Debunking Archives - Page 6 of 26 - Tales of Times Forgotten

Was Thucydides Biased?

Thucydides (lived c. 460 – c. 400 BCE)—or, to use a transliteration of his name that is more faithful to the Greek spelling, Thoukydides—was an ancient Athenian general and historian. He is best known today as the author of the work Histories of the Peloponnesian War, a historical account of the famous war fought between the Delian League, led by the city-state of Athens, and the Peloponnesian League, led by the city-state of Sparta. The war lasted from 431 until 404 BCE, with an interlude of peace in the middle lasting from 421 to 415 BCE.

Since the late nineteenth century, Thoukydides has often been held up as a paragon of the “objective,” “unbiased,” “scientific” historian. Although this conception of Thoukydides is, at any rate, no longer as fashionable among scholars as it once was, it persists in popular descriptions of his work and has greatly influenced how the general public perceives him. In this essay, I intend to debunk this perception by pointing out five examples of how Thoukydides’s biases seem to influence his narrative.

How Misogyny, Homophobia, and Antisemitism Influence Transphobia

I have developed a very unhealthy habit of deliberately seeking out bigoted and hateful content on the internet and studying it intensely in a mostly vain attempt to understand and analyze it. I really shouldn’t do this, because studying the deplorable things people have written online only intensifies my constant and overwhelming anxiety and makes me lose all faith in humanity. I have, however, learned some things from reading bigotry online about the ways bigoted people think.

Transphobia is a bigotry that has existed for a very long time. It is arguably already present in nascent form in the ancient Greek sources from the third century BCE that talk about the Galli, a group of ancient priests who, as I discuss in this article I published in August 2020, deliberately castrated themselves, wore their hair in feminine styles, dressed in traditionally feminine clothing, and worshipped the Phrygian mother goddess Kybele. Nonetheless, transphobia has only recently begun to develop its own discourse. In this article, I am going to use an example to analyze how contemporary transphobic discourse draws heavily on the older, more established discourses of misogyny, homophobia, and antisemitism.

Readers should be forewarned that this article discusses a wide range of the most unpleasant and depressing subjects imaginable, including sexual assault, transphobia, misogyny, homophobia, child molestation, antisemitism, conspiracy theories, Nazis, the Holocaust, ritual cannibalism, drug addiction, murder, pogroms, and mass genocide. There will also be some quotes with a lot of profanity, slurs, and extreme insults, which I have partly censored. This is not a piece that I enjoyed writing in the slightest, but I feel that the points I am about to make need to be made.

Lucifer Is Not a Name for Satan!

Most people believe that Lucifer is the true name for Satan. This notion has been reinforced by over a thousand years of western Christian tradition and by the constant appearances of Lucifer as a name for Satan in popular culture. In reality, however, the name Lucifer does not occur anywhere in any of the Hebrew or Aramaic texts that make up the Hebrew Bible, nor any of the Koine Greek texts that make up the Christian New Testament.

In fact, although the name does occur in many English translations of the Bible, it only occurs in one verse—the Book of Isaiah 14:12—which actually has nothing to do with Satan in any way. The only reason why anyone associates this passage in Isaiah with Satan at all is because some early Christians, including the church fathers Ioustinos Martys, Tertullianus of Carthage, and Origenes of Alexandria, spuriously interpreted it as an allegory for the fall of Satan.

“Comedy” and “Free Speech” Are Not Moral Justifications for Bigotry

If you’ve paid any attention to the world of stand-up comedy over the past decade, you’re probably already aware that there are a handful of straight, cisgender, male comedians who like to portray themselves as “edgy” who have made many transphobic jokes and statements and have attracted a great deal of controversy as a result. The most prominent of these comedians are Ricky Gervais, Dave Chappelle, and Michael Che.

This subject has come up in the news recently, because, on 5 October 2021, Netflix released a seventy-two minute stand-up comedy special starring Dave Chappelle titled The Closer. In the special, Chappelle devotes large chunks of his time to mocking LGBTQIA+ people and transgender women in particular. He repeats many age-old transphobic talking points and hackneyed jokes that people have made a million times before. Among other things, he says that TERFs (i.e., “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists”) see trans women the same way Black people see white people wearing blackface before explicitly saying he agrees with them and calling himself “Team TERF,” he implies that trans women’s genitalia are in some sense “fake” by comparing them to plant-based meat, and he expresses disgust over having been “trapped” into calling a trans woman “beautiful.”

In this article, I don’t intend to go in depth about why the things Chappelle says in the special are inaccurate, bigoted, and harmful to trans people, since his lines are so unoriginal that they have all already been debunked a million times. (In fact, I literally debunked some of his exact claims myself in this article I wrote in November 2020 and this other article I wrote in March 2021.) Instead, I want to talk about Chappelle’s justification for what he said, which is the exact same justification that many other transphobic comedians like to use. Chappelle and his defenders have tried to justify his statements in the special by claiming that he says these things in the name of comedy and free speech. I want to address why “comedy” and “free speech” are not inherently benign and are not adequate moral justifications for saying things that are bigoted.

Why That Fresco from Pompeii Isn’t Sappho

It is extremely common for modern people to misidentify ancient portraits of random people as portraits of famous people. This is partly because many famous authors and historical figures who lived in the ancient world have no surviving portraits and people are eager to find images to represent them. This is especially often the case for ancient women. I will confess that I am partly guilty of this myself; I couldn’t find any decent images to represent Pamphile of Epidauros in my article I wrote about her back in July, so I used a photo of a bust of an unidentified woman in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, paired with a photo of the Ancient Theatre of Epidauros, in an effort to the represent the idea of an ancient Greek woman from Epidauros.

