Ancient Greece Archives - Page 15 of 18 - Tales of Times Forgotten

Is Stoicism a Useful Philosophy for the Modern World?

In case you haven’t heard, the ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism seems to be having a bit of a cultural moment right now. It is the philosophy of choice for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, football stars, and ordinary people. There is a whole plethora of websites promoting Stoicism as a philosophy for the modern world, including “Daily Stoic,” “How to Be a Stoic,” “Modern Stoicism,” and “Traditional Stoicism.”

There are also countless other resources for aspiring Stoics, including YouTube channels and bestselling books like The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, The Beginner’s Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity, Stoicism: A Stoic Approach To Modern Life, and countless others. There are even events for aspiring Stoics to gather and talk about Stoicism like Stoicon.

All this enthusiasm over Stoicism has left some people wondering what Stoicism is, how modern Stoicism differs from ancient Stoicism, and whether either ancient or modern Stoicism is useful for modern life. I am neither a Stoic nor an ardent critic of Stoicism, but rather an outsider who happens to know a bit about Stoicism. In my view, there are quite a few things we can learn from Stoicism, but Stoicism also has some serious pitfalls that are worth taking into account.

Is There Really a Scene in the ‘Iliad’ Where Achilles Calls Hektor Out of Troy to Face Him?

If you ask someone who has never read the Iliad to name one scene from it, chances are, the first scene that person will probably name is the scene with the Trojan Horse. The Trojan Horse, though, is actually never even mentioned in the Iliad. The Iliad ends with the funeral of Hektor, long before the fall of Troy. The story of the Trojan Horse is first told in flashback by the blind bard Demodokos in Book Eight of the Odyssey.

If you tell the person that the Iliad ends with the funeral of Hektor and ask them to name another scene, then they’ll probably tell you the iconic scene where Achilles goes to the gates of Troy and calls for Hektor to come out and face him. It’s a scene that appears in nearly every adaptation of the Trojan War made in the past two decades. That scene, though, doesn’t appear in the Iliad at all either. In fact, it doesn’t appear in any ancient source whatsoever; it is purely an invention of Hollywood.

Did the Ancient Greeks Really Believe in Their Myths?

On Quora, I have noticed there seems to be an endless number of questions dealing with the same overall theme: “Did the ancient Greeks and Romans really believe in their gods?” and “Did the ancient Greeks really believe in their myths?”

I think these questions are born from a strange discordance that people have noticed between the ancient Greeks’ reputation for rational skepticism and the stories we still tell about their gods and heroes—stories that—let’s face it—in most cases are pretty unbelievable to say the least.

Thus people have wondered, “How on Earth could a people so supposedly enlightened believe in such absurd stories?” As it turns out, though, believing in the Greek deities and believing in Greek myths are two different things; many people in ancient times believed in the deities without necessarily believing in all the stories attached to them.

What Did Cleopatra Really Look Like?

There are a lot of misconceptions about Kleopatra VII Philopator of Egypt, the ancient queen most commonly known in English as simply “Cleopatra.” For instance, as I discuss in this article from March 2019, she actually lived closer to the present day than to the time of the construction of the pyramids of Giza. Meanwhile, as I discuss in this article from August 2019, the popular story about Cleopatra committing suicide by allowing an Egyptian asp to bite her on the breast is probably apocryphal and it is more likely that she actually committed suicide by drinking poison or by cutting herself and applying poison to the wound.

Perhaps the greatest misconception of all about Cleopatra, though, is what she looked like. Modern people have a very clear image of what Cleopatra looked like: a beautiful, pale, small-nosed woman like Elizabeth Taylor dressed in a revealing outfit with thick makeup, straight, black hair, bangs, and braids with gold ornaments going down to her shoulders. Unfortunately for fans of classic films, this image is inaccurate in almost every single way.

We actually have pretty good idea of what the historical Cleopatra looked like and it’s nothing at all like the image most people have in mind. For one thing, she didn’t have bangs. She did have a large, hooked nose, a prominent chin, and curly hair that she normally wore in a bun at the back of her head. There’s even a possibility that she may have been a redhead.

No, the Ancient Romans Didn’t Overharvest Silphium to Extinction Because It Was a Highly Effective Contraceptive

Chances are, many of my readers have seen articles on the internet about how, supposedly, in ancient times there was a kind of giant fennel plant called silphium that was grown in North Africa in the region around the Greek city of Kyrene that was a highly effective contraceptive, perhaps even the most effective one of all time. According to the articles on the internet, the ancient Romans were so horny and they loved having sex so much that they overharvested silphium, leading it to go totally extinct in around the middle of the first century AD.

There is some truth to this story, but much of it is false. Silphium was a real plant that really was grown in the region around Kyrene in North Africa and some Romans did believe it to possess contraceptive properties. Likewise, there is a Roman source that seems to support the idea that some Romans thought that, by the middle of the first century AD, the particular variety of silphium from Kyrenaïka had become extremely rare, if not extinct.

