Tales of Times Forgotten

Filthy, Obscure Greek Myths, Accidentally Preserved by Clement of Alexandria

The early Christian writer Clement of Alexandria (lived c. 150 – c. 215 CE) was probably born in Athens, but he lived most of his life in Alexandria, where he was a teacher at the Catechetical School, also known as the Didaskalion. He was extraordinarily well educated and well read in ancient Greek literature, mythology, philosophy, and theology. As a devout Christian, however, he believed that traditional Greek and Roman religions were rife with immorality and depravity. His earliest surviving work is a treatise titled Exhortation to the Hellenes, in which he condemns traditional Greek and Roman religions and exhorts Greeks and Romans to adopt Christianity.

One of Clement’s primary goals in the treatise is to prove just how perverted and morally depraved traditional religions are. He rightly points out the immoral and often rapacious behavior of the Olympian deities in the stories that are well known, but he also retells some extremely obscure and absolutely filthy Greek myths that are not recorded in any other sources before him. As a result, Clement accidentally preserved these myths for posterity—myths that we otherwise would have no idea even existed. (One of them involves a god inventing a dildo in order to anally masturbate on a dead lover’s grave!)

Was Sappho Really a Lesbian?

One of the questions that I have frequently encountered online in discussions about ancient Greece is the question of whether the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BCE) was really a lesbian. On the surface level, the answer to this question seems like an obvious “yes.” After all, Sappho wrote poems in which she very expressly describes her erotic desire for other women, the word lesbian itself literally comes from the name of the island where she lived, and its synonym, the word sapphic, comes from her own name. There is even an entire subreddit about queer erasure called r/SapphoAndHerFriend, making fun of people who try to deny that Sappho was a lesbian.

I fully agree that there is no sense in which Sappho can be accurately described as “straight.” On the other hand, though, it would be an oversimplification to say that she was a lesbian in the contemporary sense. For one thing, the ancient Greeks generally did not think about sexuality in terms of which gender (or genders) a person was erotically attracted to, but rather in terms of whether they took the active or passive role during sex. There were no words in Ancient Greek in Sappho’s time that meant “gay,” “bi,” or “straight.” As such, it is highly unlikely that anyone in her time would have seen erotic attraction to women as a sign of any kind of innate identity.

Furthermore, the character “Sappho” who is the main speaker in Sappho’s poems is most likely a fictionalized literary persona, meaning that it is difficult to untangle the relationship between the speaker in the poems and the historical poet who composed them. Finally, given the fact that the vast majority of Sappho’s poems have not survived to the present day and ancient people told many stories about her having supposedly had affairs with men, it is possible that her character may have expressed erotic desire for men in poems or parts of poems that have not survived, which would make her what twenty-first-century westerners would consider bisexual.

Update: Dr. Christine Morris Confirms She Has Not Found the Trojan Horse

As frequent readers of my blog are already aware, on 10 August 2021, the website Greek Reporter republished an article that it originally published in 2014 claiming that archaeologists have found the remains of the Trojan horse. The story was quickly copied in both The Jerusalem Post and the International Business Times. The next day, however, I published a post on this blog titled “No, Archaeologists Have Not Found the Trojan Horse,” in which I pointed out evidence that the article published by Greek Reporter is a hoax written by someone with only very superficial knowledge of Aegean archaeology.

One of the pieces of evidence that I pointed out is the fact that the article cites a supposed professor at Boston University named Christine Morris as the leader of the team that has supposedly excavated the Trojan horse—but there is only one archaeologist who studies the Aegean Bronze Age named Christine Morris, she teaches at Trinity College Dublin, not Boston University, and, as far as I could tell, she has never excavated at Troy. Nonetheless, some people left comments on my post insisting that maybe Dr. Morris used to teach at Boston University at some point and maybe she really did discover the Trojan horse seven years ago.

I thought these objections were implausible, but, in the interest of being thorough, I emailed the real Dr. Morris using the email that is listed on her faculty webpage for Trinity College Dublin. She has very kindly taken the time out of her presumably very busy schedule to reply to my email. She has confirmed that she has never been affiliated with Boston University in any way, that she has never excavated at Troy or worked there in any capacity, that she has never claimed to have found the Trojan horse, and that the story that has been published by Greek Reporter and all these other news outlets is completely fabricated.

No, Archaeologists Have Not Found the Trojan Horse

On 10 August 2021, the website Greek Reporter published an article written by a contributor named Philip Chrysopoulos titled “Archaeologists Claim They’ve Discovered the Trojan Horse in Turkey.” The article claims that archaeologists have discovered the remains of a wooden structure inside the ancient city of Troy that they think is the actual Trojan horse. On the same day, The Jerusalem Post copied Greek Reporter’s story, publishing their own article titled “Did archaeologists find the Trojan horse?” that cites the Greek Reporter article as its only source.

The problem is that the whole story is a steaming pile of horse manure. The Greek Reporter article contains obvious signs that it is a deliberate hoax written in order to attract views in order to drive up ad revenues. By publishing this ridiculous, easily debunked story, Greek Reporter and The Jerusalem Post are both showing that, at the very best, they do not conduct even the most basic fact-checking or source verification and that they are not trustworthy news sites.

How Accurate Are “Photorealistic” Portraits of Roman Emperors?

