Tales of Times Forgotten

Don’t Blame “Paganism” for the United States’ Problems

On December 25th, 2023, The Atlantic published an op-ed by David Wolpe, a prominent American rabbi, titled “The Return of the Pagans.” In the op-ed, Wolpe asserts that both the political left and right in the United States have embraced fundamentally “pagan” ideas about the world (by which he means ideas derived from and characteristic of the traditional non-monotheistic religions of the ancient Mediterranean, particularly Greece and Rome) and that this supposed “pagan” influence is the cause of many of the problems that the United States faces today.

For those who don’t know, I’m a graduate student in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies and my main research focus is ancient Greek religion. Given this interest, I was quite intrigued to see an article published in a major news outlet with a title proclaiming that “paganism” has returned. Sadly, I soon found that Wolpe’s idea of “paganism” is a wildly inaccurate caricature that has more to do with nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophies than with the non-monotheistic religions of the ancient Mediterranean world. The op-ed got under my skin, so I decided to let it furnish an opportunity to educate interested readers about what ancient polytheistic religions were like—and, just as importantly, what they weren’t like.

The Ancient Greeks Invented the Fashion Doll Over 2,500 Years Before Barbie

In my characteristic fashion, I am behind on contemporary popular culture. The movie Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig, came out in July of this year while I was in Greece. It attracted much discussion online and became both the highest-grossing film of this year and the highest-grossing comedy film of all time, but I only just recently watched it for the first time on HBO Max, over five months after it came out. Overall, I found it entertaining and surprisingly thoughtful for a comedy based on a brand of children’s toy.

The film begins with a parody documentary sequence in which the disembodied narrator (played by Helen Mirren) hyperbolically claims that, before Barbie, the only dolls that ever existed were baby dolls. I expect that most viewers will easily recognize this claim as satire, but, in case anyone takes it seriously, I thought I should point out that dolls of adult women with fully articulable joints who could be dressed in various outfits were actually all the rage among children in ancient Greece two thousand five hundred years ago. We know this because literally hundreds of dolls of this kind have survived to the present day and, today, they are held in museum collections all over the world.

Update: I Have Applied to PhD Programs Again! (December 16th, 2023)

Hello everyone! Some readers may have noticed that I haven’t made any posts in nearly a month. That’s because I’ve been busy this month writing the first chapter of my master’s thesis and applying to PhD programs. Long-time readers may recall that, two years ago, in 2021, during the final year of my bachelor’s degree at IU Bloomington, I applied to four PhD programs. Unfortunately, as I described in this post, none of those programs made me an offer of admission. This led me to go into the MA program in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at Brandeis University, which I had applied to as a backup option in case none of the programs I applied to accepted me.

I am expected to graduate with my MA in May 2024, so I have now applied to PhD programs again for the 2024-2025 academic year. This time, I am applying to the PhD programs in classics at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, Princeton University, the University of California Berkeley, and the University of California Los Angeles. As of the time I am writing this, I have submitted my applications for all of these programs except UCLA, which has a later deadline than the others. I think I am in a much stronger position this time than I was last time, I have applied to more programs than I did the first time, and I am hoping that this time at least one program will make me an offer of admission. We will see how this turns out.

Persephone Is in the Underworld During the Summer, Not the Winter

For those of us who live in the northern hemisphere, winter will soon be upon us. The ancient Greek myth of the goddess Persephone, who spends one third of the year in the underworld and the remaining two thirds of the year with her mother Demeter, is a well-known etiological myth (i.e., a myth that explains how things came to be the way they are) for the changing of the seasons.

Most modern people who know the myth of Persephone think that the ancient Greeks believed that she was in the underworld during the winter and with Demeter for the rest of the year. Even many professional classicists think this. I, however, like some other scholars, am convinced that this is incorrect. The surviving ancient sources for the myth are unclear about which part of the year Persephone spends in the underworld and it makes far more sense given everything we know about the ancient Greek agricultural and religious calendars to conclude that the Greeks believed that she was in the underworld during the summer, not the winter.

Most Memorable Opening Lines in Ancient Literature

Today, if one looks around on the internet, one can find all kinds of lists that purport to present the most memorable opening lines “of all time,” but, invariably, these opening lines are always from famous works of English literature written within the past two centuries. I have therefore decided to compile my own list of most memorable opening lines—but only for works of ancient literature.

I have chosen which lines to include in this post based on how impactful and memorable they are, not on how famous they are. As a result, many of the works I have included on this list are not well known to the general public. Meanwhile, I have omitted the opening lines of certain works that are extremely famous, but not especially memorable in their own right, such as the opening lines of Plato’s Republic and Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, which are famous because the works they come from are famous, not because they are especially memorable. I have chosen opening lines from works produced in a range of ancient cultures, including ancient Mesopotamia, the Levant, India, Greece, and Rome, and have chosen openings that I find memorable for a variety of different reasons.

My Exciting Adventure in Greece, Part 8

This is the post that many of my readers have waited months for: the eighth and final installment in my series of posts about my experience in Greece as part of the 2023 ASCSA Summer Session in June and July of this year. (For those who may have missed them, here are the previous installments: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh.)