Nonetheless, it is unclear whether silphium was actually effective at all as a contraceptive and, although a few ancient texts claim it to have possessed contraceptive properties, its primary use in antiquity was never as a form of birth control. In antiquity, silphium was, in fact, always primarily desired as a food item because people thought it was a culinary delicacy. There is far more ancient evidence for silphium’s consumption as a food item than there is for its use as a method of birth control.

Did the Ancient Egyptians Have Electric Lighting?

It has been widely claimed on the internet that the ancient Egyptians had electric lighting. This claim is made largely based on an extremely tendentious interpretation of a series of relief carvings from the southern crypt of the ancient Egyptian Temple of Hathor at Dendera and the fact that some Egyptian tombs and temples do not currently have very much soot on their ceilings.

Unfortunately for those who want to believe that the ancient Egyptians had electric lighting, they simply didn’t. As I will show, the reliefs from Dendera almost certainly don’t depict lightbulbs and there is a much more reasonable explanation for why some Egyptian temples and tombs do not have soot on their ceilings.

Why Was Aristarchos’s Heliocentric Model Dismissed and Ignored?

Many people are astonished to learn that the concept of heliocentrism did not originate with Nicolaus Copernicus, but rather with the ancient Greek astronomer Aristarchos of Samos (lived c. 310 – c. 230 BC), who published a book in around the early third century BC in which he argued that the Earth orbits around the Sun. This book has not survived, but we know about its existence because it is referenced by later authors.

What shocks many people even more than the fact that Aristarchos came up with the idea of heliocentrism in the third century BC is the fact that Aristarchos’s heliocentric model of the universe was almost totally rejected by ancient Greek and Roman scholars and never caught on in antiquity. Many people wonder why it was that the ancient Greeks never took Aristarchos seriously. In order to find out why Aristarchos’s heliocentric model of the universe was rejected, we are going to need to dive deep into the ancient sources.

Did King Porus Defeat Alexander the Great?

According to all surviving ancient historical sources, King Alexandros III of Makedonia (most commonly known in English as “Alexander the Great”) defeated King Porus (whose name is conjectured to have been Puru in his native tongue) of the Indian kingdom of Paurava in the Battle of the Hydaspes in May 326 BC.

Although Alexander was ultimately victorious, Porus and his men fought valiantly. The Battle of the Hydaspes was the closest one Alexander ever came to losing and he was reportedly so impressed by Porus’s valor that he asked him how he wished to be treated. Porus replied that he wished to be treated the way Alexander would have wanted Porus to have treated him. Alexander therefore appointed Porus as satrap of his own kingdom and the lands to the southeast as well.

Until I started writing answers on Quora, I had never heard anyone try to argue that Porus actually defeated Alexander in battle. We have nothing in our sources to suggest that and, as I shall explain in a moment, we have very good reason to doubt this assertion. Nonetheless, since I started writing answers on Quora around a year ago, I have discovered that there seems to be something of an obsession among Indian and Pakistani nationalists with “proving” that Alexander really lost and that the accepted narrative is a fabrication by the Greek historians who idolized Alexander.

In the answer, I intend to examine the historical evidence supporting the historical consensus that Alexander really did win the Battle of the Hydaspes. I doubt I will convince any hardcore Indian or Pakistani nationalists, but I am not writing this answer for them; I am writing it for those who are genuinely interested in knowing what really happened.

Spencer Ruins “Adam Ruins Everything”

Adam Ruins Everything is a comedy television series on TruTV starring comedian Adam Conover. It has been on air since September 2015 and has had, to date, three seasons, amounting to a total of sixty-five episodes. The basic premise of the show is that Adam Conover is an obnoxious know-it-all who cannot help ruining everyone around him’s favorite things by revealing to them the dark truths and common misconceptions surrounding them.

This premise provides a sort of framing narrative for a series of information-based comedy segments, which make up the bulk of each episode. Each episode usually consists of three segments debunking common misconceptions related to a particular topic, followed by a final “positive takeaway” segment in which Adam tries to make the audience feel better by putting a positive spin on everything he has said throughout the episode. Along the way, Adam cites various sources (some more reliable than others) and calls in people identified as experts to testify.

In general, most of the show’s main points are usually broadly correct. The show clearly really does strive for factual correctness, as demonstrated by their repeated warnings that the show is fallible and their multiple “corrections segments.” Sadly, they do not always live up to their aspirations. Often the errors on the show are errors of omission resulting from the fact that it is only a thirty-minute show and they try to cram no less than three different debunking sessions into each episode, which results in a series of extremely rushed information segments that end up leaving out a lot of really important information.

The Motivations behind Human Sacrifice

For people today, the fact that so many peoples throughout history have practiced human sacrifice seems absolutely baffling and horrifying. We tend to think of human sacrifice as the ultimate act of barbarism, an act that epitomizes everything savage and uncivilized about our species. Nonetheless, it is important for us to understand why people have historically engaged in this practice.

Human sacrifice has occurred in virtually every part of the world at some point in time and has occurred in some part of the world during every historical time period. Thus, whether we like it or not, understanding the motivations behind human sacrifice is a part of understanding what it means to be human.