Tales of Times Forgotten

Unicorns in the Bible

You may have heard at some point that unicorns are mentioned nine times in the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. This fact has been used by some skeptics to argue that the Bible is ridiculous, which has, in turn, led some fundamentalist Protestants to defend the Bible by making the incredible argument that unicorns may have actually existed at some point in the past.

If you look at the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament, however, you won’t find anything at all about unicorns. Unicorns are only mentioned in the King James Version due to a roughly 2,200-year-old mistranslation originating in the Greek Septuagint. This mistranslation has been corrected in most modern translations of the Bible, including the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) and the New International Version (NIV).

What Would Really Happen If We Abolished the Police?

Right now, there are a lot of people who are advocating for police departments to be reformed or defunded, but there is another idea that a very small number of people have begun advocating, which is the idea that the entire police force should be just permanently abolished altogether.

This idea seems shocking at first. Most people assume that, if the police force were completely abolished, the result would be complete chaos and people would go out murdering other people in the streets with no one to stop them and it would be like The Purge. This is, however, extraordinarily unlikely.

The fact of the matter is that we can actually have a pretty good idea of what society would be like if we abolished the police, since—believe it or not—for most of human history, there was no police force. In fact, the idea of having a police force is actually fairly modern. Nonetheless, as I will discuss in this article, permanently abolishing the police is still probably not a good idea—just not for the reasons most people think.

The Hagia Sophia Is Now a Mosque

The Hagia Sophia in Constantinople was built by the Byzantines in the sixth century AD as a Christian church. It was the largest and arguably the most famous Christian church in the world for nearly a thousand years. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, it was converted into a mosque and, after the establishment of the modern Republic of Turkey, it was converted into a museum.

Then, on 10 July 2020, amidst international outcry, the Turkish government officially converted it back into a mosque. On 21 August 2020, the Chora Church, another famous Byzantine church in İstanbul that had previously been converted into a mosque and then a museum, was converted back into a mosque as well.

These decisions, in particular the decision regarding the Hagia Sophia, have triggered a great deal of international debate. Unfortunately, there is a very long and complex history behind this discussion that is often left out. In order to fully understand this debate, we need to talk about the history of the Hagia Sophia, who built it, why it was turned into a mosque to begin with, and why it was later turned into a museum.

Transgender and Intersex People in the Ancient World

It is popularly believed that transgender, intersex, and other gender-nonconforming people only started existing fairly recently and that they are an aberration of modern times. This could not possibly be further from the truth. It is true that the word “transgender” is fairly new, since it was first coined in 1965, but there have been people whom we might consider transgender ever since at least the beginning of recorded history.

In this article, I want to talk about some examples of figures from ancient history, mythology, and literature whom we might consider transgender, intersex, or otherwise gender-nonconforming. Some of these people are fictional; others of them are historical. Not all of them fit perfectly under our modern definition of “transgender,” but all of them are of interest to the discussion of transgender history.

Regarding pronoun use, in the following article, I will mostly be using the English equivalents of the pronouns that are actually used in the ancient sources, which may or may not be the pronouns that the individuals discussed here would have preferred to have been used. Unfortunately, the people I will be discussing in this article who actually existed have all been dead for thousands of years, so it is impossible for us to ask what their preferences are.

No, Ancient Greek Slaves Did Not Like Being Enslaved

It seems like it should be obvious that slaves in ancient Greece did not like being enslaved. Unfortunately, things that seem like they should be obvious are often things that many people don’t find obvious at all. There is a disturbingly widespread claim that slaves in ancient Greece were happy to be enslaved and that they preferred slavery over freedom.

This claim recently received attention among classicists due to a description for a lecture by an esteemed classics professor for The Great Courses Daily, which begins with the shocking assertion “Slavery was the ideal condition for some people in ancient Greece.”

The claim has been around for a very long time, however. It has been widely disseminated through books and other media and, despite the valiant efforts of some classicists to point out that ancient slavery was cruel and unjust, many people continue to regard it as benign or at worst a necessary evil.

What Does ‘Habeas Corpus’ Literally Mean in Latin?

The Latin phrase Habeas corpus is used to refer to a legal writ dictating that a person who has been detained or imprisoned must be brought before a court to determine whether or not they have been detained lawfully. The writ is intended to prevent individuals from being indefinitely imprisoned without trial. If you ask a lawyer, most of them will tell you that Habeas corpus means “Produce the body.” This is not an inaccurate translation, but it is not the most literal translation either.

In addition to the standard translation, you can find all sorts of other claims about what the phrase supposedly literally means on the internet. Unfortunately, these claims nearly always come from people who don’t know Latin and who have managed to severely bungle their “literal” translations.

Are Hoplites Named After Their Shields?

It is commonly stated that ancient Greek hoplites are named after the kind of large, round, wooden shield they carried, which was supposedly known as a hoplon. This is not correct, however. In reality, the word hoplon refers not only to the hoplite’s shield, but to all his equipment collectively.

Did Medieval Christians Really Crucify Heretics?

There seems to be a very popular misconception that, in Europe during the Middle Ages, fanatical Christians went around crucifying anyone they suspected of heresy. This trope of medieval Christian crucifixions seems to be especially common in television shows with anti-religious agendas, where the writers are eager to portray medieval Christians in the worst possible light.

It’s easy to see how this misconception might have arisen. After all, medieval Christians did talk a lot about crucifixion because of the crucifixion of Jesus and they do have a well-earned reputation for dealing harshly with those accused of heresy. In historical reality, though, crucifixion was never used as a form of punishment by Christians in Europe during the Middle Ages.

Was Caligula Really Insane?

The Roman emperor Caligula, who ruled from 16 March 37 AD until his assassination on 24 January 41 AD, is undoubtedly one of the most notorious Roman emperors. Unfortunately, over the centuries, a tremendous mythology has grown up around him and many of the things that are popularly believed about him are simply not true.

Caligula is best known to the general public as an insane, sexually depraved emperor who thought he was a living god, murdered a little boy for coughing too much, had sex with all three of his sisters, murdered his sister who was pregnant with his child and ate the fetus, turned his palace into a brothel, drank expensive pearls dissolved in vinegar, made his horse a senator, and waged war against Neptune to collect seashells as “loot.”

These are all stories that have accumulated over the years. Most of them are definitely or probably false; others are based on historical facts but have been greatly misrepresented. Caligula was many things—including a jerk, a narcissist, a sadist, and a tyrant—but he probably wasn’t really insane.

Sean Hannity Still Doesn’t Know Latin—But Does He Read My Blog?

Those who have been reading my articles for a while may recall that I published an article on 16 May 2020 titled “Sean Hannity Does Not Know Latin” in which I extensively made fun of Sean Hannity’s book Live Free Or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink, for the fact that the pre-released cover image had the thoroughly garbled and unintelligible Latin motto “Vivamus vel libero perit Americae” emblazoned across the bottom.

In my article, I noted that it was evident that whoever came up with that motto had simply typed the phrase “Live free or America dies” into Google Translate and slapped the garbled nonsense that spewed out straight onto the front cover of the book. (Apparently no one told them that Google Translate is absolutely terrible when it comes to dead languages.)

Now, as it happens, the very book whose Latin motto I criticized is set to be released in two days. Curiously, the unintelligible Latin word salad has vanished from the front cover and been replaced with the grammatically correct motto “Vivamus liberi ne America pereat,” which neatly translates into English to mean, “Let us live free so that America will not die.” This makes me wonder: Did someone at Threshold Editions read my blog post and realize they needed to fix the bad Latin?