Current events Archives - Page 7 of 12 - Tales of Times Forgotten

How Was Saturnalia Celebrated in Ancient Rome?

Saturnalia is an ancient Roman holiday in honor of the god Saturnus that began on December 17th. The Romans believed that, in very ancient times, before Iupiter became the king of the deities, the cosmos had been ruled by Iupiter’s father Saturnus. They believed that the reign of Saturnus had been a “Golden Age,” in which all human beings had lived together in harmony and simplicity, and that Saturnalia was a temporary restoration of Saturnus’s reign on earth that could only last until the end of the festival.

I’ve written about Saturnalia before—usually in the context of debunking popular misconceptions about it being the source of modern American Christmas traditions. This year, however, I’ve decided to write about it again, focusing on what we know about how the holiday was actually celebrated.

Dr. Fauci Has a Classics Degree!

Dr. Anthony Fauci has been getting a lot of attention lately for his tireless work promoting public safety measures in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Polls consistently find that Dr. Fauci is by far the most trusted person in the United States on matters pertaining to COVID-19. An article published in The New Yorker on 20 April 2020 hails him as “America’s doctor.” On 10 December 2020, Time magazine named him a “Guardian of the Year,” along with “front-line health care workers.”

An interesting thing that many people don’t know about Dr. Anthony Fauci, though, is that he graduated in 1962 from the College of the Holy Cross not with a standard pre-med degree, but with Bachelor of Arts (BA) in classics with a pre-med track. In other words, Dr. Fauci has a degree in classical studies.

The Racist Mythology about the Pilgrims

For many Americans, Thanksgiving is a beloved national holiday. It’s a time when people get together with their extended families to have a large feast and talk about what they are thankful for. I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with people doing this; on the contrary, I think it can be good for families to get together and celebrate (maybe not this year, but generally speaking).

Unfortunately, the holiday of Thanksgiving as we know it today is inextricably entwined with a false mythology rooted in white supremacist thinking. The holiday continues to be abused by right-wing politicians to promote a very narrow and exclusivist vision of what sort of nation the United States is supposed to be. In this article, therefore, I want to debunk some false narratives about the Pilgrims and explain how these narratives are harmful.

When Does United States History Really Begin?

There’s a lot of controversy going on right now about when we should say that United States history begins. In 2019, The New York Times Magazine launched an initiative called “The 1619 Project,” which argues that the year 1619 should be seen as the true year when the United States was founded because that is the year when the first enslaved Black people arrived in the English colonies in North America.

In response to this, in September 2020, the Trump administration announced that it was creating a “1776 Commission” to promote “patriotic education” throughout the United States and to defend traditional narratives about American history against the claims made by the 1619 Project. I’ve already written an entire article about what a ridiculous idea I think this is, so I’m not going to talk any more about it.

What is interesting, though, is the way that both the 1619 Project and the 1776 Commission fixate on particular dates for the supposed founding of the United States. I contend that both of these proposed dates are fundamentally flawed. In fact, I believe that it is a mistake to try to pin down any particular date for the founding of the United States. This country has come into existence through a long, gradual process and focusing on exact dates and saying those dates matter more than all the others limits the ways we can think about American history and naturally tends to marginalize certain groups of people from the American story.

No, Transgender People Are Not a Sign of Cultural Collapse

In case you’ve had the good fortune of having never heard of her, Camille Paglia is a professor at the University of Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and, at this point, effectively a professional right-wing provocateur. She claims to be a feminist, but yet she disagrees with all the basic tenets of feminism and spends most of her time bashing feminists and defending patriarchy.

Paglia has been making the rounds over the past few years promoting transphobia, declaring that the growing prevalence of people identifying as transgender—especially the number of people assigned male at birth identifying as trans women—is a sign of growing effeminacy and an indication that “western civilization” is on the brink of collapse. In support of these claims, she has invented her own elaborate pseudohistory that focuses to a large extent on ancient Greece and Rome.

Unfortunately, Paglia is widely regarded as a serious social critic, especially by men on the far right, meaning her false claims about ancient history have spread widely. When I published my article about transgender people in the ancient world a few months ago, I got a lot of people leaving comments about her claims. I don’t have time to debunk everything Paglia has said about ancient history, so, for the purposes of this article, I will be focusing on what she says in one viral YouTube video in particular.

No, History Doesn’t Need to be “Mathematized”

On 12 November 2020, The Atlantic published an article titled “The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse.” This article, written by a staff writer named Graeme Wood, is primarily a profile piece about Peter Turchin, a Russian American entomologist-turned-pseudohistorian. It is also, however, to a large extent a full-on polemic against real historians, whom Wood portrays as obsolete curmudgeons who don’t really understand the past and are allergic to science.

