Tales of Times Forgotten

Everyone has heard the beautiful, heart-warming tale of how, in 1776, General George Washington, George Ross, and Robert Morris personally visited the humble Philadelphia seamstress Betsy Ross and showed her a rough sketch for the first flag of the United States of America, to which she made a few minor alterations before sewing it. It is a good story, which is why we tell it. Unfortunately, it is also completely apocryphal; there is no solid historical evidence linking Betsy Ross to the first American flag aside from a highly implausible story told by her grandson nearly a century later.

Continue reading “Betsy Ross Did Not Design the First American Flag”

We all love the Fourth of July. It is a time for fireworks, family, and patriotism. Of course, you should probably be aware that some of the things we consider patriotic today have a somewhat dodgy history. Take the Pledge of Allegiance, for instance. Surely nothing says American patriotism like the Pledge of Allegiance… until you remember that it was actually written by a socialist whose vision for America was quite different from what we admire today.

Continue reading “The Pledge of Allegiance Was Actually Written by a Socialist”

Our earliest sources on the historical Sokrates–Platon and Xenophon–tell us surprisingly little about Sokrates’s marriage. Sokrates’s wife Xanthippe briefly appears in one scene in Platon’s dialogue Phaidon, where she runs up to Sokrates and cries on his shoulder just before he is about to drink the cup of hemlock that will kill him. Sokrates orders Kriton to send someone to take her home so that she will not be there when he is forced to commit suicide. She is never mentioned ever again in any of Platon’s other dialogues.

Continue reading “Xanthippe: The Bizarre, Yet Ever-Worsening State of Sokrates’s Marriage”

We Americans like to think that our literature is unique and that, when we declared independence from Britain, we also declared our independence from European literature. This was not the case. The quintessential American story of Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving bears striking similarities to the ancient Greek story of Epimenides of Knossos.

Continue reading “The Ancient Greek Rip Van Winkle”

In his book The Travels of Marco Polo, Rustichello da Pisa tells a story claiming that there was once a man known as the “Old Man of the Mountain,” who built a garden in the mountains and designed it exactly according to the precise description of Paradise given in the Koran. He would then abduct people, drug them with hashish, and take them to the garden. Then, when they woke up, he would convince them that it was Paradise itself. Then, after they had lived in the garden for a while, the Old Man of the Mountain would tell them that they needed to start holding up their end of the bargain; he would send them out to go kill certain people, telling them that, if they died in the attempt, they would only return to the garden. These people were known as hashishiyyin, which is Arabic for “hashish-smokers.” This is the origin of our modern English word assassin.

Continue reading “Brutal Words: The Unique Origins of Words Associated With Cruelty”

I have already written about how the modern story of “Cinderella” is probably derived from the ancient Greek story of Rhodopis, but the story of the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” also originates from ancient Greece.

Continue reading “The Ancient Greek Sorcerer’s Apprentice”

Disney cartoons are an American cultural icon. Sadly, Disney has a habit of taking age-old stories, changing everything about them, and making cartoons of them. Then, unfortunately, the Disney version somehow automatically becomes the “official,” orthodox version of the story, even though the Disney versions often have very little at all in common with the originals.

Continue reading “Misunderstood Myths, Part Six: The Moirai and the Graiai”