Stedman Parmenter on the Society for Classical Studies blog. All of these posts, though, overlook what are, in my personal opinion, the most fascinating stories about the island, which are told by the Greek sophist Philostratos of Athens (lived c. 170 – c. 250 CE) in his dialogue Heroïkos, chapters 54–57. According to Philostratos, the ghosts of Achilles and Helene of Sparta haunt the island together as lovers. (Yes, you read that right; I said Helene, not Patroklos.) The stories he tells about their hauntings on the island are simultaneously captivating and bizarre.

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.

How Were Eunuchs Perceived in the Ancient Mediterranean World?

Eunuchs in the ancient world have become something of a major topic of interest for me over the past few years. The perception of eunuchs in various cultures throughout history has varied drastically, depending on the culture, the time period, and the kind of eunuch in question. In this post, I will describe the perception of eunuchs in the ancient Mediterranean world, which is my area of historical specialization.

In general, in the ancient Mediterranean world, eunuchs were heavily socially marginalized. They were often of enslaved status and, because of their castration, they were commonly seen as no longer men, but rather lesser, inferior creatures. Eunuchs, women, and children were commonly seen as belonging to the same essential category and eunuchs were often seen as more similar to women than to non-castrated men. In the highly misogynistic ancient world, this made them seen as inferior and, in some cases, even outright disgusting and debased.

No, Ares Was Not the Patron God of Sparta

Many people have gotten the impression that, in ancient Greece, Ares was the patron god of Sparta in the same way that Athena was the patron goddess of Athens. This impression, however, is not rooted in any kind of solid historical evidence, but rather solely in the fact that modern people popularly associate Ares and Sparta with many of the same general sorts of things, such as warfare, bloodshed, masculinity, unstoppable fighting abilities, et cetera. To modern observers, Ares seems to embody the Spartan ethos so perfectly that people simply assume without concrete evidence that the Spartans must have adored him.

The truth, though, is that Ares was not the patron god of Sparta in any sense. As one of the Twelve Olympians, he was certainly a significant deity in both Athens and Sparta, but, in both poleis, he was still relatively minor compared to other deities who were far more prominent. Indeed, ironically, Athena actually seems to have had a much more developed cult presence in Sparta than Ares.

Why Is the Parthenon So Famous?

The most famous building in Greece today is almost certainly the Parthenon, a spectacular temple to the Greek goddess Athena that towers atop the Athenian Akropolis and is almost universally admired for being supposedly the most “perfect” and “timeless” work of ancient Greek architecture. Some people may be surprised to learn, though, that this was not always the case.

The Parthenon did not immediately become the most famous and admired Greek temple as soon as it was built. It was certainly seen as an important temple in antiquity—one especially notable for its size, its prominent location, and its extraordinary chryselephantine cult statue of Athena, crafted by the master sculptor Pheidias. Its present-day status as the most famous of all Greek buildings, though, is the result of the events and ideological movements of the past 2,400 years of history. If post-classical history had gone differently, the Parthenon’s status might have gone to a different temple.