In this installment, I will describe how I gave my final site report about the temple of an obscure goddess who may be of pre-Greek Aegean origin and whose name ancient etymologists interpreted to mean “the Unseen One,” how some other students and I found a bunch of ancient potsherds in a random hole we dug, how I feared my life while walking to Plato’s Akademia, and how I returned home to the United States, forever changed by my time in Greece.

No, the Roman Emperor Hadrian Didn’t Invent Palestine

At this point, I’m sure that all my readers are well aware of the recent events in Israel-Palestine. I don’t intend to talk about those events on this blog, in part because I am not an expert on the present-day geopolitics of the region and, right now, a lot of public information about what is happening there is incomplete or unreliable. The first and foremost purpose of this blog is to inform and educate my readers; the last thing I want to do is misinform or misdirect them. The danger of misinformation is especially great when it comes to present-day political situations that hold serious, far-reaching impacts for a large number of people.

I do, however, wish to address a factually incorrect claim that, for years, I have seen and heard various people make in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict, which pertains directly to my own expertise in ancient Greece and Rome. Namely, a lot of people have claimed that the Roman emperor Hadrian, who ruled for twenty-one years from his accession in 117 until his death in 138 CE, was the first to apply the name Palestine to the entire land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River when he renamed the land that was previously known as Judaea “Syria Palaestina,” supposedly specifically in order to punish the Jewish people for the Bar Kokhba revolt (lasted 132 – 136 CE).

In reality, the name Palestine etymologically derives from the Greek name Παλαιστίνη (Palaistínē), which Greek-language authors were already regularly using as a name for the geographic region of the southern Levant that lies between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River as far back as the fifth century BCE—over six hundred years before Hadrian. Roman authors writing in Latin and Jewish authors writing in Greek were likewise already using this name long before Hadrian was born. Furthermore, although Hadrian did combine Judaea into a province which bore the official name Syria Palaestina sometime around the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt, his precise motives for doing so are far from clear.

No, Emily Wilson Isn’t the First Woman Ever to Translate Homer

If you pay any attention at all to news related to the ancient world (which, if you’re reading this blog, you probably do), you’ve most likely already heard that the publisher W. W. Norton has just released a new translation of the Iliad by Emily Wilson, the professor at the University of Pennsylvania who became a household name for her translation of the Odyssey, which came out in 2018. Both of Wilson’s translations have received widespread acclaim, both have now become commercial bestsellers, and they have gotten people who don’t normally read ancient Greek literature reading and talking about the Homeric epics. It’s definitely an exciting time to be someone who studies ancient Greece.

For better or worse, the media narrative surrounding Wilson’s translations has fixated heavily on the fact that she is the first woman to commercially publish a translation of the entire Odyssey in English. This has led to an incorrect impression among lay readers that Wilson is the first woman ever to translate Homer. In reality, as Wilson herself has repeatedly and emphatically pointed out, this is not true. Read on to learn more about some of the other women who translated Homer before her.

Have Scholars Really Only Just Now Figured Out That Sappho’s Supposed Husband’s Name Is Dirty Joke?

As many readers are already aware, I am a queer woman who is currently a graduate student in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies. For a couple of years now, I have been following the subreddit r/SapphoAndHerFriend, which is named after the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho, who is known for her homoerotic work, and is dedicated to showcasing humorous or mildly infuriating examples of queer erasure. It’s an amusing space. Unfortunately, people are constantly making posts in the subreddit about Sappho that are, shall we say, factually dubious. For instance, users frequently make posts in which they make fun of “historians” for having supposedly believed for ages in total earnestness that Sappho had a husband named “Kerkylas of Andros,” which they say translates as “Dick Allcock from the Isle of Man.”

Posts of this kind are a frequent occurrence, but this one happens to be the most recent. These posts regularly ignore the fact that the claim they mock “historians” for having supposedly believed only occurs in one extremely late, notoriously uncritical premodern source and modern scholars have generally recognized it as an obscene joke for nearly 170 years. Additionally, I think that people should be aware of some rather discomforting information about the man whose translation of the name they keep sharing.

Why Do Men Spend So Much Time Thinking about the Roman Empire?

I’m a woman and I think about ancient Rome every day—but that’s not surprising, since I’m a graduate student in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies. Thinking about ancient Rome is an intrinsic part of what I do. What is rather surprising, though, is the fact that a viral trend has arisen on TikTok for women to ask their male partners and relatives how much they think about the Roman Empire. Invariably, the men respond that they think about it frequently and the women to act shocked to learn this.

Those who have been reading my blog for a while know that I am not on TikTok, so they may be surprised to find me writing about a trend that originated there. The trend, however, has gone so viral that it has spilled over onto Twitter—a platform which I do occasionally check up on, even though it is generally a cesspit and has only grown even more toxic since Elon took over. Additionally, a whole host of media outlets, including The Washington Post, Insider, The Independent, The New York Post, The National Review, and Wired, have all published articles about it.

Since everyone is apparently talking about this trend, in this post, I intend to explore and answer two closely related, but distinct, questions. First, what about the Roman Empire makes it seem (at least on a purely anecdotal basis) to be especially interesting to men? Second, why, in this particular historical moment, is a viral social media trend constructing interest in ancient Rome as specifically a masculine trait?