Classics Archives - Page 20 of 33 - Tales of Times Forgotten

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.

What Did Jesus Really Look Like?

One of the greatest mysteries of ancient history is the true appearance of Jesus of Nazareth. Most people today have an image that immediately pops into their head when they hear the name “Jesus” of a tall, handsome white man with long, flowing hair and a beard and maybe a halo. This is certainly not what the historical Jesus really looked like. In fact, the image we all have of Jesus actually has a quite fascinating origin. In ancient times, Jesus was represented in a wide variety of different ways, some of them downright bizarre, but the standard image we all know and recognize eventually became the canonical one.

We don’t know much about what the historical Jesus looked like, but the gospels and other ancient sources do provide some details that can allow us to reconstruct a very general sense of his possible appearance.

Is Christianity a Mystery Cult?

Over the years, Christianity has often been compared to the mystery religions of ancient Greece and Rome, both by Christians wishing to emphasize the esoteric nature of their religion and by opponents of Christianity who claim that the resemblance between Christianity and mystery religions of antiquity proves that Christianity is not of divine origin.

Christianity certainly has many important features in common with Greco-Roman mystery religions, but there are some crucial differences between Christianity and mystery religions that really set Christianity apart. Perhaps the most notable difference between Christianity and the mystery religions is Christianity’s attitude towards proselytism.

Interestingly, it does seem that some mystery cult-like tendencies did come to dominate Christianity in late antiquity. Nonetheless, Christianity itself is not inherently a mystery religion and I don’t think anyone could accurately describe contemporary Christianity as a mystery cult.

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.

How Many Sexual Partners Was It Common for People to Have in Ancient Greece?

We all know that modern people didn’t invent sex. Consequently, some people have wondered how many sexual partners it was common for people in ancient and medieval times to have within their lifetimes.

This is a hard question to answer because the number of sexual partners that a person in ancient or medieval times had within their lifetime depended on a wide array of factors, which include the person’s personality, gender, and economic status, as well as the time and place in which the person happened to live.

Furthermore, we don’t really have enough data to say exactly what the “average” number of sexual partners for a person in the pre-modern world was. Most of our surviving evidence comes from sources written by social elites. This makes it even harder to know exactly how many sexual partners it was common for ordinary people to have.

Because there is such drastic variance across cultures, for this article, I will be focusing on what we know about the number of sexual partners people in ancient Greece could be expected to have. Many of the things I am about to say, though, can be applied in a general sense to other ancient cultures as well.

No, “Secretary” Does Not Mean “Secret-Keeper”

There is a popular claim that has been circulating for a long time claiming that the word secretary comes from Latin meaning “keeper of secrets.” This idea stems from a misunderstanding of the meaning of the Latin word secretum, which is the source of our English word secret but usually has a slightly different meaning in Latin.

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.