ancient Athens Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

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.

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.

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 Shocking True Origin of Dionysos

The ancient Greeks from at least the fifth century BCE onward commonly believed that the worship of the god Dionysos originated in Asia and was introduced to the Greek world relatively late. For most of the twentieth century, scholars simply accepted this belief at face value and deemed the elements of Dionysos’s cult that they perceived as strange and exotic as definitive marks of his cult’s eastern origin. If you pick up any book about Greek religion that was published before around 1960, it will almost certainly claim that Dionysos was a late addition to the Greek pantheon. Even today, people online still commonly repeat this claim as though it were fact.

For at least the past thirty years, though, scholars of ancient Greek religion have known for certain that Dionysos was not, in fact, a late entry to the Greek pantheon from the east at all. Instead, extremely ancient clay tablets written in a very early form of Greek definitively attest that the Greeks were already worshipping Dionysos as early as the fourteenth century BCE—a thousand years before Plato was even born. In light of this fact, the fact that the ancient Greeks believed that Dionysos was a recent addition to their pantheon takes on new meaning and potentially reveals much about how the Greeks thought about foreignness.

At What Age Did Ancient Greek Women Typically Marry?

It is well and widely known that ancient Greek parents typically compelled their daughters to marry at a shockingly young age, one at which they would legally be considered minors in most countries in the twenty-first century. Greek men, by contrast, typically married much older, usually when they were in their late twenties or thirties. As a result, the groom at an ancient Greek wedding was usually at least a decade older than the bride he was marrying—and in many cases much older than that.

Unmarried girls were effectively considered their father’s property. Marriages were usually arranged primarily between a girl’s father and her male suitor. The extent to which a father allowed his daughter to decide which man she would marry probably varied significantly depending on factors such as time period, region, and the specific father in question’s personality and attitudes; in some cases, girls probably had significant say over which man they married, but it is likely that, in other cases, they had little or no say.

Exactly how young did ancient Greek women really marry, though? Popular histories and even many academics routinely assert as fact that Greek parents typically forced their daughters to marry as soon as they began puberty, before they even turned fifteen. In this post, however, I will argue that this is based mainly on one literary passage describing a bride who was probably unusually young and was not typical for most city-states. Instead, a more comprehensive view of the evidence suggests that Greek girls actually most commonly married when they were a bit older, broadly between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. The ages at which girls married also varied significantly across regions; ancient authors record that, in certain parts of the Greek world, girls typically married significantly younger or older than they did in other parts.

The Ancient Greeks Ate Cicadas and Grasshoppers!

Twenty-first-century westerners frequently like to imagine that the ancient Greeks and Romans were “just like us.” The truth, however, is that, if a person from twenty-first-century Europe, the U.S., or Canada were transported back in time to classical Athens in the fifth century BCE, they would find themself in a culture drastically different from their own in more ways than most people today appreciate.

Notably, although ancient Greek cuisine bore some similarities to modern Greek cuisine and southern European cuisine more generally, it also bore some striking differences. For instance, many twenty-first-century westerners will be surprised to learn that the ancient Greeks frequently ate insects—specifically cicadas and grasshoppers, which they apparently regarded as a delicious snack.

In Ancient Greece, Children Wearing Drag Was a Religious Obligation!

As I discuss in great detail in this recent post I wrote about the ongoing right-wing attack on LGBTQ+ people in the United States, in the past month, right-wingers have been having a full-on moral panic about the existence of child-friendly drag performances. These rightists perceive drag itself as inherently sexual and therefore inherently inappropriate for children. Many of them are claiming that allowing a child to view any form of drag is somehow “child abuse” or “grooming.” In the heat of this moral panic, neo-fascists have disrupted and even planned violent attacks on drag performances that are billed as child-friendly and Republican lawmakers in multiple red states have proposed bills that would make it a crime to allow any person under the age of eighteen to view any kind of performance involving drag.

As I have already explained at greater length in my previous post, drag is just a variety of costume; it’s a person dressing up as a different gender. There is nothing inherently sexual about it. Although many drag performances for adult audiences do make use of sexual humor and innuendo and are therefore inappropriate for young children, such innuendo is not integral to drag itself and some drag performances can be genuinely child-friendly. Moreover, laws banning drag performances in the presence of children, if they are vaguely worded enough, could be used to criminally prosecute trans and gender-nonconforming people for wearing clothes associated with a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth in any public place where children could conceivably be present.

