Classics Archives - Page 12 of 33 - Tales of Times Forgotten

Did Pythagoras Study Philosophy in Egypt?

Pythagoras of Samos (lived c. 570 – 495 BCE) is undoubtedly among the most famous of all ancient Greek philosophers. Unfortunately, extremely little can be said about him historically with any degree of certainty. As far as we know, Pythagoras never wrote anything himself and the only contemporary references to him come from the meagre fragments that have survived from the originally much more voluminous writings of his contemporaries. These sources are enough to establish that he was almost certainly a real person, but his life is almost completely obscure.

The later sources about Pythagoras that provide most of our information about him are filled with all kinds of unreliable legends. As I discuss in this article from March 2018, although most people today believe that Pythagoras was a mathematician, the earliest sources about his life actually portray him as more of a mystic sage. It’s only in later sources that he starts to be portrayed as having done anything involving math. The theorem that now bears his name isn’t even attributed to him in any written source until many centuries after his death.

In this article, I want to talk about one of the most famous stories about Pythagoras’s life: the story that he travelled to Egypt, learned about religion and philosophy from the Egyptian priests, and then introduced Egyptian religious ideas to the Greeks. This is a story that is attested in some ancient sources and that has become very prominent in popular discourse about Pythagoras—but is it historically correct?

No, Ancient Greek Is Not Albanian

One of the most bizarre yet persistent linguistic claims I have encountered so far on Quora is the claim that Ancient Greek is somehow actually Albanian. This claim seems utterly bizarre to me, because I have been studying Ancient Greek on my own since high school, I have taken four semesters of it so far at the college level, and I can read texts written in it fairly well. I do not speak Albanian, but I have listened to recordings of people speaking it and tried to read passages written in it and I can say for a fact that it is not Ancient Greek.

Indeed, I have no idea how anyone who knows Albanian or Ancient Greek could possibly think that they are the same language. Nonetheless, again and again, I have encountered Albanian nationalists claiming that they are. I therefore think it is time for me to address this hypothesis (if we can even call it that) once and for all.

Transgender People Exist—And That’s Ok

If you’ve paid any attention whatsoever to the news over the past few years, you have almost certainly heard about how a lot of conservatives are really mad that transgender people exist. They routinely insist that acknowledging the existence of trans people is “gender ideology” and that it goes against both science and the Bible. They insist that there are only two genders—male and female—and that a person’s gender is determined by their chromosomes and can never, under any circumstances, truly be changed.

In this essay, I intend to demonstrate that these arguments are, in fact, incorrect and that the existence of more than two genders is totally compatible with both science and the Bible. This essay has taken me nearly a month to research and write, so it will be quite long and will incorporate evidence from a wide range of different fields, including biology, neuroscience, history, anthropology, and religious studies.

Conquest Is a Bad Thing

Right now, there is a question on Quora that reads: “Who was the greatest conqueror in history?” So far, nearly every person who has answered this question has attempted to provide an argument that some historical conqueror was the “greatest” because they conquered the most land, they were the bravest, or they were the most strategically brilliant.

I’m going to offer a different perspective: There is no such thing as a “great conqueror.” Using the phrase “great conqueror” is like using the phrase “great murderer,” the phrase “great oppressor,” or the phrase “great committer of genocide.” Anyone who uses the phrase “great conqueror” unironically in a sense that implies that conquest is something good is either monstrously sadistic or hopelessly ignorant of the word “conquest” actually means.

Did the Ancient Romans Really Wash Their Teeth with Urine?

One of the most commonly repeated factoids about the ancient Romans is that they supposedly brushed their teeth with urine, because urine can be used to make teeth appear whiter. This factoid is usually presented to elicit feelings of shock and disgust. For instance, here is the introduction to an article by Nicholas Sokic titled “WFT: Romans used pee to whiten teeth,” published on the website Healthing on 29 January 2020:

“The Romans contributed greatly to civilization — roads, cement, aqueducts, the postal service — but not all of their creations lived to the present day, and some deservedly so. Ancient Romans used to use both human and animal urine as mouthwash in order to whiten their teeth.”

It is true that several ancient Roman and Greek sources do mention the use of urine to whiten teeth. None of these sources, however, portray this as a Roman practice. Instead, they unanimously and consistently portray it as a disgusting and barbarous practice associated with the Celtiberians, a group of Celtic peoples who lived in the central and eastern parts of the Iberian Peninsula. Furthermore, because there are no surviving Celtiberian records that confirm the alleged practice of using urine to whiten teeth, it is unclear how common this practice really was, or even whether it was something that the Celtiberians really did at all.

