Tales of Times Forgotten

Why Were Women Prohibited from Fighting in Most Ancient Societies?

Someone on Quora recently asked the question “Is there a real reason why ancient armies didn’t have female soldiers, or was it just sexism?” This question immediately triggered a whole flurry of defensive replies from various male military history buffs proclaiming all the reasons why women are supposedly naturally unsuited for ancient warfare and why it was supposedly perfectly logical for ancient militaries to exclude women.

The most upvoted answer to the question is this one, written by a man named Alex Mann, arguing that women are naturally physically shorter, weaker, and smaller than men, that pregnancy and menstruation would hinder them from fighting, and that they would be an overall detriment to any ancient army. The answer currently has 2,722 upvotes and hundreds of comments, many of them showering praise on the author for his supposed clarity and perceptiveness.

Other men have provided answers drawing similar conclusions. The arguments that these men present, however, are demonstrably quite shoddy. In this essay, I intend to demonstrate that there is, in fact, no logical reason for an army to have a rule categorically excluding all women and that the real reason why women were excluded from ancient militaries is indeed simply sexism.

What Did Jesus Really Say about Homosexuality?

None of the canonical gospels portray Jesus as having said anything whatsoever about homosexuality. You can scour every last line of the four canonical gospels and you won’t find anything that can be unambiguously interpreted as a reference to homosexuality in any form. As far as the canonical gospels are concerned, Jesus did not condemn homosexuality, but he did not endorse it either.

Fascinatingly, though, it is possible that there may have been an alternate, non-canonical version of the Gospel of Mark in circulation in the second century CE that implied that Jesus himself had sexual relations with men. The existence of this possible version of the Gospel of Mark is controversial and many scholars regard it as a flat-out hoax. Nonetheless, it is worth talking about—even if only for the sake of curiosity.

Athenian Democracy Wasn’t Really That Great

Athenian democracy was one of the earliest well-documented governments of its kind in human history. It is hard to convey how radical and amazing it was in the context of the ancient Mediterranean world. Unfortunately, as a result of the significance it held in its historical context, today, people often misguidedly regard it as the ideal, original democracy that all modern democracies should strive to imitate. We should admire Athenian democracy as one important early step in the development of democratic government, but we should also recognize that it was not totally unique even in the Greek world for its time and that it was deeply flawed in ways that are, unfortunately, often overlooked in modern panegyrics of its greatness.

Contrary to popular belief, Athens was not the first Greek polis (i.e., city-state) to adopt a democratic constitution. Moreover, the vast majority of the Athenian population was formally excluded from participating in the democracy. Democratic Athens was also aggressively imperialistic and routinely sought to dominate and oppress other Greek poleis and, on multiple occasions, it even committed outright genocide. Finally, Athenian democracy was much shorter-lived than many people realize.

Here’s Why ‘The 1776 Report’ Is Nonsense

On Monday, 18 January 2021, the Trump administration released a document titled The 1776 Report, written by the 1776 Commission, an advisory commission created by President Donald Trump on 17 September 2020 with the explicit purpose to promote “patriotic education.” The report attempts to portray Founding Fathers who owned slaves as abolitionists, attempts to portray Civil Rights leaders as conservatives, and attempts to portray “progressivism” and “identity politics” as dangerous threats to “America’s principles” on par with slavery and fascism.

Professional scholars of United States history of all political leanings immediately and universally denounced The 1776 Report as wildly inaccurate, jingoistic propaganda. It would be all too easy to dismiss it as not even worth debunking. After all, President Joe Biden signed an executive order which rescinded the 1776 Commission and removed The 1776 Report from the official White House webpage on his very first day in office.

Unfortunately, I fear that simply choosing to ignore The 1776 Report would be naïve. Tens of thousands of children across the United States who attend conservative private schools or are homeschooled are fed narratives identical to those presented in The 1776 Report through inaccurate textbooks published by conservative Evangelical Protestant book publishers, such as BJU Press and Abeka.