As can only be expected, the entire article displays an absolutely flagrant ignorance of what the historical discipline is and what historians actually do. Indeed, it is full of all kinds of outlandish howlers, bordering on outright silliness. Unfortunately, many of the misconceptions that the article promotes are becoming more and more common as our society continues to devalue the study of history.

No, the Black Death Did Not Cause the Renaissance

With the world still mired in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which, as of the time I am writing this, has already killed roughly 1.25 million people worldwide, optimists have written a whole flurry of op-eds trying to put a positive spin on this pandemic. They have tried to insist that the Black Death somehow caused the Renaissance and that COVID-19 may therefore result in a new Renaissance that will carry our world to new and even greater heights than ever before.

This argument, however, is loaded with fallacies and false assumptions. For one thing, there are legitimate reasons for thinking that the Renaissance may not have been such a good thing as it is often made out to be. Furthermore, while the Renaissance did come after the Black Death, but it would be a grave mistake to assume that the Black Death therefore caused it to happen.

Stolen Artworks in Museums

When most people today think of stolen artworks, they usually tend to think of artifacts being stolen from museums. There are many famous cases of this, such as the notorious theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre Museum in 1911, which generated international headlines. Unfortunately, most people are not aware of the fact that many of the artifacts that are currently on display in museums in western Europe and North America were themselves stolen from the peoples of other countries all around the world.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, western Europeans and people of western European descent pillaged countries all over the world, taking their cultural artifacts and putting them in museums back in their home countries, where they could admire them, but the peoples of the countries to whom the artifacts rightfully belonged could not. There are so many stolen artworks on display in museums that it would be impossible for me to cover them all, but today I want to talk about just a few of the more famous examples.

Why Is Hollywood So Fixated on Cleopatra Anyway?

On 11 October 2020, it was officially announced that Gal Gadot, a white Israeli actress, had been cast to play the Hellenistic Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII Philopator in an upcoming epic period drama titled Cleopatra, which will be directed by Patty Jenkins and scripted by Laeta Kalogridis. This casting predictably set off outrage on social media over the fact that Cleopatra will not be portrayed by a Black actress.

I’ve already written an entire article in which I discuss Cleopatra’s ancestry and her appearance in great detail. In short, her ancestry was almost entirely Greek and her only known ancestor with non-Greek ancestry was her three times great-grandmother Kleopatra I of Syra, who was of mixed Greek, Persian, and Sogdian ancestry. There is one argument that people have tried to make that Cleopatra’s mother may have been a native Egyptian woman, but it is founded on multiple layers of wishful thinking and dubious assumptions and it is far more likely that her mother was Cleopatra V Tryphaina, her father’s only known wife, who was also his sister or his cousin.

In this article, though, I want to answer a different question: Why Cleopatra? Why is it that, out of three thousand some years of ancient Egyptian history, the only Egyptian queen that Hollywood is interested in making movies about is the one who was definitely of European ancestry? It’s clear that a very large section of the general public wants a movie about a native Egyptian queen portrayed by an actress of color. I say that, if that’s what people want, Hollywood should give that to them. Thankfully, there are plenty of native Egyptian queens and goddesses that Hollywood could potentially make movies about.

No, Liberals Don’t Hate the Humanities

An op-ed by Itxu Díaz published on the website of the American conservative magazine National Review on 19 September 2020 starts with the headline “Why Does the Left Hate the Humanities?” It’s a rather surprising headline considering the fact that conservatives have spent decades stereotyping the humanities as a useless field dominated by evil leftists.

The headline becomes a bit less surprising, though, when you realize that, by “the humanities,” Díaz is actually talking about something that might be better termed “white male heritage studies.” He isn’t advocating for people to study, say, Native American history, women’s studies, or queer literary theory; he’s advocating for people to study a handful of specific works of ancient Greek and Roman literature that are traditionally regarded as “classics” from a very traditionalist, heritage-focused perspective.

I am a currently a junior at Indiana University Bloomington pursuing a double major in history and classical studies. My main focus is in the study of ancient Greece. This means I have studied exactly the kind of material that Díaz thinks people should be studying. I agree with him that it is important for people to study the ancient Greeks and Romans. Unfortunately, I completely disagree with him about why and how these civilizations should be studied.

I don’t generally consider myself a “leftist.” Instead, I generally tend to think of myself as a liberal and a progressive. Nonetheless, I realize that, when Díaz complains about “leftists” who supposedly “hate the humanities,” he’s talking about people like me. Here is my response to what he has written.