Tales of Times Forgotten

In Defense of Representative Emanuel Cleaver’s Prayer

On 3 January 2021, Emanuel Cleaver, an ordained United Methodist pastor who is currently serving as a Democratic representative for Missouri’s 5th congressional district, delivered the opening prayer for the 117th Congress. For the most part, it was an entirely conventional mainline Protestant prayer, asking for the usual sorts of things using the usual language. At the very end, though, Representative Cleaver added some remarks in an effort to make the prayer more inclusive, saying:

“May the Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon us and give us peace—peace in our families, peace across this land, and (dare I ask oh Lord?) peace even in this chamber for now and ever more. We ask it in the name of the monotheistic God, Brahma, and God known by many names by many different faiths. Amen, and awoman.”

Naturally, Republicans are extremely outraged over this (or at least pretending to be extremely outraged in order to make their supporters feel outraged). They have, however, expressed their outrage in ways that show they clearly don’t have particularly in-depth knowledge of Christian history or even the Bible itself.

What Is the Correct Pronunciation of “Gyro”?

In the United States, there is something of an intense debate over how the word gyro is supposed to be pronounced. Many people pronounce it /ˈdʒaɪɹoʊ/ (or, to use fauxnetics, “JAI-roh’). Many other people, however, insist that it is supposed to be pronounced /ˈjiː.ɹoʊ/ (that is, “YEE-roh” in fauxnetics). This debate even made it into the recent Disney Pixar animated film Soul, which includes a flashback scene in which a mischievous unborn soul named “Twenty-Two” is portrayed as arguing with the spirit of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes (lived c. 287 – c. 212 BCE) over the correct pronunciation of the word.

If I were an ordinary pedant, I would simply tell you that the pronunciation /ˈjiː.ɹoʊ/ is correct and that the people who say /ˈdʒaɪɹoʊ/ are wrong. I, however, am no ordinary pedant. On the contrary, I am the most obnoxious and loathsome kind of pedant: a pedant who has spent years studying the Greek language at the university level and who knows far too much about it for my own good.

Therefore, I feel the need to point out that neither of the pronunciations given above is reflective of the actual pronunciation of the word in Modern Greek, since the nominative singular form of the word in Greek is actually γύρος (gýros), with an /s/ sound on the end, and the nominative plural form is actually γύροι (gýroi). Moreover, I feel the need to explain exactly why the way the word is spelled in English is so different from how it is pronounced in Greek and to explain precisely how the debate over the pronunciation of the word arose.

The “Hero’s Journey” Is Nonsense

In 1949, an American author named Joseph Campbell published a book titled The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he claims that, fundamentally, all the great stories that human beings have ever told follow the exact same pattern, which is innate in the human consciousness and therefore present in every culture during every time period. In his book, he usually refers to this supposed pattern as “the monomyth” or “the hero’s journey.”

Campbell’s theories have now become thoroughly entrenched as orthodoxy in high school English literature classes all over the English-speaking world. Whenever teachers introduce students to mythology, the first thing they usually talk about is Joseph Campbell and the so-called “hero’s journey.”

Many people will be shocked, however, to learn that academic folklorists and scholars of ancient literature almost universally reject Campbell’s theories as nonsense—and for good reason. Campbell’s outline of the “hero’s journey” is so hopelessly vague that it is essentially useless for analyzing stories across cultures. It also displays ethnocentric, sexist, heteronormative, and cisnormative biases and it encourages people to ignore the ways in which stories are fundamentally shaped by the cultures and time periods in which they are produced.

Why Does Donald Trump Like Neoclassical Architecture So Much?

On 21 December 2020, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order titled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” which officially establishes the Neoclassical architectural style as the “preferred” style for all United States federal buildings. The same executive order disparages Modernist architecture as “ugly and inconsistent.”

In practical terms, Trump’s executive order doesn’t mean much, since it only establishes the Neoclassical style as a “preferred” style and does not outright ban other styles. Moreover, the executive order is almost certainly going to go in the paper shredder as soon as President-Elect Joe Biden assumes office on 20 January 2021.

Nonetheless, the fact that Trump apparently felt strongly enough about Neoclassical architecture to issue an executive order on the subject right before he leaves office raises all sorts of interesting questions about what Neoclassical architecture represents in a modern political context and why a man like Donald Trump would devote time to enshrine it as a “preferred style” for anything.

Was Socrates a Monotheist?

It seems to be widely believed among members of the general public that Socrates was some sort of monotheist. If you go on the Stack Exchange Philosophy website, there’s a question: “Was Socrates a monotheist?” As of the time I am writing this, three of the answers say that he was definitely a monotheist and one of them says that it’s an open question. Only two answers correctly say that he wasn’t a monotheist, but neither answer gives a detailed explanation how we know this.

Historically speaking, Socrates almost certainly believed in the existence of many deities—just like most other people in classical Athens. Unfortunately, modern readers who are accustomed to thinking about religion in monotheistic terms have a tendency to misinterpret passages from the Platonic dialogues as suggesting monotheism.

