Greek philosophy Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Don’t Blame “Paganism” for the United States’ Problems

On December 25th, 2023, The Atlantic published an op-ed by David Wolpe, a prominent American rabbi, titled “The Return of the Pagans.” In the op-ed, Wolpe asserts that both the political left and right in the United States have embraced fundamentally “pagan” ideas about the world (by which he means ideas derived from and characteristic of the traditional non-monotheistic religions of the ancient Mediterranean, particularly Greece and Rome) and that this supposed “pagan” influence is the cause of many of the problems that the United States faces today.

For those who don’t know, I’m a graduate student in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies and my main research focus is ancient Greek religion. Given this interest, I was quite intrigued to see an article published in a major news outlet with a title proclaiming that “paganism” has returned. Sadly, I soon found that Wolpe’s idea of “paganism” is a wildly inaccurate caricature that has more to do with nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophies than with the non-monotheistic religions of the ancient Mediterranean world. The op-ed got under my skin, so I decided to let it furnish an opportunity to educate interested readers about what ancient polytheistic religions were like—and, just as importantly, what they weren’t like.

How Did People in the Ancient Mediterranean World View Abortion?

The United States Supreme Court is expected to announce its decision in the landmark abortion case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health at some point before the end of the present term, which will most likely end sometime in June or early July of this year. An initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito that has been obtained by Politico indicates that the majority of the justices have already privately decided to completely overturn the previous Supreme Court rulings in the cases of Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which held that the U.S. Constitution protects the inherent right of a pregnant person to choose to have an abortion until the point when the fetus becomes viable outside the womb, which is generally agreed to occur at around twenty-three or twenty-four weeks gestational age.

In this new case, the court is expected to rule that the U.S. Constitution does not protect any right of a pregnant person to choose to have an abortion at any point during pregnancy. Although the verdict is not final and the justices still have time to change their minds, it is unlikely at this point that they will do so. This will be the first (although possibly not the last) time in living memory that the Supreme Court has completely revoked something that it previously deemed a major fundamental right.

Given the current situation, I thought it would be useful to write a post about attitudes toward abortion in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world. This post will cover attitudes among peoples of the ancient Near East, Greeks, Romans, and early Christians and will give some insight about how and why ancient Christians came to disapprove of abortion in the first place.

Were the Sophists Really So Bad?

The word sophist comes from the Greek word σοφιστής (sophistḗs), which originally meant “one who is highly skilled or learned in his craft.” In the fifth century BCE, various professional teachers of public speaking began to emerge in the Greek world calling themselves σοφισταί (which is the plural form of σοφιστής).

These teachers would typically come to a city and court wealthy patrons, offering to teach them how to speak persuasively in exchange for a tuition fee. Sometimes they would teach other subjects as well, such as philosophy, music, poetry, or mathematics. They would stay in a given city long enough to teach any wealthy people who were willing to pay them for lessons and then move on to the next city to teach anyone who was willing to pay for lessons there.

The sophists have a bit of a bad reputation nowadays. The very word sophist itself has come to mean a person who uses rhetorical trickery and fallacious arguments to deceive people into believing falsehoods. In this post, I want to peel back the millennia of negative portrayals to explore who the sophists really were and what they really wrote (for most part in their own words). By the end of it, hopefully it will be clear what the real differences were between the sophists and the philosophers like Plato (lived c. 428 – c. 347 BCE) and Xenophon (lived c. 430 – c. 354 BCE) who vilified them.

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.

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?

Here’s the Meaning of the Symbolism in Lil Nas X’s Controversial New Music Video

Until last Sunday, I honestly had no idea who Lil Nas X was. I don’t really follow music in general and I honestly know especially little about rap in particular. Then, while we were driving back to Bloomington after visiting our parents for Easter, my sister mentioned to me that Lil Nas X is a rapper, that he wrote a song about being gay—which I later learned is titled “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)”—and that the music video for it includes a scene of him riding a stripper pole down to Hell and giving Satan a lap dance. She explained that religious conservatives were having a huge moral panic over this music video because they think it glorifies homosexuality and Satanism.

