Debunking Archives - Page 8 of 26 - Tales of Times Forgotten

Dark Academia, the “Western Canon,” and the Decline of the Humanities

In around mid-July, I found out that there is apparently a huge internet “aesthetic” movement called “dark academia” that centers around a highly romanticized impression of what humanities scholars and students—especially those in the fields of classics, English, history, and philosophy—dressed and lived like in the twentieth century. Aspects of the aesthetic include wearing old-fashioned, dark-colored, stereotypically “academic” clothing and appreciating “classic” literature, art, and music.

For those who aren’t already aware, I am currently about to enter my senior year at Indiana University Bloomington double-majoring in history and classical studies (i.e., Ancient Greek and Latin), with honors in history. My current plan is to apply to graduate programs in ancient history later this year. Even though I don’t deliberately dress in a dark academia style and I don’t identify with the aesthetic in any particular way, being a humanities student does make me feel like I have a connection to it.

I was so struck by my surprise discovery of dark academia’s apparent popularity that I’ve spent a good part of the past two weeks researching it and its history. Naturally, I have a lot of thoughts, especially about how the current popularity of the aesthetic seems to be at least in part a reaction to the slow ongoing decline of the academic humanities.

Ancient Roman Masturbation

For the past four years, a photograph of a plaster cast of an ancient Roman man who died in the city of Pompeii during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE has been circulating online with the claim that he died while masturbating, since his right hand happens to be positioned near his groin in a masturbation-like pose. Historically speaking, it is highly unlikely that this particular man really died while masturbating. The position of his hand is most likely a result of the muscle contractions resulting from the excruciating heat shock that killed him, rather than the result of anything he was doing before he was killed.

Nonetheless, there is a wealth of fascinating historical and archaeological evidence for both male and female masturbation in ancient Rome, including in the city of Pompeii. Needless to say, the following article contains discussion of evidence that is not suitable for children.

Ancient Greek Men Were Not All Buff

One of the most common misconceptions I have encountered about the ancient Greeks is the notion that ancient Greek men were all incredibly buff, muscle-bound bodybuilders. This misconception seems to arise from the naïve assumption that ancient Greek statues depict how average ancient Greek men really looked, perhaps also influenced by the similarly naïve assumption that the 2007 epic fantasy action film 300, written and directed by Zack Snyder, is a historically accurate depiction of ancient Greece.

The reality is that there was never a time when the majority of Greek men really looked like the physical specimens portrayed in Archaic and Classical Greek sculptures. These sculptures represent what upper-class Greek people regarded as physically ideal, not what the average Greek person actually looked like.

The Real Origin of the Nazi Salute

In the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, the National Fascist Party (i.e., the PNF) in Italy and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (i.e., the NSDAP or Nazi Party) in Germany both used a salute that consisted of a straight, rigid arm raised into the air above the shoulders with the hand parallel to the rest of the arm and the palm facing toward the ground. The Italian Fascists and the German Nazis both believed that this salute originated with the ancient Romans and tried to use the salute’s supposed Roman origins in order to bolster their own prestige and portray themselves as continuing the Roman legacy. Various modern-day fascists and Neo-Nazis have tried to do the same thing.

There is, however, no evidence that anyone in ancient Rome ever used the form of the straight-arm salute that was used by the Italian Fascists and German Nazis. The true origins of the Nazi salute are far more strange. The salute’s traceable history begins with a late eighteenth-century French Neoclassical painter. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it became incorporated into numerous stage plays and films set in ancient Rome, leading the Italian Fascists to adopt it, believing that it was Roman. The Nazis, in turn, adopted it from the Italian Fascists.

A DNA Test Cannot Tell You Your Ancient Ancestors

For many years now, companies like Ancestry and 23andMe have been selling DNA tests that they claim can tell people where their ancestors came from. Their tests have become quite popular, despite the fact that they often present results in misleading ways that appeal to popular racist ideas about “blood quantum.” Now, some companies are trying to convince people that they can use DNA tests to trace a modern person’s genetic ancestry back to specific ancient cultures.

One such company calls itself “My True Ancestry.” This company does not conduct DNA tests of its own, but allows users to upload their DNA test results from other companies so that their software can automatically compare their genomes to those sequenced from ancient remains. The software then generates a pie chart showing what percentage of a person’s DNA supposedly comes from each ancient culture. This company, however, and others like it, are blatantly misrepresenting both how genetics works and what ancient populations were like.

Sparta Was Not a Paradise for Women

It is extremely common for people who write about ancient history on the internet to claim that ancient Sparta was, by ancient Greek standards, a paradise for women. I’m frankly sick and tired of this narrative because it is, in many ways, deeply misinformed. It is, of course, dangerous to overgeneralize, but I would argue that a randomly selected woman of unspecified social status in Athens would actually be far more likely to be happy than a similarly selected woman in Sparta.

