Ancient literature Archives - Page 4 of 9

Dark Academia, the “Western Canon,” and the Decline of the Humanities

In around mid-July, I found out that there is apparently a huge internet “aesthetic” movement called “dark academia” that centers around a highly romanticized impression of what humanities scholars and students—especially those in the fields of classics, English, history, and philosophy—dressed and lived like in the twentieth century. Aspects of the aesthetic include wearing old-fashioned, dark-colored, stereotypically “academic” clothing and appreciating “classic” literature, art, and music.

For those who aren’t already aware, I am currently about to enter my senior year at Indiana University Bloomington double-majoring in history and classical studies (i.e., Ancient Greek and Latin), with honors in history. My current plan is to apply to graduate programs in ancient history later this year. Even though I don’t deliberately dress in a dark academia style and I don’t identify with the aesthetic in any particular way, being a humanities student does make me feel like I have a connection to it.

I was so struck by my surprise discovery of dark academia’s apparent popularity that I’ve spent a good part of the past two weeks researching it and its history. Naturally, I have a lot of thoughts, especially about how the current popularity of the aesthetic seems to be at least in part a reaction to the slow ongoing decline of the academic humanities.

Pamphile of Epidauros: A Female Ancient Greek Historian

Nearly all the historical writings that have survived from ancient Greece and Rome were written by men. Women’s voices in the historical record are few and far between. We do, however, know that there was, in fact, an extraordinarily prolific female ancient Greek historian named Pamphile of Epidauros, who lived in Greece in around the middle of the first century CE, when Greece was ruled by the Roman Empire.

Pamphile is known to have written a lengthy compilation of interesting historical anecdotes derived from various sources titled Historical Commentaries, an epitome of the writings of the historian Ktesias of Knidos (fl. c. 400 BCE), a work titled On Controversies that seems to have been perhaps a collection of essays on controversial topics, and a work titled On Sexual Pleasures, which seems to have been a sex manual. Sadly, everything or almost everything she wrote has been lost.

Pamphile is a truly monumental figure in the history of Greek historiography, not only because she is the only female ancient Greek historian about whom we have any significant information, but also because she seems to have been an especially important author in the development of the genre of “miscellaneous history,” which focused on retelling interesting anecdotes from earlier authors and became very popular in the Roman Empire during the second and third centuries CE.

Why Did the Patriarchal Greeks and Romans Worship Such Powerful Goddesses?

It is widely known that the ancient Greeks and Romans worshipped many powerful goddesses, whom they held in extremely high regard. At the same time, it is also widely known that ancient Greek and Roman societies were deeply patriarchal. Misogyny and machismo were rampant among men of all social classes. Women’s lives were, in general, strictly socially controlled and women were excluded from holding most official positions of power.

As a result of this, one of the most common questions people have asked me about classical mythology is how the Greeks and Romans were able to accommodate such powerful goddesses within their respective pantheons while simultaneously denigrating human women. In this essay, I will try to answer this question to the best of my ability. I will give several different plausible explanations in the hope that some of them, or the combination of all of them, may be satisfactory.

How Have Works of Greek Drama Survived?

It is widely known that the vast majority of all works of ancient drama have been lost forever. We have record of literally hundreds of playwrights who wrote plays in the Greek language in ancient times, but only five of these playwrights have any plays that have survived to the present day complete or nearly complete under their own names. Three of these playwrights were tragedians: Aischylos, Sophokles, and Euripides. The other two playwrights—Aristophanes, and Menandros—were both comedians. All five were Athenian citizen men who lived in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.

Many people who do not have any degrees in classics have heard these authors’ names and maybe even read some of their plays in translation, but very few people who do not have degrees in classics know how and why any of these authors’ works have survived to the present day when so many other works of ancient Greek drama have been lost.

Peter Singer’s Extraordinarily Bad Take on Apuleius

On 30 May 2021, the online open classics journal Antigone published a piece written by the Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer about the ancient Roman novel The Golden Ass, which was originally written in Latin in the late second century CE by the North African writer Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (lived c. 124 – c. 170 CE). Antigone promoted the article on their Twitter account. Their announcement begins with the words: “Today we are delighted to share an article by Peter Singer, renowned philosopher and animal rights advocate…”

Antigone’s publication and promotion of Singer’s article immediately sparked backlash over the fact that Singer has spent the past three and a half decades publicly advocating that infants who have observable physical disabilities at birth should be killed. He even co-authored and published an entire book in 1985 titled Should the Baby Live?: The Problem of Handicapped Infants, in which he advocated this.

Many classicists, myself included, feel that Antigone should not have published Singer’s article about Apuleius because, even though the article itself did not discuss infanticide, he is not the sort of person that they should be platforming. Even beyond this, though, Singer’s take on The Golden Ass is so extraordinarily bad that, even if he didn’t have a long history of advocating infanticide, no classics journal should have published it.

Tucker Carlson Is Using Controversy about Literature Classes to Promote Fascism

There is something of a culture war going on right now over which books students should be assigned to read in literature classes. I’ve been meaning to write an article on this subject for over six months now, but, until now, I haven’t had time. Sadly, I’ve been so insanely busy with the many other things going on in my life that I haven’t had much time for researching and writing articles lately. Now, however, recent events have compelled me to write an article about a different aspect of the controversy than I originally planned.

