Tales of Times Forgotten

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.

Did Ancient People Really Think That Gods People Didn’t Believe in Would “Fade”?

The idea that gods derive their power from people believing in them and worshipping them and that gods whom people stop believing in and worshipping will “fade” or possibly even die out pops up fairly frequently in modern popular culture. Most notably, it forms a major part of the premise for Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novel American Gods (originally published in 2001 by William Morrow in the United States and Headline the U.K.) and the television series of the same name based on it (originally released on the premium cable network Starz from 2017 through 2021).

Some people have wondered, though: Does this idea have any kind of basis in ancient sources? Did ancient people really believe that their deities drew their powers from people worshipping them? As it turns out, although the version of the idea that is best known today through American Gods and other works is utterly contrary to how ancient people normally thought about their deities, similar ideas about deities being, to some degree, dependent on worship, do crop up in ancient literature.

No, Santa Claus Is Not Inspired by Odin

I’ve spent a lot of time debunking the perennially popular misconception that modern Anglophone Christmas customs are of ancient “pagan” origin. My most thorough article on the subject remains this one I originally posted two years ago. One of the more popular claims associated with this misconception is that Santa Claus is actually somehow inspired by the “pagan” Norse god Óðinn, who is closely associated with wisdom, war, death, and the runic alphabet. I already debunked this claim in this article I posted two years ago about the history of Santa Claus, which I highly recommend reading, but I did so only briefly and I feel that this notion is so common that it deserves a more thorough rebuttal.

Jackson Crawford, who has a PhD in Old Norse studies, spent many years teaching the subject at various universities, and is now a professional public educator on the subject, posted a video on his YouTube channel last year explaining why Óðinn is not Santa Claus. Crawford’s video is excellent, but it is, for the most part, merely a simple comparison of Óðinn and Santa Claus and it does not take into account the history of Santa Claus. In this article, I intend to give this misconception the proper, in-depth refutation it deserves—one that fully takes into account Santa Claus’s complicated history.

Nabis, the Last King of Sparta, and His Torture Robot

The last king of Sparta to actually wield real political power was Nabis, who staged a coup d’état in 207 BCE, in which he seized the throne and murdered the reigning king Pelops. He claimed that he was a remote descendant of the Eurypontid king Demaratos of many centuries earlier and initiated sweeping social reforms that he designed to fortify his power.

Ever since antiquity, Nabis’s reputation has consistently been that of an extraordinarily cruel and sadistic tyrant. He is probably most notorious today for having supposedly constructed a horrifying torture robot modeled after his wife Apega that he could control and use to torture people into giving him large amounts of money and precious valuables. In this post, I will briefly look at who Nabis was, the events of his life, and, of course, the story of the evil torture robot.