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

Carl Sagan Was Really Bad at History

Carl Sagan’s thirteen-episode documentary series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which originally aired on PBS in 1980, is the most watched PBS documentary series in history. The miniseries, which is, broadly speaking, about the history and importance of science, has had a massive influence on both our culture as a whole and on individual people’s lives. Many people say that watching Cosmos growing up was what inspired them to go into STEM.

Unfortunately, while Carl Sagan may have been a brilliant scientist and a great science popularizer, he was an unbelievably terrible historian and, in the show, he gets a boatload of facts about history blatantly wrong. Because Sagan was a scientist with an established reputation, though, many people have assumed that everything he says in the miniseries must be correct and, as a result, these misconceptions have spread and become embedded in popular culture.

Perhaps the most influentially wrong segment in the whole series is a twenty-two-and-a-half-minute segment in the last episode about the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria and the murder of the Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia. In this one segment, Sagan manages to promote what seems like roughly half of all the misconceptions about the ancient world that I have ever debunked.

I wrote an article in August 2018 debunking misconceptions about Hypatia and another article in July 2019 debunking misconceptions about the Library of Alexandria. In both of those articles, I have noted that many of the misconceptions I debunk originated from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, but, in those articles, I did not address Carl Sagan’s PBS miniseries directly.

I have therefore decided to undertake the ambitious task of going through the entire segment about Hypatia and the Library of Alexandria and correcting all the inaccuracies I come across. This should give you some impression of how historically accurate Carl Sagan’s documentary really is.

What Was the First Novel?

There seems to be a lot of confusion about when the novel as a literary form developed. Many people think that the novel arose at some point during the Early Modern Period (lasted c. 1450 – c. 1750). Many works dating to this period, such as Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, and Le Morte d’Arthur are often cited as “the first novel.” The popular perception, however, is incorrect.

The novel as a literary form definitely dates at least as far back as the second century BC and probably dates to long before that. Not a single one of the works usually cited as “the first novel” is even close to being old enough to actually be “the first novel.”

The fact is, we don’t know exactly what the first novel was, but, since we have record of works that can only be described as novels dating as far back as at least the second century BC, anything written within the past 2,200 years can’t possibly be “the first novel.”

What Really Happened to the Athena Parthenos?

The Athena Parthenos, a colossal gold and ivory statue of the goddess Athena created between 447 and 438 BC by the renowned ancient Athenian sculptor Pheidias (lived c. 480 – c. 430 BC) that originally stood in the naos of the Parthenon on the Athenian Akropolis, is one of the most famous of all ancient Greek statues.

Unlike the Venus de Milo, which, as I talk about in this article from September 2019, wasn’t famous in antiquity and is mostly only famous today because of a French propaganda campaign in the nineteenth century, the Athena Parthenos really was famous in antiquity. In fact, it is only famous today because of its ancient reputation, since the statue itself has not survived.

Many people have wondered what happened to the Athena Parthenos, but its ultimate fate is actually far less mysterious than many people have been led to believe. The story of how the Athena Parthenos was destroyed, recreated, and destroyed again is as fascinating as any story from the ancient world.

How Did Greek Philosophers Support Themselves?

A lot of people have wondered how on Earth Greek philosophers made their living. It is hard for a person to earn a livable wage as a professional “philosopher” in the modern age and it would have been even more difficult in classical Greece, since there were no universities as we would think of them at that time that could hire philosophers.

As it turns out, though, most ancient Greek philosophers did not make their money from philosophy. Many of them were from wealthy families and therefore didn’t need to work. Many of them also had wealthy patrons who paid for their expenses. Other philosophers found other ways to survive, which included working day jobs, starting cults, and even literally living off the streets through begging.

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.