Ancient literature Archives - Page 2 of 9

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.

Nonbinary Characters for Children Are Nothing New

In the past few years, nonbinary fictional characters have become increasingly common in literature, television, and other areas, including in books and programs intended for children. In just the past week, anti-trans activists have made quite a lot of noise complaining about children being exposed to these characters, because apparently the pronoun they is too risqué for innocent little children to hear.

Some readers may be surprised to learn that, while nonbinary characters are starting to appear much more frequently nowadays, characters of this kind—even ones meant for children—are nothing inherently new. Characters who are at least arguably nonbinary appear in some of the oldest surviving works of literature from ancient Mesopotamia and one of the earliest emphatically nonbinary characters in a work of English-language children’s literature appeared over a hundred years ago, in a work by a children’s author who is still quite famous today.

No, the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’ Is Not the Oldest Surviving Work of Literature

If you think you know one thing about the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, then, chances are, you probably think that the epic is the oldest surviving work of literature in the whole world. This claim pervades basically all non-academic discussion of the epic. I was taught it in my history and literature classes all throughout my K-12 education, it is endlessly repeated on the internet, and, whenever I happen to talk to someone about the Epic of Gilgamesh, it is usually one of the first claims to come up.

The truth, however, is that the standard Akkadian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh (which is what most people mean when they talk about the Epic of Gilgamesh) is not even close to being the oldest surviving work of literature. In fact, it’s not even the oldest surviving poem about Gilgamesh.

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.

Yes, King David Raped Bathsheba

The legend of how King David saw Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, bathing naked, lusted after her, sent messengers to bring her to the royal palace, had sex with her, impregnated her, and then had her husband effectively murdered to prevent him from finding out is one of the most famous stories in the Hebrew Bible—but also one of the most routinely misunderstood.

Many Christian readers have interpreted Bathsheba as a depraved and nefarious seductress who deliberately bathed in a location where she knew David would be watching in order to seduce him, caused him to lust after her, and gleefully betrayed her husband to have sex with the king. There is, however, absolutely nothing in the Biblical text to support this interpretation. In fact, in the text itself, all the evidence strongly indicates that David spies on her without her knowledge or consent and then rapes her. Bathsheba, far from being a malicious temptress, is actually an innocent rape victim who has been wrongfully victim-blamed for far too long.

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.

No, Ancient Skythian Enarees Didn’t Drink Urine from Pregnant Mares as a Primitive Form of HRT

The Skythians were an ancient mostly nomadic people who inhabited the northern Eurasian steppes in what is now Ukraine, southern Russia, and Kazakhstan. They were known in antiquity as a very warlike people and were especially known for their skills at horseback riding and archery. The ancient Greeks generally regarded them as archetypal barbarians and Greek ethnographers were deeply fascinated by their culture. They wore trousers, which the Greeks regarded as the most barbaric kind of garment, and they practiced tattooing.

As I discuss in this post I wrote in August 2020, various groups of people existed in ancient world who might fit the definition of the modern word transgender. The Enarees were one such kind of gender-variant people who existed among the ancient Skythians. Although they were assigned male at birth, they wore women’s clothing, took on roles traditionally assigned to women, and spoke in a feminine manner.

A story has become widely circulated online in recent years claiming that the Enarees drank estrogen-rich urine harvested from pregnant mares in order to feminize their bodies as a form of primitive gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Sadly, as awesome as it would be if this story were true, it has absolutely no basis in any kind of historical evidence and is entirely a piece of unfounded modern speculation.

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.

What Did the Ancient Romans Use Latin For?

Someone on Quora has asked: “What was Latin used for in ancient Rome?” At first glance, this question might sound rather silly. After all, it seems obvious that people in ancient Rome used Latin for all different kinds of oral and written communication. This may explain why the people who have answered this question so far have all given brief and flippant responses. I initially thought about giving such a response as well. After a bit of consideration, though, I realized that this is not actually a bad question, or a silly one.

Quite simply, Latin was not the only language that people in the Roman cultural sphere used. There were many Roman people in ancient times who could not speak Latin. Also, many Roman people who did speak Latin spoke it in addition to at least one other language. In this post, I intend to first explain who in ancient Rome actually spoke Latin and then explain in what sorts of contexts multilingual people who knew Latin used it.