Roman Empire Archives - Page 8 of 13 - Tales of Times Forgotten

The Amazing Origin of the Story of Achilles’s Heel

We all know the story of “Achilles’s heel.” The story you probably learned in school goes like this: When Achilles was a baby, his mother Thetis dipped him in the river Styx to make him immortal and impervious to all wounds—except she held him by his heel, meaning his heel was the only part of him that was vulnerable. Many years later, near the end of the Trojan War, the Trojan prince Paris shot him in the heel with an arrow guided by the god Apollon and killed him.

This story is the source of our English phrase “Achilles’s heel,” which is often used to refer to a single fatal weakness in something that is otherwise seen as invincible. It may come as a surprise to some people that this story is not actually found in the Iliad or in any other work of classical Greek literature from before the Roman Era. In fact, in the Iliad, Achilles isn’t even invulnerable at all!

What Early Christians Thought about Marriage and Sex

Christians have never completely agreed on anything, but the general view of early Christians towards marriage, sex, and procreation was that they were bad. Of course, even the Christians who believed that these things were bad disagreed over exactly how bad they were. Some of the more radical early Christians believed that sex was so evil that it was better for a person to be literally burned alive than for them to marry and have sex with their spouse.

Most early Christians were more moderate; they believed that marriage and sex were essentially necessary evils. They thought that it was morally acceptable for a man and a woman to marry and have sex, but that it was better for a person to remain unmarried and celibate if possible and that a person should only marry if they couldn’t control themself otherwise.

The Strangest Books in the Bible

The Bible is a collection of various ancient texts that are considered by Christians to be the inspired Word of God. The number of books in the Bible varies depending on which branch of Christianity you happen to belong to. The standard Protestant Bible only has sixty-six books, the standard Roman Catholic Bible has seventy-three books, and the standard Eastern Orthodox Bible has seventy-eight books.

Many of the texts that are included in the Bible seem rather strange—at least when you read them for the first time. There are some books in the Bible that are a bit peculiar in the sense that they don’t fit in well with the other books in the Bible. Then there are other books in the Bible that just seem downright bizarre—at least until you decipher what they’re talking about.

In this article, I want to talk about five of the most unusual books in the Bible. These are books that are striking either because they are so different from the others or because they employ such bizarre imagery.

Were the Ancient Egyptians Black?

There is a lot of public controversy over which “race” the ancient Egyptians belonged to. Western media has traditionally portrayed nearly all ancient Egyptians as having white skin. Unfortunately, some films are still portraying the Egyptians this way; the 2014 film Exodus: Gods and Kings and the 2016 film Gods of Egypt both received widespread criticism for the fact that nearly all the lead roles were played by white actors.

Nevertheless, I think that, with a few exceptions, nowadays, most people realize that the idea of the ancient Egyptians as almost entirely what we consider “white” is nothing but a racist fantasy. A great deal of controversy still rages, though, over whether the ancient Egyptians were what we consider “black.” A number of authors have tried to argue that ancient Egypt was exclusively or primarily a “black civilization” and that the ancient Egyptians defined themselves as “black people.”

Since the skin color of the ancient Egyptians is a matter of such great controversy, in this article, I want to take a thorough and honest look at the evidence. In this article, we will examine evidence from Egyptian iconography, from Egyptian mummies, from ancient Greek descriptions of the Egyptians, from genetics, and from the conquests and migrations of recorded history. We will discover that Egypt has always been a very ethnically diverse place and that the ancient Egyptians cannot be uniformly classified as belonging to any particular “race.”

How Difficult Is It to Determine If an Ancient Artwork Is Authentic?

Fake ancient artifacts are all over the antiquities market. For a layperson with no expertise in ancient art, telling the difference between a bust created by a forger to look like an ancient bust and a real ancient bust is virtually impossible. For a trained expert, it is easy to spot certain obvious forgeries, but there are still many forgeries out there that are good enough to fool even the best experts.

The antiquities market, though, is incredibly sketchy at the best of times and downright illegal at the worst of times. If you’re trying to buy ancient artifacts, forgeries should be the least of your worries.

