Classics Archives - Page 7 of 33 - Tales of Times Forgotten

Why Is the Parthenon So Famous?

The most famous building in Greece today is almost certainly the Parthenon, a spectacular temple to the Greek goddess Athena that towers atop the Athenian Akropolis and is almost universally admired for being supposedly the most “perfect” and “timeless” work of ancient Greek architecture. Some people may be surprised to learn, though, that this was not always the case.

The Parthenon did not immediately become the most famous and admired Greek temple as soon as it was built. It was certainly seen as an important temple in antiquity—one especially notable for its size, its prominent location, and its extraordinary chryselephantine cult statue of Athena, crafted by the master sculptor Pheidias. Its present-day status as the most famous of all Greek buildings, though, is the result of the events and ideological movements of the past 2,400 years of history. If post-classical history had gone differently, the Parthenon’s status might have gone to a different temple.

Shocking, Taboo Sex in Ancient Greece and Rome

Ancient Greek and Roman sexuality seems to be a huge topic of interest with the general public. I’ve found that my posts on the subject are regularly among my most popular. Readers seem to be especially fascinated by stories of lurid depravities. For a very long time, the post I wrote in February 2019 about Roman orgies was consistently one of my most frequently viewed articles.

Well, if that’s what you’re interested in, you’re in luck, because, in this post, I will be discussing some of the sexual acts that the ancient Greeks and Romans regarded as the most shocking, disgraceful, unnatural, and taboo. We’ll even discuss some of the most scandalous and lurid tales of Roman imperial debaucheries. Be forewarned that some readers may find some of the acts discussed in the ancient sources I am about to analyze disturbing.

No, the University of Reading Didn’t “Cancel” the Ancient Greeks

The Daily Mail is a British tabloid newspaper that is notorious for promoting wildly sensationalistic headlines, having little-to-no fact-checking, and frequently outright fabricating news stories for the sake of attention. Their unreliability is so notorious that, in 2016, they were sanctioned by the International Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) for not meeting standards of journalistic integrity and, in February 2017, Wikipedia took the unprecedented step of blanket-prohibiting the use of the Daily Mail as a source in their encyclopedia articles, with editors concluding via consensus that the tabloid is “generally unreliable.”

On 1 January 2022, the Daily Mail published an article written by an author named Chris Hastings with the shocking headline “Reading University bosses cancel the Ancient Greeks by removing part of a poem that mentions domestic violence to avoid upsetting students.” The article claims that unnamed “bosses” at the University of Reading (by which they presumably mean an instructor in the classics department) “cut several lines” from a handout bearing the text of the poem “Types of Women,” otherwise known as “Semonides Fragment 7,” composed by the ancient Greek poet Semonides of Amorgos, who lived in around the seventh century BCE. The article claims that the university did this because they feared that the lines might offend students, even though no students had actually complained about the poem.

This article has been widely and uncritically shared on social media, including among classicists. On top of this, the story originating with the Daily Mail has been picked up by over a dozen other media outlets, including The Sun, The Times, and The Daily Telegraph. Even the website Ancient Origins, which regularly publishes wooish nonsense about ancient history, has published a piece on the subject. Information from an inside source, though, hints that the story may be totally fabricated—a prospect which seems especially likely given the Daily Mail‘s well-documented history of fabricating stories. Even if the story is not totally fabricated, it is at the very least heavily misrepresented and blown out of proportion in a manner that is clearly deliberately designed to provoke outrage.

No, Cerberus’s Name Does Not Mean “Spot”

In Greek mythology, Cerberus—or, to use a spelling that is more faithful to the Greek pronunciation, Kerberos—is the ferocious, many-headed watchdog who guards the entrance to the underworld. Ancient Greek sources disagree on exactly how many heads he has. The Theogonia, a long narrative poem in dactylic hexameter composed by the poet Hesiodos of Askre in the late eighth or early seventh century BCE, says (in lines 308–312) that Kerberos has fifty heads. The later poet Pindaros of Thebes (lived c. 518 – c. 438 BCE) says in a fragment (F249a/b SM) that he has no less than one hundred heads. In Greek vase paintings, he is usually portrayed with either two or three heads. He is often also depicted with a serpent for a tail. From the fourth century BCE onward, though, three heads seem to have become the standard.

There is a popular meme that has been circulating on the internet for a long time claiming that the name Κέρβερος (Kérberos) actually means “Spot.” This is a cute story. How deliciously ironic it would be for a literal Hellhound to have such a normal dog name like “Spot”! Unfortunately, the story probably isn’t true. Kerberos’s name certainly does not mean “Spot” in Ancient Greek, and it probably doesn’t mean this in any language at all.

Did Ancient People Really Think That Gods People Didn’t Believe in Would “Fade”?

The idea that gods derive their power from people believing in them and worshipping them and that gods whom people stop believing in and worshipping will “fade” or possibly even die out pops up fairly frequently in modern popular culture. Most notably, it forms a major part of the premise for Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novel American Gods (originally published in 2001 by William Morrow in the United States and Headline the U.K.) and the television series of the same name based on it (originally released on the premium cable network Starz from 2017 through 2021).

Some people have wondered, though: Does this idea have any kind of basis in ancient sources? Did ancient people really believe that their deities drew their powers from people worshipping them? As it turns out, although the version of the idea that is best known today through American Gods and other works is utterly contrary to how ancient people normally thought about their deities, similar ideas about deities being, to some degree, dependent on worship, do crop up in ancient literature.