Supporters of these textbooks and the narratives they present will undoubtedly try to use The 1776 Report to legitimize their claims. They will try to portray it as a definitive account written by renowned experts working under the commission of the United States government. Therefore, in this article, I want to briefly talk about a few of the reasons why the report is wildly dishonest and untrustworthy.

Fascinating Facts about Ancient Sparta

Most people today are familiar with the idea of the ancient Spartans as a warrior people who spurned luxury and devoted themselves to military training. The Spartans have a substantial presence in modern popular culture, partly due to the 2006 fantasy action film 300, which, as I discuss in this article I published in November 2019, greatly distorts the true history of Sparta in order to convey a deeply racist, misogynistic, ableist, and fascist message.

In this article, though, I don’t want to talk about 300. Instead, I want to talk about some aspects of ancient Spartan history, society, and culture that are, for the most part, fairly obscure that I think should be more widely known. For instance, did you know that there are surviving works of ancient Spartan poetry? Or did you know that Spartiate men were known in antiquity for wearing their hair in long braids that came all the way down to their mid-backs? Or did you know that other Greek people in antiquity stereotyped the Spartans as anal fetishists? Read on to learn more!

Did the Dorian Invasion Really Happen?

If you read any book about ancient Greek history written before the 1970s, there’s one event that will probably be discussed at length that any book about Greek history written after the 2000s will probably tell you never even happened at all. The event I’m talking about is, of course, the so-called “Dorian invasion.” The story goes that, in around the twelfth century BCE, a warrior people from the north known as the Dorians invaded mainland Greece and conquered large areas of it, replacing the peoples who had been there before and eventually becoming the ancestors of many Greeks, including the Spartans.

This narrative of the Dorian invasion was largely cobbled together in the nineteenth century by German philologists using vague and contradictory tales recorded in various ancient Greek sources as evidence in order to explain the distribution of Classical Greek dialects. In the twentieth century, white supremacists and Nazis exploited the narrative in order to portray northern Europeans as the true Greeks while denying the Greekness of actual Greek people. In the mid-twentieth century, however, scholars began to question the evidence supporting the narrative and, by the end of the twentieth century, most scholars came to accept that the Dorian invasion was a figment of the scholarly imagination.

Was the “Green Man” Really an Ancient Pagan Deity?

If you’ve read anything about paganism, you’ve probably heard of a figure known as the “Green Man.” This is a name that is commonly applied to an artistic motif that often appears in decorative carvings in churches in western Europe, depicting a male face surrounded by leaves and foliage. In many depictions, the man is shown with his mouth open, disgorging foliage from it.

In modern popular culture, the Green Man is widely portrayed as an extremely ancient and extremely powerful “pagan” nature deity who was supposedly of immense importance to pre-Christian cultures throughout Europe and the Middle East. In reality, the Green Man is nothing of the sort and the whole notion of him as any kind of deity is actually less than a century old.

Here’s What the Costumes and Flags on Display at the Pro-Trump Insurrection Mean

On 6 January 2021, a mob of violent, pro-Trump insurrectionists stormed the United States Capitol building in Washington D.C., forcing both houses of Congress to evacuate. These insurrectionists wanted to force Congress to overturn the vote of electoral college, which voted in favor of Joe Biden becoming the next president of the United States. Thankfully, after several hours of fighting, the rebels were eventually driven out of the Capitol. Congress has now ratified the votes of the electoral college, confirming Joe Biden’s inauguration on 20 January 2021.

Many of the insurrectionists at the Capitol were dressed in unusual costumes and carrying various flags. Many people are confused about why they dressed in this manner and what their costumes signify. Obviously, the real concern here should be the fact that these insurrectionists literally attempted a coup. Nonetheless, I think it is worth examining some of the iconography that was on display in order to get a sense of the kind of narrative that these people are trying to promote.

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.