Tales of Times Forgotten

Why Greece Hasn’t Rebuilt the Agora

Almost every tourist who has ever visited Athens has at some point thought about how amazing it would be if the city’s monuments were restored to how they looked when they were new in classical antiquity. A couple of months ago, the website UnHerd, which has right-wing and libertarian political leanings and specializes in what it calls “slow journalism,” published an essay by Nicholas Boys Smith titled “It’s time to rebuild ancient Athens,” in which Smith proposes that Greece should fully restore the Athenian agora (the ancient central market and meeting place of the city) to how it looked in antiquity. This is a fairly common sentiment, so I wanted to take this opportunity to address it.

In this post, I will discuss why restoring Athens’ ancient ruins to how they looked in antiquity hasn’t already happened in the way that many tourists like Smith have hoped and the problems that such a restoration would certainly entail. Most ancient historians and archaeologists do support the idea of restoration to some degree or another, but we also recognize that restoration must be balanced with other concerns.

New Fragments of Euripides Discovered!

As I previously discussed in this post I wrote back in 2021, the vast majority of ancient Greek drama has not survived to the present day. Of the hundreds of Greek tragic playwrights who flourished in antiquity, only three have any plays that have survived to the present day complete under their own names: Aischylos, Sophokles, and Euripides. At least ninety-five plays attributed to Euripides circulated in antiquity. Of these, only nineteen have survived to the present day complete and only eighteen of them are actually his work. (One of the surviving plays attributed to him, Rhesos, is generally agreed by modern scholars to be the work of a different playwright wrongly attributed to Euripides.)

Many of Euripides’s lost plays, however, are not totally lost; fragments of them survive. Some of these fragments are preserved through quotation by later ancient writers in surviving works, while others survive on papyri that have been discovered in Egypt over the past roughly century and a half. Some of these fragments are as long as whole scenes, while others are as short as a single word. A new expansion to Euripides’s surviving corpus, however, has just arrived. On August 1st, 2024, two classics professors at the University of Colorado Boulder announced that they have identified substantial previously unknown sections from two of his lost tragedies on a papyrus recently discovered in Egypt. This is a positively electrifying discovery for the field of classics.

An Update on My Novel in Progress (June 25th, 2024)

I apologize again for my dearth of recent posts. I am hoping to get at least one real post published before the end of this month and eventually to get back to posting more regularly. There are various reasons why I haven’t been posting as much lately as I used to, but a major part of the reason is because over the past few months, I have been doing an enormous amount of reading and I have been devoting nearly all my writing time toward working intensely on the historical fiction novel I have in progress.

As of the time I am writing this update, I currently have over 36,500 words (110 pages) of the novel written. I previously had even more written, but, as I discuss below, I decided to cut the entire second part of the novel, which made my current draft much shorter than the previous one. My target length for the first complete draft is between 75,000 and 90,000 words, so I am a little less than halfway finished. Although the book has been through a few different titles in the time I’ve been working on it and the title may end up changing before it is finally published, the current working title is Mother of the Gods.

A Personal Update (June 1st, 2024)

I would like to apologize for the fact that I haven’t posted anything in nearly a month. In this post, I would like my update my readers on several recent events that have taken place in my life. The first event is that, unfortunately, I did not get into a PhD program for this year (although I came very close to getting into the classics program at UCLA). This has contributed to me being rather depressed for the past couple of months. The second event is that I passed my master’s thesis defense with honors and have now officially graduated with my MA in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies. The third event is that I am now writing a historical fiction novel set in the ancient world.

Did Julius Caesar Really Say “The Die Is Cast”?

One of the most famous anecdotes in all of ancient history holds that, when the Roman general and politician Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon stream, which marked the boundary of Italy, in January 49 BCE during his march on Rome, he declared “Iacta alea est!” (which means “The die is cast!” in Latin). A version of this story does occur in the ancient historical sources, but those sources indicate that, instead of the Latin phrase I have quoted here, Caesar actually used a Greek phrase with a subtly different meaning, which holds different implications for his understanding of the significance of his famous Rubicon crossing.

