Classics Archives - Page 22 of 33 - Tales of Times Forgotten

What Really Happened to the Athena Parthenos?

The Athena Parthenos, a colossal gold and ivory statue of the goddess Athena created between 447 and 438 BC by the renowned ancient Athenian sculptor Pheidias (lived c. 480 – c. 430 BC) that originally stood in the naos of the Parthenon on the Athenian Akropolis, is one of the most famous of all ancient Greek statues.

Unlike the Venus de Milo, which, as I talk about in this article from September 2019, wasn’t famous in antiquity and is mostly only famous today because of a French propaganda campaign in the nineteenth century, the Athena Parthenos really was famous in antiquity. In fact, it is only famous today because of its ancient reputation, since the statue itself has not survived.

Many people have wondered what happened to the Athena Parthenos, but its ultimate fate is actually far less mysterious than many people have been led to believe. The story of how the Athena Parthenos was destroyed, recreated, and destroyed again is as fascinating as any story from the ancient world.

The Problem with Percy Jackson

The book series Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan, originally published from 2005 to 2009, is one of the most popular series of children’s fantasy novels of the twenty-first century so far. According to the Wikipedia article on it (which may or may not be reliable here since the source it cites is a Fox Business article from 2010 with a dead link), over sixty-nine million copies of books in the series have been sold worldwide.

In case you haven’t read the series, the basic premise is that the Greek gods are real, they live in the United States, and their demigod offspring live among us. According to the series, these demigods have special powers that they have inherited from their parents. The main character of the series is Percy Jackson, the demigod son of Poseidon and a mortal woman. Major supporting characters introduced in the first book include Annabeth Chase (a daughter of Athena), Grover Underwood (a satyr), Luke Castellan (a son of Hermes), and Chiron (a wise centaur).

I first read the series when I was in late elementary school and, at the time, I loved it—although I never quite got as obsessed with it as I did with Harry Potter or The Spiderwick Chronicles (probably because I read it at a significantly older age). As I grew older, though, there was something about the series that really started to bother me. I was in around seventh grade when I really started to notice it and, ever since then, it is something that I have found very disturbing about the series and the message that it sends.

This article will be just as much an account of my personal experience with the books and how they have affected me, as well as an assessment of them and a reflection on how my sentiments towards them have changed over the years.

How Did Greek Philosophers Support Themselves?

A lot of people have wondered how on Earth Greek philosophers made their living. It is hard for a person to earn a livable wage as a professional “philosopher” in the modern age and it would have been even more difficult in classical Greece, since there were no universities as we would think of them at that time that could hire philosophers.

As it turns out, though, most ancient Greek philosophers did not make their money from philosophy. Many of them were from wealthy families and therefore didn’t need to work. Many of them also had wealthy patrons who paid for their expenses. Other philosophers found other ways to survive, which included working day jobs, starting cults, and even literally living off the streets through begging.

If You Like Ancient Greek Texts, Thank the Byzantines for Preserving Them

There is a widespread belief among members of the general public that ancient Greek texts were mostly only preserved by the Arabs through Arabic translations. The Byzantine Empire is rarely mentioned in the context of the preservation of classical texts. When the Byzantines are mentioned in this context, it is usually by writers who see them as ignorant fundamentalist Christian obscurantists.

Contrary to what popular culture would lead you to believe, however, the Byzantine Empire did retain Greco-Roman knowledge. In fact, the vast majority of ancient Greek texts that have survived to the present day are primarily known from Greek manuscripts that were either copied in the Byzantine Empire or copied from texts that were copied in the Byzantine Empire.

The idea that the majority of ancient Greek texts have only been preserved because they were translated by Arabic scholars is largely a misconception. There are a few lesser-known classical Greek texts that have been preserved only through Arabic translations, but the vast majority of the really famous texts that people still study today have actually been preserved in the original Greek.

The widespread ignorance of the Byzantines’ role in the preservation of classical Greek and Roman texts is just one small part of a centuries-old, systematic effort by westerners to marginalize the Byzantine Empire and minimize its importance in European history.

Is Stoicism a Useful Philosophy for the Modern World?

In case you haven’t heard, the ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism seems to be having a bit of a cultural moment right now. It is the philosophy of choice for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, football stars, and ordinary people. There is a whole plethora of websites promoting Stoicism as a philosophy for the modern world, including “Daily Stoic,” “How to Be a Stoic,” “Modern Stoicism,” and “Traditional Stoicism.”

There are also countless other resources for aspiring Stoics, including YouTube channels and bestselling books like The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, The Beginner’s Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity, Stoicism: A Stoic Approach To Modern Life, and countless others. There are even events for aspiring Stoics to gather and talk about Stoicism like Stoicon.

