Ancient Rome Archives - Page 14 of 17 - Tales of Times Forgotten

Spencer Ruins “Adam Ruins Everything”

Adam Ruins Everything is a comedy television series on TruTV starring comedian Adam Conover. It has been on air since September 2015 and has had, to date, three seasons, amounting to a total of sixty-five episodes. The basic premise of the show is that Adam Conover is an obnoxious know-it-all who cannot help ruining everyone around him’s favorite things by revealing to them the dark truths and common misconceptions surrounding them.

This premise provides a sort of framing narrative for a series of information-based comedy segments, which make up the bulk of each episode. Each episode usually consists of three segments debunking common misconceptions related to a particular topic, followed by a final “positive takeaway” segment in which Adam tries to make the audience feel better by putting a positive spin on everything he has said throughout the episode. Along the way, Adam cites various sources (some more reliable than others) and calls in people identified as experts to testify.

In general, most of the show’s main points are usually broadly correct. The show clearly really does strive for factual correctness, as demonstrated by their repeated warnings that the show is fallible and their multiple “corrections segments.” Sadly, they do not always live up to their aspirations. Often the errors on the show are errors of omission resulting from the fact that it is only a thirty-minute show and they try to cram no less than three different debunking sessions into each episode, which results in a series of extremely rushed information segments that end up leaving out a lot of really important information.

The Motivations behind Human Sacrifice

For people today, the fact that so many peoples throughout history have practiced human sacrifice seems absolutely baffling and horrifying. We tend to think of human sacrifice as the ultimate act of barbarism, an act that epitomizes everything savage and uncivilized about our species. Nonetheless, it is important for us to understand why people have historically engaged in this practice.

Human sacrifice has occurred in virtually every part of the world at some point in time and has occurred in some part of the world during every historical time period. Thus, whether we like it or not, understanding the motivations behind human sacrifice is a part of understanding what it means to be human.

Who Was the Strangest Roman Emperor?

A number of ancient Roman emperors have acquired reputations for being very strange. In particular, emperors such as Caligula, Nero, and Domitian are well-known for their alleged bizarre antics. It is unclear, however, to what extent these reputations for bizarreness are warranted, since many of the most famous stories concerning these emperors are apocryphal. (For instance, Nero definitely never played the fiddle while Rome burned and Caligula definitely never made his horse a senator.)

I think it is generally agreed, though, that the strangest Roman emperor—at least in terms of how he is portrayed in our extant sources—was Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus, known to later generations as Elagabalus. Elagabalus had a brief, but notoriously bizarre reign, which lasted from 16 May 218 AD until 11 March 222 AD. According to historical sources, Elagabalus was highly eccentric and his reign was ridden with scandal.

Did Abolitionism Exist in Ancient Greece and Rome?

The prevailing attitude towards slavery throughout the ancient Mediterranean world was essentially that being a slave was horrible and unpleasant, but that that was just the way things were and the way things always would be. As far as we can tell from the surviving sources, the idea that slavery even could be abolished does not seem to have occurred to most people.

There were apparently a few people in ancient Greece and Rome who thought that slavery was immoral, but these people seem to have been extremely rare, since they only appear briefly in the sources. Furthermore, we have absolutely no documentation of the existence of any large-scale, organized movement to abolish slavery in ancient Greece or Rome. Some people did criticize slavery extensively and there were probably people who wished slavery didn’t exist, but no one seems to have ever developed any realistic plans to abolish it.

Was Hypatia of Alexandria Black?

A lot of people today seem to have quite a fascination with the subject of race in the ancient world. I frequently encounter questions on Quora asking whether various historical figures from ancient times were “Black” or “white.” Elsewhere online, I often encounter claims about the racial identities of people from ancient times.

Back in September 2019, I wrote an article in response to various articles I had encountered claiming that the Roman emperor Septimius Severus was Black. In that article, I concluded that, while you could certainly describe Septimius Severus as what we today would call a “person of color,” it would be misleading to describe him as Black without any kind of careful qualification.

Another historical figure from ancient times whose racial identity seems to provoke a great deal of controversy is the early fifth-century AD Neoplatonist philosopher and mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria, who is often cited (quite anachronistically) as an example of a Black woman who excelled in STEM. In this article, I will answer the question: “Was Hypatia of Alexandria really Black?”

Why Do Ancient Greek Sculptures All Have Such Tiny Penises?

Whenever I talk about ancient Greek sculpture, there is always one question that everyone always asks me. It is not “How did the style of Hellenistic sculptures differ from the style of earlier Classical sculptures?” Nor is it “Can you tell me more about how ancient Greek sculptures were originally painted?” No, of course, not. The question everyone always asks me is “Why do they all have such tiny penises?” I have been asked this question so many times that I feel compelled to answer it.

No, the Romans Did Not Just “Steal” All the Greek Deities

Lots of people seem to wrongly assume that the Romans “stole” the Greek gods and just renamed them. People often portray this as though it were an act of plagiarism, like one student copying another student’s homework. It is easy to see how they have gotten this impression, since they know the Greeks came first and that the names of the Greek and Roman deities are used today interchangeably. The problem is that this is not at all what actually happened.

In reality, the ancient Greeks and Romans originally had separate deities with different names, different mythologies, and different attributes. These deities were worshipped in different and unique ways that were specific to the culture in which they were venerated. In other words, the Romans had their own deities. Then, due to immense Greek cultural influence in Italy, the Romans gradually came to identify their own native deities with the Greek ones.

In the process, the Romans adopted the traditional stories and distinctive divine attributes belonging to the Greek deities and attributed them to their own deities as well. Eventually, by around the first century AD or thereabouts, the Greek and Roman deities had become largely indistinguishable from each other and they were widely seen as the same deities only with different names.

Eight Things That Would Surprise Most People about Life in the Ancient World

There are a whole lot of things that would surprise most people about what life was like in ancient times. As historians sometimes say, “The past is a foreign country.” When reading about the past, we learn about people whose lives were, in many ways, utterly different from our own. Here are a few facts about life in the ancient world that would probably instantly shock a modern person travelling into the past.

A Compilation of the Most Disturbing Stories from Classical Mythology

Classical mythology is absolutely filled with all sorts of bizarre and disturbing stories involving horrific deeds such as murder, cannibalism, rape, incest, bestiality, filicide, fratricide, self-cannibalism, and mutilation. Just for fun, here is a compilation of some of the most disturbing stories from classical mythology.

Was Septimius Severus a Black Roman Emperor?

It has been widely claimed on the internet that the Roman emperor Septimius Severus (ruled 193 – 211 AD) was a black man. For instance, a blog post published on the site Rasta Livewire on 25 September 2010 describes Septimius Severus as “first black African-born Emperor of Rome” and declares that it is important for black people today to “remember and celebrate” the Severan Dynasty he founded.

The claim that Septimius Severus was a “black Roman emperor” has even found its way into peer-reviewed journals dealing with contemporary black culture. For instance, here is an article written by Molefi Kete Asante and Shaza Ismail titled “Rediscovering the ‘Lost’ Roman Caesar: Septimius Severus the African and Eurocentric Historiography” that was published in March 2010 in the Journal of Black Studies, a peer-reviewed journal on contemporary African-American culture, that advances this claim.

So, was Septimius Severus a black man? Well, it depends on what you happen to consider “black.” Septimius Severus was definitely born on the African continent; that at least makes him African. Unfortunately, there are some serious problems with calling him a “black Roman emperor.”