Ancient Greece Archives - Page 10 of 18 - Tales of Times Forgotten

Fascinating Facts about Ancient Sparta

Most people today are familiar with the idea of the ancient Spartans as a warrior people who spurned luxury and devoted themselves to military training. The Spartans have a substantial presence in modern popular culture, partly due to the 2006 fantasy action film 300, which, as I discuss in this article I published in November 2019, greatly distorts the true history of Sparta in order to convey a deeply racist, misogynistic, ableist, and fascist message.

In this article, though, I don’t want to talk about 300. Instead, I want to talk about some aspects of ancient Spartan history, society, and culture that are, for the most part, fairly obscure that I think should be more widely known. For instance, did you know that there are surviving works of ancient Spartan poetry? Or did you know that Spartiate men were known in antiquity for wearing their hair in long braids that came all the way down to their mid-backs? Or did you know that other Greek people in antiquity stereotyped the Spartans as anal fetishists? Read on to learn more!

Did the Dorian Invasion Really Happen?

If you read any book about ancient Greek history written before the 1970s, there’s one event that will probably be discussed at length that any book about Greek history written after the 2000s will probably tell you never even happened at all. The event I’m talking about is, of course, the so-called “Dorian invasion.” The story goes that, in around the twelfth century BCE, a warrior people from the north known as the Dorians invaded mainland Greece and conquered large areas of it, replacing the peoples who had been there before and eventually becoming the ancestors of many Greeks, including the Spartans.

This narrative of the Dorian invasion was largely cobbled together in the nineteenth century by German philologists using vague and contradictory tales recorded in various ancient Greek sources as evidence in order to explain the distribution of Classical Greek dialects. In the twentieth century, white supremacists and Nazis exploited the narrative in order to portray northern Europeans as the true Greeks while denying the Greekness of actual Greek people. In the mid-twentieth century, however, scholars began to question the evidence supporting the narrative and, by the end of the twentieth century, most scholars came to accept that the Dorian invasion was a figment of the scholarly imagination.

Here’s What the Costumes and Flags on Display at the Pro-Trump Insurrection Mean

On 6 January 2021, a mob of violent, pro-Trump insurrectionists stormed the United States Capitol building in Washington D.C., forcing both houses of Congress to evacuate. These insurrectionists wanted to force Congress to overturn the vote of electoral college, which voted in favor of Joe Biden becoming the next president of the United States. Thankfully, after several hours of fighting, the rebels were eventually driven out of the Capitol. Congress has now ratified the votes of the electoral college, confirming Joe Biden’s inauguration on 20 January 2021.

Many of the insurrectionists at the Capitol were dressed in unusual costumes and carrying various flags. Many people are confused about why they dressed in this manner and what their costumes signify. Obviously, the real concern here should be the fact that these insurrectionists literally attempted a coup. Nonetheless, I think it is worth examining some of the iconography that was on display in order to get a sense of the kind of narrative that these people are trying to promote.

What Is the Correct Pronunciation of “Gyro”?

In the United States, there is something of an intense debate over how the word gyro is supposed to be pronounced. Many people pronounce it /ˈdʒaɪɹoʊ/ (or, to use fauxnetics, “JAI-roh’). Many other people, however, insist that it is supposed to be pronounced /ˈjiː.ɹoʊ/ (that is, “YEE-roh” in fauxnetics). This debate even made it into the recent Disney Pixar animated film Soul, which includes a flashback scene in which a mischievous unborn soul named “Twenty-Two” is portrayed as arguing with the spirit of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes (lived c. 287 – c. 212 BCE) over the correct pronunciation of the word.

If I were an ordinary pedant, I would simply tell you that the pronunciation /ˈjiː.ɹoʊ/ is correct and that the people who say /ˈdʒaɪɹoʊ/ are wrong. I, however, am no ordinary pedant. On the contrary, I am the most obnoxious and loathsome kind of pedant: a pedant who has spent years studying the Greek language at the university level and who knows far too much about it for my own good.

Therefore, I feel the need to point out that neither of the pronunciations given above is reflective of the actual pronunciation of the word in Modern Greek, since the nominative singular form of the word in Greek is actually γύρος (gýros), with an /s/ sound on the end, and the nominative plural form is actually γύροι (gýroi). Moreover, I feel the need to explain exactly why the way the word is spelled in English is so different from how it is pronounced in Greek and to explain precisely how the debate over the pronunciation of the word arose.

Why Does Donald Trump Like Neoclassical Architecture So Much?

On 21 December 2020, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order titled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” which officially establishes the Neoclassical architectural style as the “preferred” style for all United States federal buildings. The same executive order disparages Modernist architecture as “ugly and inconsistent.”

In practical terms, Trump’s executive order doesn’t mean much, since it only establishes the Neoclassical style as a “preferred” style and does not outright ban other styles. Moreover, the executive order is almost certainly going to go in the paper shredder as soon as President-Elect Joe Biden assumes office on 20 January 2021.

