Tales of Times Forgotten

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.

My Exciting Adventure in Greece, Part 4 (July 28th, 2023)

Hello everyone! As of two days ago, I am now back in the United States after having spent the past just over six weeks in Greece taking part in the 2023 ASCSA Summer Session. Unfortunately, while I was in Greece, I was so busy that I was not really able to keep up with my blog of my experience. Now that I am back in the U.S., though, I intend to continue posting my account of my experience until I have covered the entire six weeks. Partly on the advice of my parents, from this point onward, I intend to break up my account into shorter, more frequent posts than I have been previously.

This post is the fourth installment in my ongoing series, covering the period of Tuesday, July 4th, through Saturday, July 8th. (Here are the previous three installments: first, second, and third.) In this installment, I will describe how I got to see behind the scenes at an archaeological excavation with restricted access, how I got to go inside an astoundingly well-preserved ancient Greek temple that very few people even know exists, and how I participated in a footrace in the stadium of the ancient Olympic Games at Olympia.

My Exciting Adventure in Greece, Part 3 (July 11th, 2023)

Hello! This is the third installment in my ongoing blog of my experience in the ASCSA Summer Session for summer 2023, covering the period of Wednesday, June 21st through Monday, July 3rd. The first installment can be found here and the second installment can be found here.

In this installment, I will describe how I (among many other things) saw the mountain underneath which Zeus is said to have been raised by nymphs, tried octopus, hiked to the top of the Akrokorinth, ran in a footrace in the ancient stadium of the Nemean Games, recited ancient Greek poetry in the ancient Greek Theater of Epidauros, went down an over-three-millennia-old tunnel, and tried alcohol for the first time in Sparta. There will, of course, be plenty of photos of the various sites, monuments, and artworks that I have seen.

My Exciting Adventure in Greece, Part 2 (June 20th, 2023)

Hello everyone! I’m making this post to give a further update about all the exciting things I’ve been doing in the past week in Greece. This will be the second installment in my ongoing blog of my experience in the ASCSA Summer Session for summer 2023, covering the period of Wednesday, June 14th, through Tuesday, June 20th. The first installment can be found here. In this installment, I will describe how I (among many other things) went inside the Parthenon, walked in the ruins of a 3,500-year-old Minoan city, hiked through the Gorge of Dead, and went swimming in the Aegean Sea.

My Exciting Adventure in Greece, Part 1 (June 13th, 2023)

As regular readers of this blog are already aware from this post I made back in early March, this summer, I am participating in the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA)’s six-week Summer Session in Greece, which began yesterday (Monday, June 12th) and will continue until July 26th. This is not only my first time ever being in Greece, but also my first time ever visiting any country other than the United States, so it is a very new and exciting experience for me. I have been obsessed with Greece for over a decade now and have wanted to go there for just as long. Now, for the first time, I am finally here.

The program is intensive and, as a result, I will not have time to research and write my usual variety of long, heavily-researched blog posts while I am taking part in it. Instead of writing my usual research posts, I have decided to write short updates about what I have been doing and seeing in Greece, along with photos I have taken myself. Thus, for the next six weeks, this blog will temporarily become a travel blog. After I go back to the U.S. near the end of July, I will resume my usual posting.

How Did Ancient Greek Women Make Themselves Look Seductive?

Imagine that you’re a woman in ancient Greece and, for some reason, you find yourself in a situation where you need (or want) to seduce someone. How would you go about doing it? What kind of clothes or cosmetics would you wear to do it? Some readers may be surprised to learn that there are actually a significant number of surviving texts from ancient Greece that describe in considerable detail how goddesses and mortal women made themselves look sexy in order to seduce people and, in this post, I will put my years of classics education to excellent use by introducing all my wonderful readers to them.

In general, these texts indicate that, if a woman wanted to look sexually attractive in order to seduce someone, she might engage in preparations such as bathing herself, anointing her skin with oil, putting on perfume, dressing herself in beautiful, expensive, and sometimes diaphanous clothing, putting on ornate and expensive jewelry, powdering her face with white lead to make herself look paler, painting alkanet dye rouge on her cheeks to make them look rosier, and removing her body hair.

The Most Twisted Scene in Any Ancient Greek Novel

It’s no secret that ancient Greek literature is full of all kinds of twisted and disturbing stories. I even previously wrote a post on this blog about some such stories in classical myth back in September 2019. There are, however, some truly messed-up incidents in ancient Greek literature that are not well known. In this post, I want to discuss an obscure episode of this nature that I think more people should hear.

