Ancient quotes Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Did Julius Caesar Really Say “The Die Is Cast”?

One of the most famous anecdotes in all of ancient history holds that, when the Roman general and politician Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon stream, which marked the boundary of Italy, in January 49 BCE during his march on Rome, he declared “Iacta alea est!” (which means “The die is cast!” in Latin). A version of this story does occur in the ancient historical sources, but those sources indicate that, instead of the Latin phrase I have quoted here, Caesar actually used a Greek phrase with a subtly different meaning, which holds different implications for his understanding of the significance of his famous Rubicon crossing.

In Defense of Hegelochos

The Athenian tragic playwright Euripides (lived c. 480 – c. 406 BCE) is known for adapting traditional myths in highly innovative and sometimes controversial ways. In spring 408 BCE, his perhaps most iconoclastic tragedy Orestes premiered at the City Dionysia in the Theater of Dionysos Eleuthereus on the south slope of the Athenian akropolis. The play addresses the same myth as Aischylos’s earlier tragedy Eumenides, but radically alters the plot. In Aischylos’s play, the character Orestes stands trial before a jury of Athenians and is acquitted of the crime of murdering his own mother. In Euripides’s adaptation, by contrast, Orestes (along with his accomplices Pylades and Elektra) are convicted and sentenced to death in Argos and attempt to escape through murder and hostage-taking.

The play’s radically revisionist treatment of a classic myth, however, is not the only reason why its first performance is famous. Several ancient scholarly commentaries, known as scholia, attest that, in the first performance of the play, Orestes was portrayed by an actor named Hegelochos, who messed up one of his lines and won eternal ridicule. In this post, however, I will argue that Hegelochos may not be entirely (or perhaps at all) to blame for the infamous slip-up, which may owe just as much or more to the audience’s mishearing.

Most Memorable Opening Lines in Ancient Literature

Today, if one looks around on the internet, one can find all kinds of lists that purport to present the most memorable opening lines “of all time,” but, invariably, these opening lines are always from famous works of English literature written within the past two centuries. I have therefore decided to compile my own list of most memorable opening lines—but only for works of ancient literature.

I have chosen which lines to include in this post based on how impactful and memorable they are, not on how famous they are. As a result, many of the works I have included on this list are not well known to the general public. Meanwhile, I have omitted the opening lines of certain works that are extremely famous, but not especially memorable in their own right, such as the opening lines of Plato’s Republic and Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, which are famous because the works they come from are famous, not because they are especially memorable. I have chosen opening lines from works produced in a range of ancient cultures, including ancient Mesopotamia, the Levant, India, Greece, and Rome, and have chosen openings that I find memorable for a variety of different reasons.

How Likely Is It That Scholars Will Find More of Sappho’s Lost Poems?

Sappho (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BCE) was a female early Greek lyric poet who flourished on the island of Lesbos, located just off the west coast of Asia Minor, and composed many poems in the Aeolic dialect of the Greek language. Her output was so prolific that the standard edition of her work in antiquity, which literary scholars working at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt produced in around the third century BCE, is thought to have spanned nine “books” or rolls of papyrus. Ancient audiences esteemed her as one of the greatest of all lyric poets, if not the greatest. She was known as the “Tenth Muse” and some even regarded her work as on par with that of Homer (the putative author of the Iliad and the Odyssey and most revered of all ancient Greek poets).

Sadly, nearly all of her poems have been lost. Only one poem, Fragment 1 (the “Ode to Aphrodite”) has survived to the present day totally complete. Only a handful of others—including Fragment 16 (the “Anaktoria Poem”), Fragment 31 (“Phainetai Moi”), Fragment 58 (the “Tithonos Poem”), and the “Brothers Poem”—are nearly complete. Most of what survives are tiny fragments of only a few lines or less. Nonetheless, today, many scholars of ancient literature regard Sappho’s more complete poems as among the greatest that have survived from antiquity. The fact that she is one of the very few female ancient Greek or Roman authors who have any works that have survived to the present day and the fact that she composed poems in which her female speaker openly discusses her erotic desire for other women have both further magnified contemporary interest in her work.

