classical reception Archives - Page 9 of 10

How Do We Know Ancient Texts Are Really Ancient?

There seems to be a lot of people who think that, because we do not have the original manuscripts of ancient texts, that is somehow deeply suspicious. While it is certainly true that there are some places in some texts where we are not completely sure what the original text said, in the vast majority of cases, it is possible to reconstruct exactly or at least almost exactly what the original text said. Even when the exact original wording of a text is unclear, we usually have a pretty good idea of what the original author wrote.

Boudicca Was Actually a Horrible Person

The first-century AD Celtic warrior queen Boudicca is widely seen a British folk hero. She has been so admired for so long that her image has literally become national personification of Britain. Outside of Britain, she is seen as an icon of female empowerment and her revolt against the Romans has been interpreted as a rebellion against both foreign and patriarchal oppression.

Despite how she has been portrayed in modern culture, however, the historical Boudicca was certainly not a feminist. In fact, for what it’s worth, Boudicca makes a frankly very disturbing hero for modern feminists, given the horrible atrocities that she committed—not just against men, but also against women as well.

What Was the Conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity Really Like?

The transition from traditional Greco-Roman religion to Christianity in late antiquity has often been portrayed in terms of the so-called “triumph of Christianity over paganism.” This is an idea that originates from Christian triumphalist accounts of the era that portray Christianity as having eradicated “paganism” within a single generation.

Anti-Christian writers, especially in recent years, have seized upon this propagandistic idea of the “triumph of Christianity” and twisted the Christian propaganda into anti-Christian propaganda by portraying Christians as militant zealots and obscurantists who destroyed classical civilization in the span of a single generation because it was too great for their small minds. Unfortunately, this story is no more accurate than the story Christians have been telling for centuries; indeed, if anything, it is even less accurate.

In reality, the process of the Roman Empire’s “conversion” to Christianity was both far more gradual and far complicated than it has often been portrayed. In many ways, traditional religions were not so much “eradicated” as transformed. In many ways, Christianity and traditional religions melded so that the “Christianity” that emerged from late antiquity was not the same “Christianity” that had gone in, while “paganism” was more domesticated than vanquished.

What Was Really in the Library of Alexandria?

It is no secret that I spend a lot of time debunking popular misconceptions about the Library of Alexandria. I do this because modern people are absolutely obsessed with the Library of Alexandria and all the amazing documents they believe it must have contained. Today I’m going to revisit the Library of Alexandria yet again to debunk some ideas about what was in it.

Lots of people like to imagine that the Library of Alexandria was filled with amazing scientific information that has been lost. They like to imagine that it could have housed all sorts of breathtaking secrets about the universe that even modern scientists might not know. These ideas, though, are wrong.

I’ve addressed this subject before, but today I want to address it in-depth, debunking some specific claims about the Library of Alexandria’s contents and bringing people’s expectations more down to Earth.

Ancient Cities Weren’t All Just Abandoned

There seems to be a widespread misconception that, after 476 AD, civilization just disappeared from the Mediterranean world and all the cities of the ancient world were totally abandoned. That’s not what really happened. In fact, all the most famous cities of the classical world survived after the so-called “fall of Rome.” People didn’t just leave or die out and leave all the cities completely barren.

Cities like Athens, Sparta, Alexandria, and Rome have long, fascinating post-antique histories and are even still populated even today. In this article, we will explore what really happened to these cities after the so-called “fall of Rome” and the “end of antiquity.” The true history is actually a lot more interesting than the popular narrative about civilization just totally collapsing.

Did Ancient “Pagans” Really Worship Nature?

If you go around and ask a bunch of people what “paganism” is, chances are, most people will tell you something like “nature worship.” It is true that some contemporary Neopagans do indeed worship nature, albeit in various forms and in various ways. Even many Neopagans who do not literally worship nature still hold nature in very high regard. This conception of “paganism” as “nature worship,” however, is, for the most part, not applicable to the ancient world.

The term “paganism” is problematic in a historical context for all kinds of reasons, but it is most often applied to the various polytheistic religions that were practiced in the greater Mediterranean region (i.e., the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe) in ancient times before Christianity. When we look at these religions, we actually find a rather startling absence of nature-worshippers.

For most people in the ancient Mediterranean world, nature was a frightening and dangerous thing that could never really be trusted. Most of the deities worshipped in ancient times by so-called “pagans” were not seen as personifications of nature or natural forces, but rather as supernatural beings governing certain areas of human endeavor. Some deities were associated with aspects of the natural world, but the deities themselves were almost always clearly distinguished from the phenomena with which they were associated. Furthermore, even those deities associated with natural phenomena were usually associated with cultural phenomena as well.

Why Did We Start Using Greek Names for Greek Deities?

Today, in the English-speaking world, the classical deities are most widely known by their Greek names. Up until the late nineteenth century, though, the deities of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds were almost exclusively known in the west by their Roman names. The Greek names were almost totally obscure among English-speakers and they were almost never used.

What is it that changed? Why did we stop using the Roman names and start using the Greek names? The answer to this question is complicated and there are a lot of cultural factors that go into it, but I think that a large part of the motivation for the switch came as a result of the belief that the Greeks were culturally superior to the Romans because they were supposedly more “western.”

No, Nero Didn’t “Fiddle While Rome Burned”

The phrase “fiddling while Rome burns” has been in the news a lot again lately for some rather surprising reasons. As most people already know, the deadly COVID-19 epidemic is spreading across the globe. According to The New York Times, as of today, at least 973 people in the United States have tested positive for COVID-19 and at least thirty people in the United States are confirmed to have died of it. It is currently estimated that COVID-19 has a case fatality rate of around 3.4%. Meanwhile, the stock market continues to plummet at record rates.

Donald J. Trump—who is somehow the actual president of the United States—reportedly spent a large part of the weekend golfing at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. For some reason, though, on Sunday, 8 March 2020, Trump decided that it would be a good idea to retweet a meme of himself literally playing a fiddle with the caption “My next piece is called… nothing can stop what’s coming.” Trump commented on the meme, saying, “Who knows what this means, but it sounds good to me!”

Naturally, people immediately began using the meme to criticize Trump’s response to the ongoing crises, comparing him to the Roman emperor Nero (lived 37 – 68 AD), who is famously said to have played the fiddle during the Great Fire of Rome in July 64 AD, which destroyed large parts of the city of Rome. I wrote a detailed article back in November 2017 debunking the story about Nero “fiddling while Rome burned.” Given the contemporary situation, I figured I’d revisit the subject and debunk it afresh.

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.

Yes, Kratos Is a Real Deity in Greek Mythology

I have never played any of the games in the video game series God of War. I don’t really have any interest in video games and, even if I did have an interest in them, I would never have time to play them. Nonetheless, as a Hellenist, I like to pay attention to how Greek mythology is portrayed in modern popular culture and I find it interesting that Kratos, the main character in the God of War series, is actually very loosely based on a real figure in Greek mythology.

In Greek mythology, Kratos is the divine personification of strength, the son of the Titan Pallas and the Okeanid nymphe Styx. Ironically, in ancient Greek sources, Kratos is portrayed as a dumb, overly violent thug who is unquestioningly loyal to Zeus and whose job is to enforce Zeus’s authority over all the other deities; whereas I’ve read that, in the video game series God of War, Kratos is apparently portrayed as a renegade demigod who kills all the major deities in the Greek pantheon, including Zeus.