All this enthusiasm over Stoicism has left some people wondering what Stoicism is, how modern Stoicism differs from ancient Stoicism, and whether either ancient or modern Stoicism is useful for modern life. I am neither a Stoic nor an ardent critic of Stoicism, but rather an outsider who happens to know a bit about Stoicism. In my view, there are quite a few things we can learn from Stoicism, but Stoicism also has some serious pitfalls that are worth taking into account.

Is There Really a Scene in the ‘Iliad’ Where Achilles Calls Hektor Out of Troy to Face Him?

If you ask someone who has never read the Iliad to name one scene from it, chances are, the first scene that person will probably name is the scene with the Trojan Horse. The Trojan Horse, though, is actually never even mentioned in the Iliad. The Iliad ends with the funeral of Hektor, long before the fall of Troy. The story of the Trojan Horse is first told in flashback by the blind bard Demodokos in Book Eight of the Odyssey.

If you tell the person that the Iliad ends with the funeral of Hektor and ask them to name another scene, then they’ll probably tell you the iconic scene where Achilles goes to the gates of Troy and calls for Hektor to come out and face him. It’s a scene that appears in nearly every adaptation of the Trojan War made in the past two decades. That scene, though, doesn’t appear in the Iliad at all either. In fact, it doesn’t appear in any ancient source whatsoever; it is purely an invention of Hollywood.

Did the Ancient Greeks Really Believe in Their Myths?

On Quora, I have noticed there seems to be an endless number of questions dealing with the same overall theme: “Did the ancient Greeks and Romans really believe in their gods?” and “Did the ancient Greeks really believe in their myths?”

I think these questions are born from a strange discordance that people have noticed between the ancient Greeks’ reputation for rational skepticism and the stories we still tell about their gods and heroes—stories that—let’s face it—in most cases are pretty unbelievable to say the least.

Thus people have wondered, “How on Earth could a people so supposedly enlightened believe in such absurd stories?” As it turns out, though, believing in the Greek deities and believing in Greek myths are two different things; many people in ancient times believed in the deities without necessarily believing in all the stories attached to them.

For the Last Time, Donald Trump Isn’t the Modern-Day Julius Caesar

One thing I have discovered is that people really love to directly equate Donald Trump with various historical figures from the ancient world. As I discuss in this article from December 2019, Trump’s evangelical supporters are constantly comparing him to Cyrus the Great, claiming that he is God’s vessel appointed to fulfill God’s will by enacting conservative policies. Meanwhile, people who do not like Trump seem to habitually joke about Donald Trump being Caligula or Nero.

Both Trump’s supporters and his fiercest enemies, though, love to compare him to one man in particular: Julius Caesar. This obsession with equating Trump with figures from ancient history annoys me because it inevitably leads to the distortion of history to suit the needs of the present.

The Fascinating Truth about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are symbolic figures that appear in the Book of Revelation, the last book in the New Testament canon. They seem like familiar figures to most of us. Even if you aren’t a Christian or weren’t raised as a Christian, you’ve probably been exposed to the idea of the “Four Horsemen” through popular culture. Popular culture’s portrayal of the Four Horsemen, though, isn’t very accurate. For instance, nearly all popular culture adaptations get the identity of the first horseman wrong.

Even if you have read the original descriptions of the Four Horsemen from the Book of Revelation, chances are you aren’t aware of the complex cultural background and symbolism that these descriptions draw on. For instance, original readers of the Book of Revelation may have imagined the first horseman as a Parthian archer and the fourth horseman, Death, as a naked young man with wings, since that’s how the personification of Death is usually portrayed in ancient Greek art.

What Did Cleopatra Really Look Like?

There are a lot of misconceptions about Kleopatra VII Philopator of Egypt, the ancient queen most commonly known in English as simply “Cleopatra.” For instance, as I discuss in this article from March 2019, she actually lived closer to the present day than to the time of the construction of the pyramids of Giza. Meanwhile, as I discuss in this article from August 2019, the popular story about Cleopatra committing suicide by allowing an Egyptian asp to bite her on the breast is probably apocryphal and it is more likely that she actually committed suicide by drinking poison or by cutting herself and applying poison to the wound.

Perhaps the greatest misconception of all about Cleopatra, though, is what she looked like. Modern people have a very clear image of what Cleopatra looked like: a beautiful, pale, small-nosed woman like Elizabeth Taylor dressed in a revealing outfit with thick makeup, straight, black hair, bangs, and braids with gold ornaments going down to her shoulders. Unfortunately for fans of classic films, this image is inaccurate in almost every single way.

We actually have pretty good idea of what the historical Cleopatra looked like and it’s nothing at all like the image most people have in mind. For one thing, she didn’t have bangs. She did have a large, hooked nose, a prominent chin, and curly hair that she normally wore in a bun at the back of her head. There’s even a possibility that she may have been a redhead.