In this article, there is one particular ancient portrait that is especially widely misidentified as a portrait of a famous woman that I want to discuss. The portrait in question is a fresco. It depicts a woman with short, curly brown hair, a gold hairnet, gold earrings, and clothes that are dyed purple and green. She gazes directly at the viewer, holding a set of wax tablets bound with ribbons in her left hand and pressing a writing stylus to her lips with her right hand as though she were in thoughtful contemplation. It dates to between c. 50 and 79 CE and was discovered on 24 May 1760 in the Insula VI region of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii.

Classical scholars immediately began to speculate that the fresco might be a portrait of the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho of Lesbos (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BCE), who is best known today for her poems about love and attraction between women and whose home island is the source for the contemporary word lesbian. (Whether Sappho herself was actually a lesbian is a subject I address in depth in this article I published in August 2021.) The fresco is currently held in the Naples National Archaeological Museum on the first floor in room seventy-six. It is still widely admired as a remarkable portrait of a literate ancient woman. Although the fresco is still widely circulated online as a supposed portrait of Sappho, art historians now generally agree that it actually depicts an unknown upper-class Pompeiian woman.

No, Thales of Miletos Was Not “the First Scientist”

Thales of Miletos (lived c. 625 – c. 545 BCE, with those dates being very approximate) is widely revered today with monikers such as “the first philosopher,” “the first scientist,” or “the first mathematician.” Many people today admire him, believing that he was an astounding, once-in-a-millennium kind of genius akin to Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein who single-handedly invented the idea of science as we know it. There is even a French defense contracting company named after him called the “Thales Group” (presumably because the name “Thales” makes people think of science, innovation, and progress, which are all much-needed positive associations for a company that actually makes deadly weapons that governments use to kill people).

The Thales of the modern imagination, however, is predominantly a myth. Most of the stories that people have heard about him are legends that can’t possibly be true, that are first attested many centuries after his death, or both. Much like Pythagoras of Samos and Hippokrates of Kos, the historical Thales of Miletos is an obscure figure about whom very little is known with any certainty.

Did the Ancient Greeks and Romans Practice BDSM?

For those who are not aware, BDSM is a combined acronym for bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism. The term refers to a variety of sexual practices that fall under these umbrella categories. There are already many articles on the internet that talk about the supposed ancient history of BDSM, but I think that all these articles are hopelessly inadequate for anyone looking for accurate information on the subject.

Nearly all of these articles are clearly written by people who know very little about ancient history and are just looking for anything mentioned in modern secondary sources that seems to vaguely resemble contemporary BDSM practices. Additionally, most online articles about BDSM-like practices in the ancient world don’t cite any ancient sources whatsoever and repeat demonstrably false factoids as though they were true. In this article, I hope to counter the dearth of trustworthy information on this subject by providing my own analysis of it, using real ancient primary sources as evidence.

Here’s How We Know the Canonical Gospels Were Originally Anonymous

The four canonical gospels are traditionally attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew is said to have been a tax collector who became one of Jesus’s twelve apostles. Mark is a minor figure mentioned in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles who is said to have worked as a translator and secretary for the apostle Peter. Luke is said to have been a Greek physician who became a travelling companion of the apostle Paul. John is said to have been a fisherman who became one of Jesus’s twelve apostles along with his brother James.

Despite how well known these attributions are, however, New Testament scholars have realized for well over a hundred years now that the four canonical gospels were, in fact, originally anonymous works. They only became attributed to the authors to whom they are so widely attributed today in the second half of the second century CE, around a hundred years after the first of these gospels was originally written. In this article, I intend to explain the evidence for how scholars know this.

“There Are No Pronouns in the Bible”?

I’m sure that most of my readers already know what a pronoun is, but, just in case you happened to skip (or forget) every grammar lesson in elementary, middle, and high school, a pronoun is a word that takes the place of a noun. Pronouns are considered a part of speech. They have also generated a lot of controversy in recent years, due to the fact that personal pronouns are sometimes gendered.

Some people with left-leaning or progressive political inclinations have started stating their pronouns in their social media profiles or (less frequently) when they introduce themselves in person, so that other people will know how to refer to them. They do this because, in some cases, a person’s gendered pronouns may not be obvious from their name or appearance. This is especially often true in the case of transgender people.

Naturally, many conservatives are outraged over this. In fact, the word pronouns has become such a buzzword among conservatives that some conservatives seem to have forgotten what the word itself actually means. Some conservatives, falsely assuming that pronouns are something that only transgender people have and seeking to undermine them, have made the assertion: “There are no pronouns in the Bible.” This claim, however, is false, regardless of whether you are reading the Bible in English or in the original languages.

What Would Socrates Say about Modern Things?

Apart from Jesus, the ancient Athenian philosopher Socrates (lived c. 470 – 399 BCE) is possibly the one person who lived in ancient times who is most widely venerated today. Many people see him as a figure who is worthy of contemporary emulation. In the same way that Christians have often tried to justify their own actions and opinions by insisting that Jesus would be on their side, philosophers have tried to justify their actions and opinions by insisting that Socrates would be on their side—whatever their side happens to be.

Contemporary professors and philosophers have tried to posthumously marshal Socrates as a supporter for all kinds of contemporary causes, including going to graduate school in the humanities, opposing supposed university “cancel culture,” and even opposing vaccine mandates—but what was the historical Socrates like and what would he think of all the causes people are invoking his name in support of? More importantly, would Socrates’s opinion on any of these issues actually be worth listening to?