Many of my readers are probably already aware of Tucker Carlson. He is a far-right political commentator who has a long and well-documented history of promoting white supremacist, fascist, misogynist, and xenophobic ideas. He has his own show on Fox News called Tucker Carlson Tonight and, on 14 May 2021, he did an entire segment about the literature class controversy titled “Classic literature out. Sexual propaganda in.”

In this segment, Carlson first protests the removal of works that he considers “classic literature” from English syllabi and then pretends to be absolutely scandalized by the reading of explicit passages in young adult novels that have been approved for students to read in one public school in Loudoun County, Virginia. Carlson frames the controversy using a standard fascist narrative that misrepresents the issues and ignores many demonstrable facts, including the fact that many works of so-called “classic literature,” including many works that are often read in schools, are just as sexually explicit as the works he protests against—or, in some cases, even more explicit.

Jordan Peterson Does Not Understand Mythology

In case you’ve had the extraordinary good fortune of having never heard of him, Jordan B. Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He largely rose to fame in 2016 over his vocal opposition to an act passed by the Parliament of Canada to prohibit discrimination on the basis of “gender identity and expression.” Since then, Peterson has developed an enormous cult following as a self-help author and YouTube personality. His followers generally tend to be young, heterosexual, cisgender men who come from middle-class backgrounds and have conservative political leanings.

Peterson calls himself a “classical British liberal” and a “traditionalist”—both terms that are commonly used as euphemistic self-descriptors by members of the far right. As we shall see shortly, he has publicly promoted various misogynistic, transphobic, and white supremacist claims. Much of what Peterson has written and said has already been thoroughly analyzed and debunked. In this article, however, I want to especially focus on an aspect of Peterson’s work and activism that I don’t think has been adequately addressed: his interpretation of mythology.

Peterson has made the psychoanalytic interpretation of myths into a major backbone of his work. Peterson’s first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, which was first published in 1999, talks about mythology extensively, and he routinely uses mythical examples in his lecture videos and in his 2018 book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. This is all in spite of the fact that he clearly does not understand mythology and much of what he says on the subject is incorrect.

Ancient Greek Swear Words

I am currently taking a class at my university about the Roman poet Catullus (lived c. 84 – c. 54 BCE). One of Catullus’s most notorious poems is “Carmen 16,” which begins with a shockingly obscene threat, directed at two critics who thought Catullus’s poetry was effeminate: “Pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō, Aurēlī pathice et cinaede Fūrī.” In English, this means “I will fuck you in the ass and shove my cock down your throats, sodomy-lover Aurelius and pervert Furius.” The opening line of this poem was recently quoted in the Netflix comedy series History of Swear Words.

It occurred to me that there is a ton of readily available information on the internet about obscenity in Latin. (Notably, there is an entire Wikipedia article titled “Latin obscenity,” which has an entire section devoted to each word!) Meanwhile, there is virtually nothing accessible and comprehensive on the internet whatsoever about Ancient Greek obscenity that a person who does not already know Ancient Greek might be able to understand. Wikipedia has no article on the subject, I can’t find any blog posts that give comprehensive information, and, if you try to look up an obscene Greek word like πέος in the online LSJ, it gives you an extremely evasive definition in Latin because the word is apparently too obscene to define in English.

I have decided to remedy this situation. Below is a fairly extensive list of various oaths, insults, sexual vocabulary, and vocabulary related to human waste in Ancient Greek. This list should be useful to people who are simply curious about what Greek obscenity was like, people who are writing stories set in ancient Greece who want to incorporate historically accurate obscenity, and, of course, people who want to secretly cuss out their coworkers in Ancient Greek. (Note: It should go without saying that this content is not appropriate for children.)

The “Hero’s Journey” Is Nonsense

In 1949, an American author named Joseph Campbell published a book titled The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he claims that, fundamentally, all the great stories that human beings have ever told follow the exact same pattern, which is innate in the human consciousness and therefore present in every culture during every time period. In his book, he usually refers to this supposed pattern as “the monomyth” or “the hero’s journey.”

Campbell’s theories have now become thoroughly entrenched as orthodoxy in high school English literature classes all over the English-speaking world. Whenever teachers introduce students to mythology, the first thing they usually talk about is Joseph Campbell and the so-called “hero’s journey.”

Many people will be shocked, however, to learn that academic folklorists and scholars of ancient literature almost universally reject Campbell’s theories as nonsense—and for good reason. Campbell’s outline of the “hero’s journey” is so hopelessly vague that it is essentially useless for analyzing stories across cultures. It also displays ethnocentric, sexist, heteronormative, and cisnormative biases and it encourages people to ignore the ways in which stories are fundamentally shaped by the cultures and time periods in which they are produced.

Were Achilles and Patroklos Lovers?

In twenty-first-century adaptations of the story of the Trojan War, Achilles and Patroklos are often portrayed as gay lovers. This is how they are portrayed, for instance, in Madeline Miller’s novel The Song of Achilles (published in 2012) and in the BBC television series Troy: Fall of a City (released in 2018). Many people have wondered how faithful these portrayals are to the ancient sources. In other words, were Achilles and Patroklos really in a sexual relationship?

As it turns out, the debate over whether Achilles and Patroklos were lovers goes all the way back to antiquity. There are some surviving ancient sources that unambiguously portray them as lovers—but there are also ancient sources that explicitly deny that their relationship was ever sexual.