Having heard this, I naturally decided to look up the music video for myself to see what all the fuss was about. I have to say that, for a three-minute clip that involves the main character riding a stripper pole to Hell and giving Satan a lap dance, the music video is remarkably intellectually sophisticated. The people who worked on this video clearly did a ton of research. As soon as I watched it, I was genuinely impressed by the sheer number of classical and Biblical allusions that they managed to cram in.

It incorporates specific references to works of ancient Greek and Roman art, the Bible, Greek mythology, works of Greek philosophy, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. They even managed to include an exact, direct quote from Plato’s Symposion in the original Classical Attic Greek! Here’s a detailed explanation of the music video’s classical and Biblical symbolism.

Did Pythagoras Study Philosophy in Egypt?

Pythagoras of Samos (lived c. 570 – 495 BCE) is undoubtedly among the most famous of all ancient Greek philosophers. Unfortunately, extremely little can be said about him historically with any degree of certainty. As far as we know, Pythagoras never wrote anything himself and the only contemporary references to him come from the meagre fragments that have survived from the originally much more voluminous writings of his contemporaries. These sources are enough to establish that he was almost certainly a real person, but his life is almost completely obscure.

The later sources about Pythagoras that provide most of our information about him are filled with all kinds of unreliable legends. As I discuss in this article from March 2018, although most people today believe that Pythagoras was a mathematician, the earliest sources about his life actually portray him as more of a mystic sage. It’s only in later sources that he starts to be portrayed as having done anything involving math. The theorem that now bears his name isn’t even attributed to him in any written source until many centuries after his death.

In this article, I want to talk about one of the most famous stories about Pythagoras’s life: the story that he travelled to Egypt, learned about religion and philosophy from the Egyptian priests, and then introduced Egyptian religious ideas to the Greeks. This is a story that is attested in some ancient sources and that has become very prominent in popular discourse about Pythagoras—but is it historically correct?

Was Socrates a Monotheist?

It seems to be widely believed among members of the general public that Socrates was some sort of monotheist. If you go on the Stack Exchange Philosophy website, there’s a question: “Was Socrates a monotheist?” As of the time I am writing this, three of the answers say that he was definitely a monotheist and one of them says that it’s an open question. Only two answers correctly say that he wasn’t a monotheist, but neither answer gives a detailed explanation how we know this.

Historically speaking, Socrates almost certainly believed in the existence of many deities—just like most other people in classical Athens. Unfortunately, modern readers who are accustomed to thinking about religion in monotheistic terms have a tendency to misinterpret passages from the Platonic dialogues as suggesting monotheism.

This problem is only made worse by the fact that some of the most widely used translations of the Platonic dialogues were produced by monotheistic scholars who were desperate to see Socrates as a monotheist and therefore deliberately translated the texts to make it sound like he was one.

Aristotle Was Not Wrong about Everything

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (lived 384 – 322 BCE) is widely portrayed in popular culture as an overconfident buffoon who made assertions based on no evidence whatsoever and who was wrong about nearly everything. It is often claimed that his errors and overconfidence held back the progress of science for two thousand years. This portrayal is wildly inaccurate and is rooted in a centuries-old tradition of hostile writers deliberately misrepresenting Aristotle’s works to make him look as stupid as possible.

It is undoubtedly true that Aristotle made quite a few mistakes, but he was wrong a lot less often than is usually claimed. Furthermore, Aristotle did, in fact, rely on empirical evidence. In fact, of all ancient Greek philosophers, Aristotle is by far one of the most empirical. When Aristotle did make a mistake, it was generally not because he didn’t care about evidence, but rather because the evidence available to him was incomplete or his interpretation of the evidence was faulty.

Finally, the claim that Aristotle held back the progress of science for two thousand years is demonstrably wrong and ridiculous. For one thing, for much of the two thousand years in question, Aristotle wasn’t even generally seen as the most authoritative philosopher in the parts of the world where his works were being regularly studied. Furthermore, even when Aristotle was seen as the most authoritative philosopher, his authority was still open to some degree of question.

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.