Sometime around the second century CE or thereabouts, the Greek writer Xenophon of Ephesos (who is not to be confused with Xenophon of Athens, the much more famous Athenian writer of the fourth century BCE) wrote a novel known as the Ephesiaka or Ephesian Tale. The novel is, for the most part, not especially interesting. In fact, I think it’s probably the least interesting overall of all the surviving Greek novels; it mostly consists of a monotonous repetition of the same tropes that other ancient novelists do better. In book five, chapter one, however, Xenophon unexpectedly drops what is perhaps the freakiest moment in any surviving ancient Greek novel. It involves a man, a mummy, and some casual necrophilia.

The Lost Ancient Greek Novel with a Lesbian Love Plot in It

As I wrote about previously in this post from January 2020, the literary form of the novel (by which I mean a long work of narrative prose fiction) is vastly older than a lot of people believe. In fact, a significant number of novels written in the Ancient Greek and Latin languages by various authors from the first century BCE onward have survived to the present day. In fact, as of the time I am writing this, I have just completed a graduate-level course on the ancient Greek novel.

The central theme of many of the ancient Greek-language novels that have survived is ἔρως (érōs), which refers to sexual and romantic desire. (The ancient Greeks did not distinguish between the two.) The novels in which ἔρως is a central theme center around a pair of protagonists—invariably a young man and a young woman—who deeply and passionately erotically desire each other.

Many of the surviving novels, however, feature side characters who also have experiences with ἔρως, including some who either currently have or have previously had a partner of the same gender as themself. For instance, in the novel Leukippe and Kleitophon, written by Achilleus Tatios, a Greek-language writer from Alexandria in around the late second century CE, the male protagonist Kleitophon initially learns about ἔρως from his older male cousin Kleinias, who has a boyfriend. Fascinatingly, one ancient novel that has not survived—the Babyloniaka or Babylonian Tale, which a Syrian writer named Iamblichos wrote in the Greek language sometime between c. 165 and c. 180 CE—is known to have included a subplot involving two women characters who erotically desire one another and possibly end up marrying each other.

Jordan Peterson Does Not Understand Ancient Languages

I have written before on this blog about Jordan B. Peterson, a professor emeritus of psychology from the University of Toronto who rose to fame in 2016 when he publicly spoke out in opposition to an act passed by the Parliament of Canada to prohibit discrimination on the basis of “gender identity and expression.” Over the past seven years since then, he has attracted an enormous number of devoted followers as a self-help author and YouTube personality, appealing primarily to an audience of young, mostly white, straight, cisgender men from middle-class backgrounds who hold conservative political opinions. Peterson has used the platform he has built to publicly promote misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, and occasionally even white supremacist ideas.

In a blog post I wrote back in April 2021, I discuss in detail how Peterson routinely tries to use ancient myths and the Bible to support his various noxious viewpoints, despite the fact that he has absolutely no understanding of the academic study of these subjects and his interpretations of them display a profound ignorance of the historical and cultural contexts from which they originate and how ancient audiences understood them. I would recommend that readers who have not already read that post from two years ago go back and read it before continuing with this one, since this post is something of an addendum to that one.

In this post, I want to discuss the troubling way in which Peterson often tries to support his positions by making wildly unsupported claims about ancient languages, mainly Hebrew and Ancient Greek, despite the fact that he has never studied either of these languages in his life and he does not know them or any real information about them.

What Is the Correct Plural Form of ‘Octopus’?

It is something of a platitude among native speakers of English to say that our language is a motley one. It is a West Germanic language that has taken in an enormous amount of vocabulary from non-Germanic languages, especially French, Latin, and Ancient Greek. These other languages have systems for the pluralization of nouns that differ from the predominant system in English and, in some cases, users of English have favored pluralizing nouns derived from other languages according to the morphological rules of the word’s language of origin. As a result of this and other factors, pluralizing nouns in English is sometimes a controversial subject.

One of the most controversial of all English nouns to pluralize is octopus, which ultimately derives from the Greek word ὀκτώπους (oktṓpous), which is a compound of the Greek word ὀκτώ (oktṓ), meaning “eight,” and the noun πούς (poús), meaning “foot” or “leg.” English-speakers have tried to pluralize this noun in various ways, with the most popular plural forms being octopuses and octopi. But which plural for this word is the most pedantically correct? In this post, I will delve into the wonderful and exciting world of etymology to answer this question.