Nonetheless, the fact that Trump apparently felt strongly enough about Neoclassical architecture to issue an executive order on the subject right before he leaves office raises all sorts of interesting questions about what Neoclassical architecture represents in a modern political context and why a man like Donald Trump would devote time to enshrine it as a “preferred style” for anything.

Was Socrates a Monotheist?

It seems to be widely believed among members of the general public that Socrates was some sort of monotheist. If you go on the Stack Exchange Philosophy website, there’s a question: “Was Socrates a monotheist?” As of the time I am writing this, three of the answers say that he was definitely a monotheist and one of them says that it’s an open question. Only two answers correctly say that he wasn’t a monotheist, but neither answer gives a detailed explanation how we know this.

Historically speaking, Socrates almost certainly believed in the existence of many deities—just like most other people in classical Athens. Unfortunately, modern readers who are accustomed to thinking about religion in monotheistic terms have a tendency to misinterpret passages from the Platonic dialogues as suggesting monotheism.

This problem is only made worse by the fact that some of the most widely used translations of the Platonic dialogues were produced by monotheistic scholars who were desperate to see Socrates as a monotheist and therefore deliberately translated the texts to make it sound like he was one.

Did Leonidas Really Say “Molon Labe”?

Ancient Greek is not like Latin. There are dozens of Latin phrases—such as et cetera, ad hoc, alias, alter ego, de facto, de jure, and so on—that are commonly used in everyday conversation. By contrast, there are very few phrases from the ancient Greek language that ordinary people can even recognize in the original language. μολὼν λαβέ (molṑn labé) is one of those phrases. Literally, it means: “Having come, take.” More idiomatically, it can be translated as: “Come and take them.”

Most people have heard a story about this phrase. The story normally goes a bit like this: in 480 BCE, the armies of the Achaemenid Empire were attempting to conquer mainland Greece, so King Leonidas I of Sparta brought an army of three hundred brave Spartan warriors to stop the invading armies at the pass of Thermopylai in central Greece. Then, when King Xerxes I of the Achaemenid Empire ordered Leonidas and his soldiers to hand over their weapons, Leonidas supposedly replied with two words: “μολὼν λαβέ”—”Come and take them.”

This makes for a rather fine story. Historically speaking, however, this incident almost certainly never really happened. In fact, the earliest version of the story is not attested until over four hundred years after Leonidas’s death and that version of the story is very different from the version that most people know today—for one thing, it doesn’t even include the phrase “μολὼν λαβέ.”

Where Does the Idea of a “Saint” Come From?

Most people today are familiar with the concept of a “saint,” but the question of when and how this concept arose is a very interesting one. The basic idea behind the Christian conception of sainthood can be traced all the way back to the writings of the Hebrew Bible, which contains stories about holy people using their special connection with God to perform miracles for the benefit of others.

This idea is expanded on in the writings of the New Testament and in other early Christian texts. Early Christian ideas about sainthood may have been influenced to some extent by similar Greek and Roman stories about holy men performing miracles. By late antiquity, a conception of sainthood similar to the one most people today are familiar with had developed. Although saints have become less prominent in western Christianity since the Protestant Reformation, ancient and medieval stories about saints continue to influence contemporary western culture.

No, Transgender People Are Not a Sign of Cultural Collapse

In case you’ve had the good fortune of having never heard of her, Camille Paglia is a professor at the University of Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and, at this point, effectively a professional right-wing provocateur. She claims to be a feminist, but yet she disagrees with all the basic tenets of feminism and spends most of her time bashing feminists and defending patriarchy.

Paglia has been making the rounds over the past few years promoting transphobia, declaring that the growing prevalence of people identifying as transgender—especially the number of people assigned male at birth identifying as trans women—is a sign of growing effeminacy and an indication that “western civilization” is on the brink of collapse. In support of these claims, she has invented her own elaborate pseudohistory that focuses to a large extent on ancient Greece and Rome.

Unfortunately, Paglia is widely regarded as a serious social critic, especially by men on the far right, meaning her false claims about ancient history have spread widely. When I published my article about transgender people in the ancient world a few months ago, I got a lot of people leaving comments about her claims. I don’t have time to debunk everything Paglia has said about ancient history, so, for the purposes of this article, I will be focusing on what she says in one viral YouTube video in particular.

Did Cleopatra Really Dissolve a Pearl in Vinegar?

There are a lot of famous stories about the Greek-Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII Philopator that are probably not historically true. For instance, as I discuss in this article from August 2019, while it is highly probable that Cleopatra killed herself, it is highly unlikely that she really did so by allowing an asp to bite her on the breast. Similarly, as I discuss in this article from October 2020, it is virtually certain that she never owned any sort of vibrator powered by angry bees.

One of the most famous stories about her that I have not yet addressed, though, is the story that she once dissolved an ancient pearl that was worth tens of millions of sesterces in vinegar as a party trick to impress her lover Marcus Antonius. Unlike the bizarre vibrator story, the story about the pearl is actually found in the ancient sources. Nevertheless, it is almost certainly a fabrication invented by Roman propagandists to portray Cleopatra in the worst possible light.