Tales of Times Forgotten

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?

My Exciting Adventure in Greece, Part 7

Hello everyone! Even though I’ve been back in the U.S. for over a month now and the fall 2023 semester has already started, I still want to finish my account of my time in Greece this summer. Thus, this is the seventh installment in my ongoing series of posts about my experience in the 2023 ASCSA Summer Session, covering the period from Monday, July 17th through Thursday, July 20th. (Here are the previous installments, for those who may have missed them: first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth.)

This will be the second to last post in this series; once the series is finished, I will return to my usual research posts. In this installment, I will describe how I went inside the Kasta tomb, how I got heat exhaustion in Thessaloniki, how I visited an ancient sanctuary of Zeus under the shadow of Mount Olympos, how I saw the site of the famous Battle of Thermopylai, and how our bus driver got lost in Athens on our way back to the school.

My Exciting Adventure in Greece, Part 6

This is the sixth installment in my ongoing series of posts about my experience in the 2023 ASCSA Summer Session, covering the period from Thursday, July 13th, to Sunday, July 16th. (Here are the previous installments, for those who may have missed them: first, second, third, fourth, and fifth.)

In this installment, I will describe how I saw the ancient site of Delphi and the archaeological museum there, how I saw the hanging monasteries of Meteora, how I saw the tomb of (probably) none other than King Philippos II of Makedonia, the father of Alexander the Great, as well as its spectacular contents, which are perhaps the closest ancient Greek equivalent to the Egyptian treasures of Tutankhamun, and, finally, how I saw the birthplace of Alexander himself.

My Exciting Adventure in Greece, Part 5 (August 9th, 2023)

This post is the fifth installment in my ongoing series about my experience in the 2023 ASCSA Summer Session, covering the period from Sunday, July 9th, to Wednesday, July 12th. (Here are the previous installments, for those who may have missed them: first, second, third, and fourth.)

This post will describe, among many other things, how I went back to the Akropolis for the last time in my adventure, how I visited the ancient quarry where the Athenians quarried the stones they used to build the monuments on the Akropolis and a cave at the quarry that was a sanctuary of the god Pan in antiquity and is known today as the site of all kinds of supposed paranormal activity, how I visited two of the most famous battlefields in Greek history, and how I visited an often-overlooked ancient city that, for a brief period in the fourth century BCE, became the most powerful in mainland Greece, surpassing both Athens and Sparta. It will conclude with my arrival at Delphi, which was one of the most important sanctuaries in the ancient Greek world.