Tales of Times Forgotten

No, Xerxes I Was Not an Eight-Foot-Tall Giant

In the 2007 epic fantasy action film 300, cowritten and directed by Zack Snyder and based on the 1998 limited comic book series of the same name by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, Xerxes I, the king of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, is portrayed by the Brazilian actor Rodrigo Santoro as a towering giant god-king who goes around almost completely nude, wearing only a very skimpy gold loincloth and a ton of really ornate gold jewelry, which is held on mostly through body piercings.

I’ve already written an entire post about how 300 is not historically accurate and it blatantly promotes a fascist, white supremacist message. Sadly, though, it has recently come to my attention that there are apparently some people on the internet who earnestly think that Xerxes I was really believed in antiquity to have been an eight-foot-tall giant.

Some have tried to prove this claim using a blatantly misquoted passage from the Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) and Achaemenid relief carvings as evidence. In this post, I will show that Xerxes I was not really an eight-foot-tall giant, that Herodotos never claimed that he was an eight-foot-tall giant, and that there is no evidence to suggest that anyone in antiquity ever believed that he was one.

No, Ares Was Not the Patron God of Sparta

Many people have gotten the impression that, in ancient Greece, Ares was the patron god of Sparta in the same way that Athena was the patron goddess of Athens. This impression, however, is not rooted in any kind of solid historical evidence, but rather solely in the fact that modern people popularly associate Ares and Sparta with many of the same general sorts of things, such as warfare, bloodshed, masculinity, unstoppable fighting abilities, et cetera. To modern observers, Ares seems to embody the Spartan ethos so perfectly that people simply assume without concrete evidence that the Spartans must have adored him.

The truth, though, is that Ares was not the patron god of Sparta in any sense. As one of the Twelve Olympians, he was certainly a significant deity in both Athens and Sparta, but, in both poleis, he was still relatively minor compared to other deities who were far more prominent. Indeed, ironically, Athena actually seems to have had a much more developed cult presence in Sparta than Ares.

What Did the Ancient Romans Use Latin For?

Someone on Quora has asked: “What was Latin used for in ancient Rome?” At first glance, this question might sound rather silly. After all, it seems obvious that people in ancient Rome used Latin for all different kinds of oral and written communication. This may explain why the people who have answered this question so far have all given brief and flippant responses. I initially thought about giving such a response as well. After a bit of consideration, though, I realized that this is not actually a bad question, or a silly one.

Quite simply, Latin was not the only language that people in the Roman cultural sphere used. There were many Roman people in ancient times who could not speak Latin. Also, many Roman people who did speak Latin spoke it in addition to at least one other language. In this post, I intend to first explain who in ancient Rome actually spoke Latin and then explain in what sorts of contexts multilingual people who knew Latin used it.

Why Is the Parthenon So Famous?

The most famous building in Greece today is almost certainly the Parthenon, a spectacular temple to the Greek goddess Athena that towers atop the Athenian Akropolis and is almost universally admired for being supposedly the most “perfect” and “timeless” work of ancient Greek architecture. Some people may be surprised to learn, though, that this was not always the case.

The Parthenon did not immediately become the most famous and admired Greek temple as soon as it was built. It was certainly seen as an important temple in antiquity—one especially notable for its size, its prominent location, and its extraordinary chryselephantine cult statue of Athena, crafted by the master sculptor Pheidias. Its present-day status as the most famous of all Greek buildings, though, is the result of the events and ideological movements of the past 2,400 years of history. If post-classical history had gone differently, the Parthenon’s status might have gone to a different temple.

Shocking, Taboo Sex in Ancient Greece and Rome

Ancient Greek and Roman sexuality seems to be a huge topic of interest with the general public. I’ve found that my posts on the subject are regularly among my most popular. Readers seem to be especially fascinated by stories of lurid depravities. For a very long time, the post I wrote in February 2019 about Roman orgies was consistently one of my most frequently viewed articles.

Well, if that’s what you’re interested in, you’re in luck, because, in this post, I will be discussing some of the sexual acts that the ancient Greeks and Romans regarded as the most shocking, disgraceful, unnatural, and taboo. We’ll even discuss some of the most scandalous and lurid tales of Roman imperial debaucheries. Be forewarned that some readers may find some of the acts discussed in the ancient sources I am about to analyze disturbing.

Yes, English Does Have Grammatical Gender (Sort Of)

Grammatical gender is a kind of noun class system that exists in many languages, in which nouns are said to possess a certain, inherent “gender” and articles, adjectives, and/or pronouns applied to these nouns are declined to match the gender of the noun. To illustrate, in Ancient Greek, the noun πόλεμος (pólemos), meaning “war,” is considered masculine, so it takes the masculine form of the article, which is ὁ (ho). If you wanted to describe the war as, say, “savage,” you would use the masculine form of the adjective with this meaning, which is ἄγριος (agrios). Thus, you would end up with the phrase ὁ ἄγριος πόλεμος, which means “the savage war.”