It’s true that Spartiate women (i.e., women who belonged to the Spartan citizen class) generally had more freedom and privileges than women of the citizen class in most other Greek poleis (i.e., city-states). Nonetheless, life for Spartiate women wasn’t nearly as good as it is often made to sound. Their rights were still severely limited and the rights that Spartiate women had that women in other Greek poleis lacked were actually fairly normal for women in other ancient civilizations, such as Egypt and Rome.

Furthermore, the popular discourse around Sparta almost always completely omits mention of the fact that the overwhelming majority of all women in Sparta were enslaved helots, for whom life was almost certainly an absolute living Hell. While all Greek poleis had enslaved people, in Sparta, they made up a vastly larger share of the overall population than in any other polis and they were notoriously ill-treated, even by ancient Greek standards. Helot women were forced to do an overwhelming amount of manual labor, they lived in constant fear of being whipped or murdered by the krypteia, they were kept perpetually starving and malnourished, people they loved were constantly dying, and many of them were regularly being raped.

Yes, Young Women in the Nineteenth Century Knew What Sex Was

It seems that, when people think about sex in the historical past, they have a tendency to think in terms of extremes. For instance, the popular perception of the ancient Romans seems to be that they were all having wild sex orgies all the time. (This perception is usually coupled with the idea that this sexual “degeneracy” somehow led the Roman Empire to collapse, which, as I address in this article from July 2020, is complete nonsense.)

By sharp contrast, the popular perception of nineteenth-century British people is that they were so prudish and sexually repressed that young women had no idea that sex even existed. This idea that nineteenth-century women had no idea how a woman becomes pregnant is notably a major part of the Netflix historical drama series Bridgerton, which is set in London in the year 1813.

In reality, however, nineteenth-century mothers generally saw it as their responsibility to tell their daughters what sex was so that they could know to avoid having it before marriage. Moreover, a parent of any social rank in any society in any time period would have to go to truly extraordinary lengths to shelter their daughter in order to prevent her from finding out what sex is until she reached young adulthood. Trying to shelter a daughter to this degree in the nineteenth century would have been at least as difficult as trying to do such a thing today.

Yes, There Were Black People in Britain in the Nineteenth Century

It seems that, with my characteristically late timing, I have only just gotten around to watching the show that everyone was talking about six months ago. On 25 December 2020, Netflix released the period drama series Bridgerton, which is set in London in the year 1813 during the Regency Era. The show has triggered enormous controversy over the fact that it portrays a large number of British aristocrats who are not white, including one of the main characters, Simon Bassett, Duke of Hastings, portrayed by the Black British actor Regé-Jean Page. Many people on the internet are predictably outraged over this, insisting that the show is not historically accurate and that it is “blackwashing” history.

The show, however, for its own part, makes very little pretense at historical accuracy in the first place. After all, most of the music is modern pop music played in a “traditional,” orchestral style. Furthermore, the show is not quite as historically inaccurate as some people might think. It is true that there were no Black people who held titles of nobility in Britain during the period when Bridgerton is set, but there were certainly free Black people living in Britain at the time who were both prominent and prosperous.

Peter Singer’s Extraordinarily Bad Take on Apuleius

On 30 May 2021, the online open classics journal Antigone published a piece written by the Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer about the ancient Roman novel The Golden Ass, which was originally written in Latin in the late second century CE by the North African writer Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (lived c. 124 – c. 170 CE). Antigone promoted the article on their Twitter account. Their announcement begins with the words: “Today we are delighted to share an article by Peter Singer, renowned philosopher and animal rights advocate…”

Antigone’s publication and promotion of Singer’s article immediately sparked backlash over the fact that Singer has spent the past three and a half decades publicly advocating that infants who have observable physical disabilities at birth should be killed. He even co-authored and published an entire book in 1985 titled Should the Baby Live?: The Problem of Handicapped Infants, in which he advocated this.

Many classicists, myself included, feel that Antigone should not have published Singer’s article about Apuleius because, even though the article itself did not discuss infanticide, he is not the sort of person that they should be platforming. Even beyond this, though, Singer’s take on The Golden Ass is so extraordinarily bad that, even if he didn’t have a long history of advocating infanticide, no classics journal should have published it.

Is Yoga Really Ancient?

Yoga has become quite an international cultural phenomenon in the past few decades. It is now estimated that somewhere around three hundred million people practice yoga worldwide, which is nearly the same number of people who live in the entire United States. Yoga is consistently advertised—both by the yoga industry and by the current government of India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi—as an extremely ancient Indian spiritual and physical practice that dates back thousands of years in more-or-less its present form.

This narrative, however, is not entirely accurate. It is true that there was an ancient Āstika philosophical school called yoga and that modern yoga has been influenced by traditions that ultimately grew out of this school. Nonetheless, nothing closely resembling modern āsana-centered yoga-as-exercise ever actually existed in the Indian subcontinent in ancient times. Haṭhayoga, the immediate precursor to modern postural yoga, only first started to emerge around a thousand years ago during the medieval period and did not start to develop into modern yoga until the nineteenth century, under the heavy influence of European “physical culture” exercise regimes.