Boudicca Was Actually a Horrible Person

The first-century AD Celtic warrior queen Boudicca is widely seen a British folk hero. She has been so admired for so long that her image has literally become national personification of Britain. Outside of Britain, she is seen as an icon of female empowerment and her revolt against the Romans has been interpreted as a rebellion against both foreign and patriarchal oppression.

Despite how she has been portrayed in modern culture, however, the historical Boudicca was certainly not a feminist. In fact, for what it’s worth, Boudicca makes a frankly very disturbing hero for modern feminists, given the horrible atrocities that she committed—not just against men, but also against women as well.

How Did the Ancient Greeks Think about Their Place in History?

We are used to thinking about history in terms of written history, so, when people today hear about early civilizations, they often wonder, “Did people in ancient times have a sense of their own place in history? What did early civilizations think came before them? Did they think they were living at the beginning of history?” The answer is that ancient peoples did have a sense of living within a historical context and even the people living in the very earliest civilizations had an impression that there were many peoples who had come before them.

Unfortunately, ancient peoples often didn’t clearly distinguish history from legend. For instance, the ancient Greeks fully believed that the Trojan War was a historical event and that people like Herakles, Achilles, and Odysseus were real people. As I talk about in this article from March 2019, though, there is little evidence to support the view that anything like the Trojan War described in the Iliad really happened at all.

People in ancient times didn’t think of themselves as living in “ancient times”; they thought of themselves as modern in pretty much the same way that we do now. Nonetheless, the way they conceived of “modernity” was usually quite different from how we conceive of it.

What Was the Conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity Really Like?

The transition from traditional Greco-Roman religion to Christianity in late antiquity has often been portrayed in terms of the so-called “triumph of Christianity over paganism.” This is an idea that originates from Christian triumphalist accounts of the era that portray Christianity as having eradicated “paganism” within a single generation.

Anti-Christian writers, especially in recent years, have seized upon this propagandistic idea of the “triumph of Christianity” and twisted the Christian propaganda into anti-Christian propaganda by portraying Christians as militant zealots and obscurantists who destroyed classical civilization in the span of a single generation because it was too great for their small minds. Unfortunately, this story is no more accurate than the story Christians have been telling for centuries; indeed, if anything, it is even less accurate.

In reality, the process of the Roman Empire’s “conversion” to Christianity was both far more gradual and far complicated than it has often been portrayed. In many ways, traditional religions were not so much “eradicated” as transformed. In many ways, Christianity and traditional religions melded so that the “Christianity” that emerged from late antiquity was not the same “Christianity” that had gone in, while “paganism” was more domesticated than vanquished.

Did Everyone in Pre-Modern Times Believe in Astrology?

There is a popular perception that people in ancient and medieval times all believed in astrology because they were all stupid and ignorant. This idea, recently promoted by the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in a tweet, is inaccurate for two main reasons.

Firstly, believing in astrology only makes someone wrong; it doesn’t necessarily make them stupid. Secondly, there were some intellectuals in both ancient and medieval times who did reject astrology.

No, Easter Is Not Named after Ishtar

Around this time of year it is common to see people sharing memes claiming that Easter is really an ancient pre-Christian pagan holiday that was hijacked by Christians. I wrote an article all the way back in April 2017 debunking some of the more general claims that you often hear about various Easter traditions such as the Easter bunny and painting Easter eggs. This year, though, I want to specifically debunk the popular claim that Easter originated as a festival of the ancient Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar.

This is a claim that has circulated ever since the middle of the nineteenth century. Although it was originally only popular among the most die-hard of Protestant fundamentalists, it has, unfortunately, recently become very popular among atheists. It is, quite frankly, a completely ridiculous claim to anyone who knows anything about ancient Mesopotamian religion, but this sadly has not deterred the claim’s popularity.

In reality Easter is—and has always been—a Christian holiday. The only thing about the holiday that is verifiably of ancient pagan origin is the holiday’s name in English, but even the name doesn’t come from Ishtar, but rather from a totally different goddess worshipped half a world away from Mesopotamia.