The Debate about Classics Isn’t What You Probably Think It Is

On 2 February 2021, The New York Times published a profile piece written by Rachel Poser titled “He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?” The subject of the article is Dan-el Padilla Peralta, an Afro-Latino associate professor of classics at Princeton University who argues that the field of classics as it is currently constructed is deeply embedded with systemic racism and serves to reinforce white supremacist hegemony. Padilla wants to radically reshape the field by rooting out aspects that reinforce white supremacy and rebuilding the field in a new way.

This profile piece triggered an unceasing deluge of op-eds published on various platforms purporting to “defend” the discipline of classics from Padilla’s supposed attacks. These op-eds almost invariably display complete ignorance of the conversation that has been taking place within the discipline of classics over the past few years and ignorance of what Padilla is actually proposing. They reduce the conversation to a ridiculous caricature according to which evil, radical leftist scholars are trying to bring an end to the study of ancient texts altogether.

Many people who are not directly connected to the field of classics are learning about the controversy solely from these op-eds and coming away with the egregious misimpression that this is really what is happening. In this essay, I want to explain for my general readership what is really going on within the field and what sorts of changes people are really advocating. (I would write an op-ed, but no one would publish it, since I’m just a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate.)

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.)

Why Were Women Prohibited from Fighting in Most Ancient Societies?

Someone on Quora recently asked the question “Is there a real reason why ancient armies didn’t have female soldiers, or was it just sexism?” This question immediately triggered a whole flurry of defensive replies from various male military history buffs proclaiming all the reasons why women are supposedly naturally unsuited for ancient warfare and why it was supposedly perfectly logical for ancient militaries to exclude women.

The most upvoted answer to the question is this one, written by a man named Alex Mann, arguing that women are naturally physically shorter, weaker, and smaller than men, that pregnancy and menstruation would hinder them from fighting, and that they would be an overall detriment to any ancient army. The answer currently has 2,722 upvotes and hundreds of comments, many of them showering praise on the author for his supposed clarity and perceptiveness.

Other men have provided answers drawing similar conclusions. The arguments that these men present, however, are demonstrably quite shoddy. In this essay, I intend to demonstrate that there is, in fact, no logical reason for an army to have a rule categorically excluding all women and that the real reason why women were excluded from ancient militaries is indeed simply sexism.

Athenian Democracy Wasn’t Really That Great

Athenian democracy was one of the earliest well-documented governments of its kind in human history. It is hard to convey how radical and amazing it was in the context of the ancient Mediterranean world. Unfortunately, as a result of the significance it held in its historical context, today, people often misguidedly regard it as the ideal, original democracy that all modern democracies should strive to imitate. We should admire Athenian democracy as one important early step in the development of democratic government, but we should also recognize that it was not totally unique even in the Greek world for its time and that it was deeply flawed in ways that are, unfortunately, often overlooked in modern panegyrics of its greatness.

Contrary to popular belief, Athens was not the first Greek polis (i.e., city-state) to adopt a democratic constitution. Moreover, the vast majority of the Athenian population was formally excluded from participating in the democracy. Democratic Athens was also aggressively imperialistic and routinely sought to dominate and oppress other Greek poleis and, on multiple occasions, it even committed outright genocide. Finally, Athenian democracy was much shorter-lived than many people realize.

Fascinating Facts about Ancient Sparta

Most people today are familiar with the idea of the ancient Spartans as a warrior people who spurned luxury and devoted themselves to military training. The Spartans have a substantial presence in modern popular culture, partly due to the 2006 fantasy action film 300, which, as I discuss in this article I published in November 2019, greatly distorts the true history of Sparta in order to convey a deeply racist, misogynistic, ableist, and fascist message.

In this article, though, I don’t want to talk about 300. Instead, I want to talk about some aspects of ancient Spartan history, society, and culture that are, for the most part, fairly obscure that I think should be more widely known. For instance, did you know that there are surviving works of ancient Spartan poetry? Or did you know that Spartiate men were known in antiquity for wearing their hair in long braids that came all the way down to their mid-backs? Or did you know that other Greek people in antiquity stereotyped the Spartans as anal fetishists? Read on to learn more!