This problem is only made worse by the fact that some of the most widely used translations of the Platonic dialogues were produced by monotheistic scholars who were desperate to see Socrates as a monotheist and therefore deliberately translated the texts to make it sound like he was one.

How Was Saturnalia Celebrated in Ancient Rome?

Saturnalia is an ancient Roman holiday in honor of the god Saturnus that began on December 17th. The Romans believed that, in very ancient times, before Iupiter became the king of the deities, the cosmos had been ruled by Iupiter’s father Saturnus. They believed that the reign of Saturnus had been a “Golden Age,” in which all human beings had lived together in harmony and simplicity, and that Saturnalia was a temporary restoration of Saturnus’s reign on earth that could only last until the end of the festival.

I’ve written about Saturnalia before—usually in the context of debunking popular misconceptions about it being the source of modern American Christmas traditions. This year, however, I’ve decided to write about it again, focusing on what we know about how the holiday was actually celebrated.

Dr. Fauci Has a Classics Degree!

Dr. Anthony Fauci has been getting a lot of attention lately for his tireless work promoting public safety measures in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Polls consistently find that Dr. Fauci is by far the most trusted person in the United States on matters pertaining to COVID-19. An article published in The New Yorker on 20 April 2020 hails him as “America’s doctor.” On 10 December 2020, Time magazine named him a “Guardian of the Year,” along with “front-line health care workers.”

An interesting thing that many people don’t know about Dr. Anthony Fauci, though, is that he graduated in 1962 from the College of the Holy Cross not with a standard pre-med degree, but with Bachelor of Arts (BA) in classics with a pre-med track. In other words, Dr. Fauci has a degree in classical studies.

Did Leonidas Really Say “Molon Labe”?

Ancient Greek is not like Latin. There are dozens of Latin phrases—such as et cetera, ad hoc, alias, alter ego, de facto, de jure, and so on—that are commonly used in everyday conversation. By contrast, there are very few phrases from the ancient Greek language that ordinary people can even recognize in the original language. μολὼν λαβέ (molṑn labé) is one of those phrases. Literally, it means: “Having come, take.” More idiomatically, it can be translated as: “Come and take them.”

Most people have heard a story about this phrase. The story normally goes a bit like this: in 480 BCE, the armies of the Achaemenid Empire were attempting to conquer mainland Greece, so King Leonidas I of Sparta brought an army of three hundred brave Spartan warriors to stop the invading armies at the pass of Thermopylai in central Greece. Then, when King Xerxes I of the Achaemenid Empire ordered Leonidas and his soldiers to hand over their weapons, Leonidas supposedly replied with two words: “μολὼν λαβέ”—”Come and take them.”

This makes for a rather fine story. Historically speaking, however, this incident almost certainly never really happened. In fact, the earliest version of the story is not attested until over four hundred years after Leonidas’s death and that version of the story is very different from the version that most people know today—for one thing, it doesn’t even include the phrase “μολὼν λαβέ.”

Indiana Jones Is Actually a Villain

It may come as a surprise to some of my readers, given my interest in ancient history, that I never watched any of the Indiana Jones movies when I was a child. I was, of course, vaguely aware of them. I remember seeing advertisements for the VHS sets at the beginnings of some of the old VHS tapes of Disney films that my sister and I watched when we were growing up. I also remember watching the MythBusters “Indiana Jones Special” at one point. The first time I ever watched any of the actual films, though, was earlier this year.

Thus, even though Raiders of the Lost Ark came out eighteen years before I was born, by the time I actually watched the movie, I was already in college studying ancient history and had already taken multiple courses in real-life archaeology. The film is definitely entertaining if you’re looking for a cheesy, old-school adventure story and I appreciate how it has helped get people excited about archaeology. Unfortunately, it also promotes a lot of racist stereotypes and consistently fails to problematize the atrocious crimes committed by the protagonist.

You see, Indiana Jones is not just a terrible archaeologist; he’s also a despicable human being. He’s a criminal sociopath, a statutory rapist, a grave robber, a murderer, a destroyer of cultural heritage, and an enforcer of European colonialism. The only reason why anyone sees him as the hero is because his adversaries are literally insane Nazis who want to steal an ancient artifact and use it as a superweapon to commit genocide against the vast majority of the human race. Under any other circumstances, he would be the villain.

Where Does the Idea of a “Saint” Come From?

Most people today are familiar with the concept of a “saint,” but the question of when and how this concept arose is a very interesting one. The basic idea behind the Christian conception of sainthood can be traced all the way back to the writings of the Hebrew Bible, which contains stories about holy people using their special connection with God to perform miracles for the benefit of others.

This idea is expanded on in the writings of the New Testament and in other early Christian texts. Early Christian ideas about sainthood may have been influenced to some extent by similar Greek and Roman stories about holy men performing miracles. By late antiquity, a conception of sainthood similar to the one most people today are familiar with had developed. Although saints have become less prominent in western Christianity since the Protestant Reformation, ancient and medieval stories about saints continue to influence contemporary western culture.