Ancient Greek Ghost Stories, Part Four: The Boarded-Up Bathhouse

In his Life of Kimon, the Greek biographer and essayist Ploutarchos of Chaironeia tells one of the spookiest of all ancient Greek ghost stories.

The story is set in Ploutarchos’s own hometown of Chaironeia, a relatively small, peaceful village not far from Delphoi. The story takes place many years before Ploutarchos’s time when Chaironeia had just recently been annexed by the Roman Empire. In order to ensure that the inhabitants of the town remained docile and complicit with Roman occupation, the Romans had stationed a cohort of soldiers there.

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Surprise! Classical Sculptures Were Actually Brightly Painted!

When you imagine ancient Greece, you probably imagine stark, white, marble columns and white, marble statues with vacant, pupilless eyes standing in majestic poses. In actuality, however, ancient Greek statues were originally painted with bright, primary colors. The only reason why they appear white today is because all of the paint has flaked off.

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No, Atlas Did Not Hold the Earth on His Shoulders

The image of the Titan Atlas holding the Earth on his shoulders is an iconic one that has inspired countless writers, thinkers, and artists. It is also a modern notion with no basis whatsoever in any ancient Greek texts. In actual ancient Greek mythology, Atlas does not, in fact, hold the Earth on his shoulders, but rather the sky. The misconception that the ancient Greeks imagined Atlas as holding the Earth on his shoulders arose as a result of the misinterpretation of classical representations of Atlas. In this article, I intend to set the record straight by examining how the ancient Greeks really envisioned Atlas and explaining how the misconception about him holding up the Earth arose.

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Ancient Greek Ghost Stories, Part Three: How the Ancient Greeks Invented the Vampire Romance Story

Back in the late 2000s, the book Twilight was outrageously popular among teenaged girls (much to the great annoyance of everyone else). What you may not know, however, is that the vampire romance story was actually invented in ancient Greece.

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Cats and Weasels

Everyone knows that, in ancient times, the Egyptians worshipped cats, but across the Mediterranean over in Europe, the situation was much different. During the Archaic Period (lasted c. 800 – c. 510 BC), housecats seem to have been almost completely absent from the Greek world; they do not appear in Greek art and not referenced in works of Greek literature from this time period.

During the Classical Period (lasted c. 510 – c. 323 BC), housecats seem to have been gradually introduced to Greece and southern Italy from Egypt and the Near East, but they seem to have been seen as strange, exotic pets—in the same way that keeping a parrot as a pet might be seen as unusual today.

Eventually, starting during the Hellenistic Period (lasted c. 323 – c. 31 BC) and continuing into the Roman Period, housecats as pets gradually became more and more common in the Greco-Roman world. Curiously, though, weasels seem to have been much more commonly kept as pets in ancient Greece than cats and the words for “cat” and “weasel” seem to often been conflated.

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No, Vomitoria Were Not Places for Vomiting

There is a popular story that has been circulating for a long time that claims that people in ancient Rome would routinely gorge themselves on food and then go to places called vomitoria, where they would deliberately vomit up everything they had eaten so they could gorge themselves some more. This fanciful tale has been referenced in popular culture, repeated on the internet, and even taught in schools. Unfortunately, it is completely false. We have no evidence that gorging and vomiting was ever a common practice in ancient Rome, vomitoria were not really places for vomiting, and the word vomitoria itself is not even attested in Roman sources until very late.

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Ancient Greek Ghost Stories, Part Two: Simonides of Keos and the Dead Sailor

Simonides of Keos was one of the most famous ancient Greek lyric poets, but there is a very strange and unusual story about him recorded by the Roman orator Cicero in On Divination 1.27.56 and also in the Palatine Anthology.

Supposedly, one day as Simonides was walking by the shore on the island of Lesbos, he discovered a dead corpse lying in the water, apparently belonging to a man who had recently drowned. The corpse had no identification attached to it and no one had claimed it. Simonides pulled the corpse out of the water and gave it a proper funeral with full honors, even though he had no idea who it belonged to.

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Ancient Greek Ghost Stories, Part One: Athenodoros and the Haunted House

In his letter To Sura, the ancient Roman writer Pliny the Younger recounts one of the oldest and most famous ghost stories of all time.

There was once a Stoic philosopher named Athenodoros of Tarsos. Athenodoros came to the city of Athens, where he learned that there was a large house for sale at an extraordinarily cheap price. When Athenodoros asked why the house was available at such a low price, he was informed that, every night, the clashing of chains could be heard coming from a certain room in the house and that, after a while, the sound of clattering chains would grow louder and louder until, at last, the terrifying apparition of an old, decrepit man would appear, standing in the room with iron chains attached to his arms and dragging along on the floor behind him. The man was said to be extremely emaciated, as though he had been starved to death, and his hair and beard were said to be tangled and matted.

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Why Everything about Your Toga Party is All Wrong

#1: First of all, that is not a toga you are wearing to begin with.

Today, most so-called “togas” are made from old bedsheets, which are rectangular. The classical Roman toga, however, was always made from a roughly semicircular piece of cloth. The classical toga was comprised of a single sheet of cloth, but this piece of cloth was actually much larger than the size of a single bedsheet. That is the reason why in Roman statues you always see ripples of flowing cloth.

Furthermore, the classical toga was always made from wool, whereas most modern bedsheets are made from cotton. In ancient times, cotton could only be obtained through importing it from India, which was half a world away from Italy. Only the extremely ultra wealthy would have been able to afford any kind of clothes made from cotton.

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Happy New Year? Depends on Which Calendar You Are Using…

Today, January 1 is widely celebrated as the beginning of the New Year, but it was not always that way.

Our modern calendar is based off the ancient Roman calendar, but the ancient Roman calendar is a bit different from ours. This is what scholars believe the ancient Roman calendar would have looked like originally:

Martius
Aprilis
Maius
Iunius
Quintilis
Sextilis
September
October
November
December

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