As a result of this, many people have wondered: How likely is it that more of Sappho’s poems will be recovered? To answer this question, in this post, I will discuss the history of how her work was transmitted in antiquity, how most of it became lost, how the parts that have survived have managed to survive, and, finally, how likely it is that someone will discover and publish any substantial material by her that is not currently known anytime in the next half century.

Ancient Greek and Latin Insult Poetry

The ancient Greeks and Romans are known for their many revered works of literature, art, and philosophy. One thing they are not known for (but perhaps should be!) is their insult poetry. In this post, I have collected some insulting ancient Greek and Roman poetic passages from a wide variety of sources, including the Homeric epics, Sappho, Hipponax, Catullus, and Martial, that I find especially amusing or revealing about ancient Greek and/or Roman society.

Readers should be aware that many of the passages I am about to discuss are extremely misogynistic, classist, racist, and/or shockingly sexually obscene. Some passages contain references to sexual violence. Some readers may find some of these poems disturbing.

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.

Here’s the Meaning of the Symbolism in Lil Nas X’s Controversial New Music Video

Until last Sunday, I honestly had no idea who Lil Nas X was. I don’t really follow music in general and I honestly know especially little about rap in particular. Then, while we were driving back to Bloomington after visiting our parents for Easter, my sister mentioned to me that Lil Nas X is a rapper, that he wrote a song about being gay—which I later learned is titled “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)”—and that the music video for it includes a scene of him riding a stripper pole down to Hell and giving Satan a lap dance. She explained that religious conservatives were having a huge moral panic over this music video because they think it glorifies homosexuality and Satanism.

Having heard this, I naturally decided to look up the music video for myself to see what all the fuss was about. I have to say that, for a three-minute clip that involves the main character riding a stripper pole to Hell and giving Satan a lap dance, the music video is remarkably intellectually sophisticated. The people who worked on this video clearly did a ton of research. As soon as I watched it, I was genuinely impressed by the sheer number of classical and Biblical allusions that they managed to cram in.

It incorporates specific references to works of ancient Greek and Roman art, the Bible, Greek mythology, works of Greek philosophy, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. They even managed to include an exact, direct quote from Plato’s Symposion in the original Classical Attic Greek! Here’s a detailed explanation of the music video’s classical and Biblical symbolism.

Did Leonidas Really Say “Molon Labe”?

Ancient Greek is not like Latin. There are dozens of Latin phrases—such as et cetera, ad hoc, alias, alter ego, de facto, de jure, and so on—that are commonly used in everyday conversation. By contrast, there are very few phrases from the ancient Greek language that ordinary people can even recognize in the original language. μολὼν λαβέ (molṑn labé) is one of those phrases. Literally, it means: “Having come, take.” More idiomatically, it can be translated as: “Come and take them.”

Most people have heard a story about this phrase. The story normally goes a bit like this: in 480 BCE, the armies of the Achaemenid Empire were attempting to conquer mainland Greece, so King Leonidas I of Sparta brought an army of three hundred brave Spartan warriors to stop the invading armies at the pass of Thermopylai in central Greece. Then, when King Xerxes I of the Achaemenid Empire ordered Leonidas and his soldiers to hand over their weapons, Leonidas supposedly replied with two words: “μολὼν λαβέ”—”Come and take them.”

This makes for a rather fine story. Historically speaking, however, this incident almost certainly never really happened. In fact, the earliest version of the story is not attested until over four hundred years after Leonidas’s death and that version of the story is very different from the version that most people know today—for one thing, it doesn’t even include the phrase “μολὼν λαβέ.”

The Strangest Books in the Bible

The Bible is a collection of various ancient texts that are considered by Christians to be the inspired Word of God. The number of books in the Bible varies depending on which branch of Christianity you happen to belong to. The standard Protestant Bible only has sixty-six books, the standard Roman Catholic Bible has seventy-three books, and the standard Eastern Orthodox Bible has seventy-eight books.

Many of the texts that are included in the Bible seem rather strange—at least when you read them for the first time. There are some books in the Bible that are a bit peculiar in the sense that they don’t fit in well with the other books in the Bible. Then there are other books in the Bible that just seem downright bizarre—at least until you decipher what they’re talking about.

In this article, I want to talk about five of the most unusual books in the Bible. These are books that are striking either because they are so different from the others or because they employ such bizarre imagery.

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.