Roman Empire Archives - Page 5 of 13 - Tales of Times Forgotten

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.

Transgender People Exist—And That’s Ok

If you’ve paid any attention whatsoever to the news over the past few years, you have almost certainly heard about how a lot of conservatives are really mad that transgender people exist. They routinely insist that acknowledging the existence of trans people is “gender ideology” and that it goes against both science and the Bible. They insist that there are only two genders—male and female—and that a person’s gender is determined by their chromosomes and can never, under any circumstances, truly be changed.

In this essay, I intend to demonstrate that these arguments are, in fact, incorrect and that the existence of more than two genders is totally compatible with both science and the Bible. This essay has taken me nearly a month to research and write, so it will be quite long and will incorporate evidence from a wide range of different fields, including biology, neuroscience, history, anthropology, and religious studies.

Conquest Is a Bad Thing

Right now, there is a question on Quora that reads: “Who was the greatest conqueror in history?” So far, nearly every person who has answered this question has attempted to provide an argument that some historical conqueror was the “greatest” because they conquered the most land, they were the bravest, or they were the most strategically brilliant.

I’m going to offer a different perspective: There is no such thing as a “great conqueror.” Using the phrase “great conqueror” is like using the phrase “great murderer,” the phrase “great oppressor,” or the phrase “great committer of genocide.” Anyone who uses the phrase “great conqueror” unironically in a sense that implies that conquest is something good is either monstrously sadistic or hopelessly ignorant of the word “conquest” actually means.

Did the Ancient Romans Really Wash Their Teeth with Urine?

One of the most commonly repeated factoids about the ancient Romans is that they supposedly brushed their teeth with urine, because urine can be used to make teeth appear whiter. This factoid is usually presented to elicit feelings of shock and disgust. For instance, here is the introduction to an article by Nicholas Sokic titled “WFT: Romans used pee to whiten teeth,” published on the website Healthing on 29 January 2020:

“The Romans contributed greatly to civilization — roads, cement, aqueducts, the postal service — but not all of their creations lived to the present day, and some deservedly so. Ancient Romans used to use both human and animal urine as mouthwash in order to whiten their teeth.”

It is true that several ancient Roman and Greek sources do mention the use of urine to whiten teeth. None of these sources, however, portray this as a Roman practice. Instead, they unanimously and consistently portray it as a disgusting and barbarous practice associated with the Celtiberians, a group of Celtic peoples who lived in the central and eastern parts of the Iberian Peninsula. Furthermore, because there are no surviving Celtiberian records that confirm the alleged practice of using urine to whiten teeth, it is unclear how common this practice really was, or even whether it was something that the Celtiberians really did at all.

The Debate about Classics Isn’t What You Probably Think It Is

On 2 February 2021, The New York Times published a profile piece written by Rachel Poser titled “He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?” The subject of the article is Dan-el Padilla Peralta, an Afro-Latino associate professor of classics at Princeton University who argues that the field of classics as it is currently constructed is deeply embedded with systemic racism and serves to reinforce white supremacist hegemony. Padilla wants to radically reshape the field by rooting out aspects that reinforce white supremacy and rebuilding the field in a new way.

This profile piece triggered an unceasing deluge of op-eds published on various platforms purporting to “defend” the discipline of classics from Padilla’s supposed attacks. These op-eds almost invariably display complete ignorance of the conversation that has been taking place within the discipline of classics over the past few years and ignorance of what Padilla is actually proposing. They reduce the conversation to a ridiculous caricature according to which evil, radical leftist scholars are trying to bring an end to the study of ancient texts altogether.

Many people who are not directly connected to the field of classics are learning about the controversy solely from these op-eds and coming away with the egregious misimpression that this is really what is happening. In this essay, I want to explain for my general readership what is really going on within the field and what sorts of changes people are really advocating. (I would write an op-ed, but no one would publish it, since I’m just a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate.)

Why Were Women Prohibited from Fighting in Most Ancient Societies?

Someone on Quora recently asked the question “Is there a real reason why ancient armies didn’t have female soldiers, or was it just sexism?” This question immediately triggered a whole flurry of defensive replies from various male military history buffs proclaiming all the reasons why women are supposedly naturally unsuited for ancient warfare and why it was supposedly perfectly logical for ancient militaries to exclude women.

The most upvoted answer to the question is this one, written by a man named Alex Mann, arguing that women are naturally physically shorter, weaker, and smaller than men, that pregnancy and menstruation would hinder them from fighting, and that they would be an overall detriment to any ancient army. The answer currently has 2,722 upvotes and hundreds of comments, many of them showering praise on the author for his supposed clarity and perceptiveness.

Other men have provided answers drawing similar conclusions. The arguments that these men present, however, are demonstrably quite shoddy. In this essay, I intend to demonstrate that there is, in fact, no logical reason for an army to have a rule categorically excluding all women and that the real reason why women were excluded from ancient militaries is indeed simply sexism.

What Did Jesus Really Say about Homosexuality?

None of the canonical gospels portray Jesus as having said anything whatsoever about homosexuality. You can scour every last line of the four canonical gospels and you won’t find anything that can be unambiguously interpreted as a reference to homosexuality in any form. As far as the canonical gospels are concerned, Jesus did not condemn homosexuality, but he did not endorse it either.

Fascinatingly, though, it is possible that there may have been an alternate, non-canonical version of the Gospel of Mark in circulation in the second century CE that implied that Jesus himself had sexual relations with men. The existence of this possible version of the Gospel of Mark is controversial and many scholars regard it as a flat-out hoax. Nonetheless, it is worth talking about—even if only for the sake of curiosity.

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.

Where Does the Idea of a “Saint” Come From?

Most people today are familiar with the concept of a “saint,” but the question of when and how this concept arose is a very interesting one. The basic idea behind the Christian conception of sainthood can be traced all the way back to the writings of the Hebrew Bible, which contains stories about holy people using their special connection with God to perform miracles for the benefit of others.

This idea is expanded on in the writings of the New Testament and in other early Christian texts. Early Christian ideas about sainthood may have been influenced to some extent by similar Greek and Roman stories about holy men performing miracles. By late antiquity, a conception of sainthood similar to the one most people today are familiar with had developed. Although saints have become less prominent in western Christianity since the Protestant Reformation, ancient and medieval stories about saints continue to influence contemporary western culture.

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.