In 2020, the digital artist Daniel Voshart used a neural net called Artbreeder to create a series of “photorealistic” portraits of fifty-four Roman emperors spanning from Augustus (ruled 27 BCE – 14 CE) to Carinus (who died in 285 CE). As the term “photorealistic” suggests, his portraits look almost like photographs. Unfortunately, a lot of people do not realize that these portraits are modern artistic impressions, not scientific recreations of what the Roman emperors really historically looked like.

I’ve seen many people over the past year cite Voshart’s portraits and others like them as though they were authoritative, scientific recreations of what the Roman emperors really looked like. In particular, I’ve noticed a worrying number of white supremacists trying to cite these kinds of portraits as “evidence” that the ancient Romans were all white. In this article I would like to discuss why Voshart’s portraits—and others like them—should be taken with several grains of salt.

Was Jesus a Communist?

People have been claiming that Jesus of Nazareth was actually a communist or socialist for a very long time. Notably, Francis Bellamy (lived 1855 – 1931), who is best known today as the author of the United States Pledge of Allegiance, was a Baptist minister and self-proclaimed “Christian Socialist” who attracted a great deal of negative attention during his lifetime for frequently claiming that Jesus was a socialist. In more recent years, various pro-communist memes about Jesus being a communist have gone viral on the internet.

I’ve seen so many different expressions of the idea that Jesus was a communist over the years that I’ve decided to write an in-depth article examining whether this is an accurate characterization of Jesus’s teachings. There are indeed some genuine similarities between the views that are attributed to Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels and communism. There are, however, a number of enormous differences between Jesus and contemporary revolutionary communists that make the claim that Jesus was a communist a profound mischaracterization of his teachings.

Dark Academia, the “Western Canon,” and the Decline of the Humanities

In around mid-July, I found out that there is apparently a huge internet “aesthetic” movement called “dark academia” that centers around a highly romanticized impression of what humanities scholars and students—especially those in the fields of classics, English, history, and philosophy—dressed and lived like in the twentieth century. Aspects of the aesthetic include wearing old-fashioned, dark-colored, stereotypically “academic” clothing and appreciating “classic” literature, art, and music.

For those who aren’t already aware, I am currently about to enter my senior year at Indiana University Bloomington double-majoring in history and classical studies (i.e., Ancient Greek and Latin), with honors in history. My current plan is to apply to graduate programs in ancient history later this year. Even though I don’t deliberately dress in a dark academia style and I don’t identify with the aesthetic in any particular way, being a humanities student does make me feel like I have a connection to it.

I was so struck by my surprise discovery of dark academia’s apparent popularity that I’ve spent a good part of the past two weeks researching it and its history. Naturally, I have a lot of thoughts, especially about how the current popularity of the aesthetic seems to be at least in part a reaction to the slow ongoing decline of the academic humanities.

Alluring Anecdotes about the Olympic Games

The 2020 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo are now officially underway, having been delayed by a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I have absolutely no interest in sports and, in all likelihood, I will not watch any part of the ongoing Olympics. Nonetheless, I do know a little bit about Olympic history, due to my intense study of ancient Greece and Rome and, on account of the occasion, I’ve decided to share a few of my favorite anecdotes about Olympic history.

The first is a legend about why ancient Olympic athletes were required to compete naked, the second is about a woman who disguised herself as a man in order to attend the Olympic Games, the third is about how women were sometimes able to compete in the ancient Olympic Games due to a loophole, and the fourth is about how the modern Olympic Games at one point included competitions for literature and the arts.

Ancient Roman Masturbation

For the past four years, a photograph of a plaster cast of an ancient Roman man who died in the city of Pompeii during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE has been circulating online with the claim that he died while masturbating, since his right hand happens to be positioned near his groin in a masturbation-like pose. Historically speaking, it is highly unlikely that this particular man really died while masturbating. The position of his hand is most likely a result of the muscle contractions resulting from the excruciating heat shock that killed him, rather than the result of anything he was doing before he was killed.

Nonetheless, there is a wealth of fascinating historical and archaeological evidence for both male and female masturbation in ancient Rome, including in the city of Pompeii. Needless to say, the following article contains discussion of evidence that is not suitable for children.

Pamphile of Epidauros: A Female Ancient Greek Historian

Nearly all the historical writings that have survived from ancient Greece and Rome were written by men. Women’s voices in the historical record are few and far between. We do, however, know that there was, in fact, an extraordinarily prolific female ancient Greek historian named Pamphile of Epidauros, who lived in Greece in around the middle of the first century CE, when Greece was ruled by the Roman Empire.

Pamphile is known to have written a lengthy compilation of interesting historical anecdotes derived from various sources titled Historical Commentaries, an epitome of the writings of the historian Ktesias of Knidos (fl. c. 400 BCE), a work titled On Controversies that seems to have been perhaps a collection of essays on controversial topics, and a work titled On Sexual Pleasures, which seems to have been a sex manual. Sadly, everything or almost everything she wrote has been lost.

Pamphile is a truly monumental figure in the history of Greek historiography, not only because she is the only female ancient Greek historian about whom we have any significant information, but also because she seems to have been an especially important author in the development of the genre of “miscellaneous history,” which focused on retelling interesting anecdotes from earlier authors and became very popular in the Roman Empire during the second and third centuries CE.