The grammatical gender of a noun may or may not correspond to the natural gender of the person or thing to whom it refers. For instance, the Modern High German word for “girl” or “young woman” is Mädchen, which is grammatically neuter, even though the subject’s natural gender would obviously be feminine, because it is a diminutive of the more archaic word Magd, and all diminutives in German are neuter.

It is often stated as objective fact that Modern English has “no grammatical gender.” This is not, however, entirely true. Modern English does, in fact, have grammatical gender to some extent, but it is very limited compared to other Indo-European languages, and a noun’s grammatical gender usually corresponds to the natural gender of the person or thing to whom it refers.

No, the University of Reading Didn’t “Cancel” the Ancient Greeks

The Daily Mail is a British tabloid newspaper that is notorious for promoting wildly sensationalistic headlines, having little-to-no fact-checking, and frequently outright fabricating news stories for the sake of attention. Their unreliability is so notorious that, in 2016, they were sanctioned by the International Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) for not meeting standards of journalistic integrity and, in February 2017, Wikipedia took the unprecedented step of blanket-prohibiting the use of the Daily Mail as a source in their encyclopedia articles, with editors concluding via consensus that the tabloid is “generally unreliable.”

On 1 January 2022, the Daily Mail published an article written by an author named Chris Hastings with the shocking headline “Reading University bosses cancel the Ancient Greeks by removing part of a poem that mentions domestic violence to avoid upsetting students.” The article claims that unnamed “bosses” at the University of Reading (by which they presumably mean an instructor in the classics department) “cut several lines” from a handout bearing the text of the poem “Types of Women,” otherwise known as “Semonides Fragment 7,” composed by the ancient Greek poet Semonides of Amorgos, who lived in around the seventh century BCE. The article claims that the university did this because they feared that the lines might offend students, even though no students had actually complained about the poem.

This article has been widely and uncritically shared on social media, including among classicists. On top of this, the story originating with the Daily Mail has been picked up by over a dozen other media outlets, including The Sun, The Times, and The Daily Telegraph. Even the website Ancient Origins, which regularly publishes wooish nonsense about ancient history, has published a piece on the subject. Information from an inside source, though, hints that the story may be totally fabricated—a prospect which seems especially likely given the Daily Mail‘s well-documented history of fabricating stories. Even if the story is not totally fabricated, it is at the very least heavily misrepresented and blown out of proportion in a manner that is clearly deliberately designed to provoke outrage.

Announcement: I Am Now Implementing an Official Policy on Comments

I have an additional announcement, which is that, as of today, 3 January 2022, I am implementing an official policy on comments. For the first few years of this blog’s existence, my policy on comments was basically that I would approve any comments anyone made that were not obviously spam. By summer 2020, though, it had become apparent to me that this policy was a disaster. I won’t go into details, but let’s just say that I had some comments sections that were real dumpster fires.

Over the course of the past year and a half or so, I have slowly developed an informal policy on comments. Now, it is a new year and I just announced in my previous post that I have started a Patreon. I therefore think that this is a good time for me to post my policy on comments publicly in a formalized manner. Because I know that old posts have a tendency to get buried, I have also posted the following policy as a separate page, which is accessible via a link underneath the “Pages” sign along the right side of the website.

Announcement: I Now Have a Patreon!

Hello, everyone! I have an important announcement, which is that I have now created a Patreon page. If you would like to support me and my blog, you can become a patron. I only have one tier for now, which is for a regular donation of three dollars a month. I do not currently offer any benefits for becoming a patron. I may decide to offer some benefits of some kind at some point in the future, but, for now at least, I’m still trying to figure out how this whole system works, and I still don’t really know what kinds of benefits for patrons would be simultaneously practical for me to offer and desirable for patrons.

You can become a patron if you want to, but don’t feel like you have to. I plan to continue posting articles on this blog that everyone can read for free, exactly as I have been doing for the past five years. It is very important to me that my writing is accessible to as many people as possible, so I am not going to put any of my articles behind a paywall.

No, Cerberus’s Name Does Not Mean “Spot”

In Greek mythology, Cerberus—or, to use a spelling that is more faithful to the Greek pronunciation, Kerberos—is the ferocious, many-headed watchdog who guards the entrance to the underworld. Ancient Greek sources disagree on exactly how many heads he has. The Theogonia, a long narrative poem in dactylic hexameter composed by the poet Hesiodos of Askre in the late eighth or early seventh century BCE, says (in lines 308–312) that Kerberos has fifty heads. The later poet Pindaros of Thebes (lived c. 518 – c. 438 BCE) says in a fragment (F249a/b SM) that he has no less than one hundred heads. In Greek vase paintings, he is usually portrayed with either two or three heads. He is often also depicted with a serpent for a tail. From the fourth century BCE onward, though, three heads seem to have become the standard.

There is a popular meme that has been circulating on the internet for a long time claiming that the name Κέρβερος (Kérberos) actually means “Spot.” This is a cute story. How deliciously ironic it would be for a literal Hellhound to have such a normal dog name like “Spot”! Unfortunately, the story probably isn’t true. Kerberos’s name certainly does not mean “Spot” in Ancient Greek, and it probably doesn’t mean this in any language at all.