In Defense of Hegelochos

The Athenian tragic playwright Euripides (lived c. 480 – c. 406 BCE) is known for adapting traditional myths in highly innovative and sometimes controversial ways. In spring 408 BCE, his perhaps most iconoclastic tragedy Orestes premiered at the City Dionysia in the Theater of Dionysos Eleuthereus on the south slope of the Athenian akropolis. The play addresses the same myth as Aischylos’s earlier tragedy Eumenides, but radically alters the plot. In Aischylos’s play, the character Orestes stands trial before a jury of Athenians and is acquitted of the crime of murdering his own mother. In Euripides’s adaptation, by contrast, Orestes (along with his accomplices Pylades and Elektra) are convicted and sentenced to death in Argos and attempt to escape through murder and hostage-taking.

The play’s radically revisionist treatment of a classic myth, however, is not the only reason why its first performance is famous. Several ancient scholarly commentaries, known as scholia, attest that, in the first performance of the play, Orestes was portrayed by an actor named Hegelochos, who messed up one of his lines and won eternal ridicule. In this post, however, I will argue that Hegelochos may not be entirely (or perhaps at all) to blame for the infamous slip-up, which may owe just as much or more to the audience’s mishearing.

What Do the Newly-Read Herculaneum Papyri Actually Tell Us about Plato?

Readers who have been paying attention to the news may have seen that a group of researchers led by Graziano Ranocchia of the University of Pisa in Italy have recently used modern technology to read portions of a carbonized scroll from the library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum bearing a history of Plato’s Akademia written by the Epicurean philosopher and poet Philodemos of Gadara, who lived in the first century BCE and died sometime between c. 40 and c. 35 BCE. The newly-readable parts of the scroll include an anecdote about how Plato supposedly died and more specific information than was previously known about where he was buried.

In this post, I will briefly discuss the actual historical, literary, and philosophical significance of these findings. While the findings are genuinely significant, a lot of media coverage has been rather sensationalistic and has perhaps raised some false assumptions and hopes about what these discoveries mean. This post will serve as a scholarly counterpoint to these assumptions.

Did Any Non-Israelite Ancient Cultures Have Their Own “Bibles”?

The Bible is one of the most influential collections of texts in human history. Its influence goes far beyond the Jewish and Christian religious traditions, which regard different versions of it as sacred; it has fundamentally shaped how most people living in the west in the twenty-first century, even those who of us who are not religiously Christian or Jewish, think about religion in general. Because the Hebrew and Christian Bibles are so central to modern Judaism and Christianity respectively, many people have wondered whether any non-Israelite cultures of the ancient world had similar collections of sacred texts.

As it happens, a large number of ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman texts have survived that were relevant in various ways to those peoples’ religious practices, including some texts that people considered to be “divinely inspired” in some sense and some that bear significant parallels to Biblical literature. Nonetheless, the Hebrew Bible bears some remarkable features that set it apart from other sacred writings that existed in the ancient world.

When and How Did Modern Westerners Learn about Egyptian Myth?

In the western world today, Egyptian mythology is roughly as well-known as Greek or Norse mythology. This, however, was not always the case. Two hundred years ago, even the foremost western experts on ancient Egypt knew relatively little about Egyptian myth and the vast majority of non-academic westerners knew nothing at all about the subject. It has only been over the past couple hundred years that academic knowledge on the subject has grown and become widely disseminated. In this post, I will discuss the fascinating history of how westerners became aware of Egyptian myth.

Why Were Elaborate Floor Mosaics More Common in Antiquity Than Today?

Ancient Greek and Roman wealthy homes often bore elaborate and beautiful floor mosaics, many of which depicted gods, heroes, and mythic and historical scenes in exquisite detail. Many such mosaics have survived to the present day, are displayed in museums and art collections all over the world, and are justly admired as great works of art.

Some people have recently wondered why floor mosaics were so popular in antiquity and why they are no longer as popular today as they were back then. In this post, I will attempt to answer this question. Along the way, we will take a deep dive into the ancient and modern economics of art and artistic labor.