Nabis, the Last King of Sparta, and His Torture Robot

The last king of Sparta to actually wield real political power was Nabis, who staged a coup d’état in 207 BCE, in which he seized the throne and murdered the reigning king Pelops. He claimed that he was a remote descendant of the Eurypontid king Demaratos of many centuries earlier and initiated sweeping social reforms that he designed to fortify his power.

Ever since antiquity, Nabis’s reputation has consistently been that of an extraordinarily cruel and sadistic tyrant. He is probably most notorious today for having supposedly constructed a horrifying torture robot modeled after his wife Apega that he could control and use to torture people into giving him large amounts of money and precious valuables. In this post, I will briefly look at who Nabis was, the events of his life, and, of course, the story of the evil torture robot.

No, “Xmas” Was Not Invented to Advance a Secularist Agenda

We are now well into the month of December. This obviously means that there are already people going around promoting nonsense assertions that twenty-first-century Anglophone Christmas traditions are of ancient “pagan” origin. (I already wrote an article back in December 2019, in which I thoroughly refute the most common “Christmas-is-secretly-pagan” arguments and I’ve addressed some of the other arguments in various other articles.) The time of year also, however, means that there are tons of conservative Christians promoting absurd conspiracy theories that evil leftists are staging some kind of “War on Christmas.”

One aspect of this whole conspiracy theory about the supposed “War on Christmas” is the misconception that the name Xmas was invented by atheists as part of a secularist attempt to remove Christ from Christmas and turn it into a secular holiday. The assumption is that the “X” represents an attempt to literally x-out the word “Christ.” Because of this misconception, some Christians regard the name “Xmas” as downright blasphemous. In reality, the name Xmas was not invented by atheists at all; it is, in fact, merely a harmless abbreviation that was originally invented by Christians and has been in continuous use in various forms for nearly five hundred years.

Were Ancient Civilizations Conservative or Liberal?

I have repeatedly encountered questions on Quora asking whether ancient civilizations were “liberal” or “conservative,” so I thought I would write an in-depth response to those sorts of questions here. I think these questions arise from people perceiving what seems like a fundamental paradox: we revere ancient civilizations for things people generally see as progressive, such as technological advancements and the invention of democracy, while, at the same time, it is widely known that basically all ancient societies had slavery, oppressed women to some degree or another, and were often imperialistic, xenophobic, and culturally chauvinistic.

It’s true that ancient civilizations were generally very conservative in the sense that they tended to value traditions very highly, they were usually culturally resistant to change, and people in those civilizations rarely challenged long-established cultural assumptions and social institutions. For instance, as far as we have evidence, few people in the ancient world ever challenged the idea that men are naturally superior to women or the idea that slavery is normal and morally acceptable.

At the same time, though, it would be misleading to describe ancient civilizations as “conservative” or “liberal” without careful clarification because, among individual people in the ancient world, there was tremendous ideological diversity. Furthermore, the normative values of ancient civilizations were often very different from the values of both contemporary people who call themselves conservatives and contemporary people who call themselves liberals.

A History of the “Common Era” (BCE/CE) Dating System

I functionally stopped believing in the existence of God sometime around late 2018 or early 2019. It’s difficult to say exactly when it happened, since it was a gradual process of realizing that all the theological arguments to which I had clung to support my belief in the existence of God were fundamentally flawed. Long after I became an agnostic, though, I still clung to many of the cultural trappings of Christianity. One of these trappings was the BC/AD dating system, which numbers the years from the supposed year of Jesus’s birth, with “BC” standing for “before Christ” and “AD” standing for “anno Domini,” which is Latin for “in the year of the Lord,” referring to Jesus.

For nearly two years after becoming an agnostic, I continued to use this dating system in all my articles. I felt that the alternative BCE/CE dating system (which uses the exact same numbers for the years, but with “BCE” standing for “before the Common Era” and “CE” standing for “Common Era”) was a relatively recent invention of atheists seeking to advance a secularist agenda by taking the Christian dating system and making it superficially “secular” by removing the explicit Christian references while retaining the years numbered from the supposed date of Jesus’s birth. I wondered why secularists didn’t just create a dating system that was actually secular and not based on the supposed date of Jesus’s birth.

Well, it turns out that the history of the “Common Era” dating notation is a lot more complicated and fascinating than I realized. In fact, it is not a recent invention of atheist secularists in any way; it is both quite old and originally Christian. Christians first began using the “Common Era” notation in the early seventeenth century and they have been using it continuously ever since. Jewish people widely adopted the notation in the nineteenth century so that they could use the Christian dating system that everyone around them was using while still upholding their religion by not applying the titles “Christ” and “Lord” to Jesus. The notation is now widely used among scholars and academics, primarily out of respect for followers of religions that don’t regard Jesus as Lord or Christ.

Why There Are No Nu or Xi Variants of COVID

The World Health Organization (WHO) is the organization that is in charge of naming variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. They originally named these variants with long, hard-to-say, alphanumeric names. As a result, the public began referring to these variants by the names of the places where they originated, calling them “U.K.,” “South Africa,” “Brazil,” and “India” variants.

The WHO, however, was concerned that this naming practice could lead to stigmatization of people from the countries the variants were being named after, so, in May 2021, they began naming variants of concern or interest after Greek letters in order to make it easier to refer to them while avoiding names that might stigmatize specific groups of people. Thus, they named the variants I just listed the “alpha,” “beta,” “gamma,” and “delta” variants respectively.

The WHO has continued this practice of naming variants after Greek letters, but, when they named the most recent “variant of concern” the “omicron variant,” after omicron (o), the fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, they deliberately skipped the two Greek letters before it: nu (ν) and xi (ξ).