In this post, I thought I would mention, from an ancient historical angle, that the ancient Greeks would be absolutely baffled by twenty-first-century U.S. right-wingers’ paroxysms over child-friendly drag. All the female roles in Greek drama were originally portrayed by men in drag at religious festivals where at least older children were present, it was a religious custom for men to dress in drag for certain religious festivals and occasions where children could be present, and the ancient Athenians even had a festival at which two adolescent boys were religiously mandated to dress in drag themselves.

How Did People in the Ancient Mediterranean World View Abortion?

The United States Supreme Court is expected to announce its decision in the landmark abortion case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health at some point before the end of the present term, which will most likely end sometime in June or early July of this year. An initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito that has been obtained by Politico indicates that the majority of the justices have already privately decided to completely overturn the previous Supreme Court rulings in the cases of Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which held that the U.S. Constitution protects the inherent right of a pregnant person to choose to have an abortion until the point when the fetus becomes viable outside the womb, which is generally agreed to occur at around twenty-three or twenty-four weeks gestational age.

In this new case, the court is expected to rule that the U.S. Constitution does not protect any right of a pregnant person to choose to have an abortion at any point during pregnancy. Although the verdict is not final and the justices still have time to change their minds, it is unlikely at this point that they will do so. This will be the first (although possibly not the last) time in living memory that the Supreme Court has completely revoked something that it previously deemed a major fundamental right.

Given the current situation, I thought it would be useful to write a post about attitudes toward abortion in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world. This post will cover attitudes among peoples of the ancient Near East, Greeks, Romans, and early Christians and will give some insight about how and why ancient Christians came to disapprove of abortion in the first place.

How Were Lesbians Regarded in Ancient Greece and Rome?

Within the past month, I have encountered at least three different people asking the question of how lesbians were perceived in ancient Greece and Rome. This is a topic that is rarely covered in ancient history and classics courses, so I decided that it was worth taking the time to write an in-depth article on the subject.

Unfortunately, while references to men’s homoerotic attraction and relationships are absolutely ubiquitous throughout the surviving ancient Greek and Roman sources, women’s homoerotic attraction and relationships are very poorly attested. To say that the primary sources on this subject are scant is an understatement. This paucity of evidence is mainly the result of the fact that nearly all the surviving ancient sources were written by men who were generally not interested in writing about anything women did among themselves when there were no men around.

Based on the admittedly very few sources that we have, though, homoerotic attraction and relationships seem to have been relatively common and not heavily stigmatized among Greek women in the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic Eras. Attitudes toward women’s homoeroticism in the Roman world, by contrast, seem to have varied drastically. Roman-era sources variously portray women’s homoeroticism as a degenerate Greek perversion, as something that should amuse and titillate male audiences, as an absurd impossibility, as an allegation against which a woman’s reputation must be defended, and, finally, in some cases, something that should be accepted as normal.

Were the Sophists Really So Bad?

The word sophist comes from the Greek word σοφιστής (sophistḗs), which originally meant “one who is highly skilled or learned in his craft.” In the fifth century BCE, various professional teachers of public speaking began to emerge in the Greek world calling themselves σοφισταί (which is the plural form of σοφιστής).

These teachers would typically come to a city and court wealthy patrons, offering to teach them how to speak persuasively in exchange for a tuition fee. Sometimes they would teach other subjects as well, such as philosophy, music, poetry, or mathematics. They would stay in a given city long enough to teach any wealthy people who were willing to pay them for lessons and then move on to the next city to teach anyone who was willing to pay for lessons there.

The sophists have a bit of a bad reputation nowadays. The very word sophist itself has come to mean a person who uses rhetorical trickery and fallacious arguments to deceive people into believing falsehoods. In this post, I want to peel back the millennia of negative portrayals to explore who the sophists really were and what they really wrote (for most part in their own words). By the end of it, hopefully it will be clear what the real differences were between the sophists and the philosophers like Plato (lived c. 428 – c. 347 BCE) and Xenophon (lived c. 430 – c. 354 BCE) who vilified them.