Ancient Greece Archives - Page 4 of 18 - Tales of Times Forgotten

Zeus’s Horrifying Plan for Cosmic Genocide

There are more human beings alive right now than there have ever been at any previous point in the history of the universe. Even so, our population continues to skyrocket. In fact, the human population of the world is predicted to reach eight billion on Tuesday, November 15th, 2022. According to this article the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) released a few days ago, approximately 7% of all the humans who have ever lived are currently alive right now.

Given this historic occasion, I thought I would share with my readers a myth that is referenced in various forms in a number of works of early ancient Greek literature. The myth claims that, once, in the heroic age, humans became so populous that Gaia, the earth, struggled to bear the burden of their combined weight. Zeus, the king of the deities, saw that Gaia was suffering and therefore resolved to create devastating wars to annihilate as many humans as possible in order to bring her relief. Although this is a myth that not many people today have heard, it is referenced in one of the most famous passages in all of ancient literature: the opening proem of the Iliad.

The Shocking Ancient Pagan Origin of the Legend of Stingy Jack

Halloween is upon us once again. As I have mentioned many times before on this blog, the popular notion that Halloween is a superficially Christianized ancient pagan holiday and that the practices associated with it today are of ancient pagan origin is largely a misconception. In reality, there is very little about Halloween as it is celebrated in the United States in the twenty-first century that can reliably be traced back to any ancient pre-Christian culture or belief system. There are, however, a few concepts and stories associated with Halloween that do have genuine, well-attested, pre-Christian, pagan origins.

Notably, as I discuss in this blog post I made in October 2021, many of the monsters that have become associated with the holiday—including ghosts, werewolves, and revenants—are really of ancient pre-Christian origin. In this post, I will discuss another such example: the traditional Irish Halloween legend of Stingy Jack, which is a Christianized version of a very ancient and widely attested folktale in which a clever human trickster manages to trap a malevolent or threatening supernatural being who has come to take him away to an undesirable afterlife location. Older, expressly pagan versions of this legend are attested as far back as ancient Greece in sixth century BCE.

The Decline of Cursive Isn’t Historically as Big of a Deal as Most People Think

On 16 September 2022, Drew Gilpin Faust, a scholar of nineteenth-century U.S. history who specializes in the Antebellum South and who served as the president of Harvard University from 2007 until 2018, published an essay in The Atlantic titled “Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive,” in which she conveys her shock, consternation, and sorrow at having recently discovered that the majority of undergraduate students nowadays cannot read cursive and that, of those few who can read it, even fewer can write it. She expresses worry that, as a result of not being able to read cursive, students will not be able to read historical documents written in it and will be cut off from the historical past. This piece set off many conversations about cursive instruction in the U.S.

I am currently a twenty-three-year-old first-semester master’s student who just received my bachelor’s degree in May of this year, so I am very close in age to present-day undergraduates. Contrary to the sweeping declaration in the title of Faust’s article, I did receive full instruction in how to read and write cursive from third through fifth grades. Nonetheless, I think that the ongoing decline of cursive instruction in the U.S. is both less of a tragedy and less historically significant than many people (including Faust) are making it out to be. In this post, I intend to clear up a few popular misconceptions about the history of cursive writing.

No, Athena Didn’t Turn Medusa into a Monster to Protect Her

One of the most famous stories in all of ancient Greek and Roman mythology and literature is the tale of the origin of the Gorgon Medusa that the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (lived 43 BCE – c. 17 CE), who is better known in English simply as “Ovid,” tells in his long narrative poem Metamorphoses, which he composed in the Latin language in dactylic hexameter verse in around the year 8 CE or thereabouts.

According to Ovid, Medusa was originally an extraordinarily beautiful mortal woman who was known for her gorgeous hair. Then, however, the god Neptunus (whom the Romans equated with the Greek god Poseidon) raped her in the temple of the goddess Minerva (whom the Romans equated with the Greek goddess Athena) and Minerva punished her by turning her into a hideous monster with snakes entwined in her hair and making it so that any mortal who saw her would instantly turn to stone.

A claim has circulated online for years now claiming that modern people have misunderstood this myth and that, actually, Minerva turned Medusa into a monster and made it so that anyone who saw her would instantly turn to stone in order to protect her so that men would never prey on her again. This claim, however, is not supported by any evidence in any ancient source and, in fact, Ovid’s account expressly says that Minerva cursed Medusa in order to punish her for her involvement in desecrating her temple, even though her involvement was totally nonconsensual. Furthermore, the context in which Ovid tells the story strongly suggests that he intended his readers to sympathize with Medusa and question the justice of Minerva’s punishment.

Was Corinth Really an Ancient City of Vice?

The claim that the ancient Greek city of Corinth was known in antiquity as a place of unparalleled depravity, vice, and licentiousness has regularly occurred in English-language Bible dictionaries, commentaries, and sermons for a century and a half at least. New works have repeated the claim again and again. Recently, it has even begun to make inroads into popular secular media through, for instance, the new Netflix series The Sandman.

Now, I love a good story about an ancient city of vice and perversion as much as the next person, but, unfortunately, there are at least three major problems with this narrative. The first problem is that Corinth didn’t have a reputation for “sin” or “vice” in general, but rather a very specific reputation for its female hired companions who primarily served an upper-class male clientele.

The second problem is that, while Corinth seems to have had this reputation before the Romans destroyed it in 146 BCE, the evidence for it having had this reputation after the Romans refounded the city in 44 BCE as a colonia under their rule is limited at best. The third and final problem is that Corinth was not unique at all in having a stereotypical association with a certain kind of low or disreputable activity; on the contrary, nearly every city in the ancient Greek world had some kind of disreputable stereotype attached to it.

Does the Word ‘Dinosaur’ Really Mean “Terrible Lizard”?

When I was growing up, I always read and was taught in school that the word dinosaur comes from Greek roots that mean “terrible lizard.” This is how the current revision of the article “dinosaur” on Wikipedia translates the word also. This translation is not strictly incorrect, but it is not necessarily the most accurate translation either.

The English biologist and paleontologist Richard Owen coined the word dinosaur at a meeting for the British Association for the Advancement of Science in the year 1841 by combining the Greek adjective δεινός (deinós), which is usually translated as “terrible,” with the noun σαύρα (saúra), which means “lizard” or “reptile.”

The meaning of the word σαύρα is more-or-less straightforward, but the word δεινός is a bit more complicated than the simple translation of “terrible” might lead a person to believe. In some contexts, “terrible” is an adequate translation, but, unlike the English word terrible, which has exclusively negative meanings, δεινός can also have positive meanings. As such, “formidable” is probably a better translation of the word in general.

Men Have Been Finding Weird and Unsettling Ways to Describe Women’s Breasts Since Ancient Times

It is common knowledge that cisgender straight and bisexual men frequently possess an overriding fascination with women’s breasts—to such an extent that they often devote more attention to a woman’s breasts than to any other aspect of her person. As a result of this fixation, some male writers have a habit of throwing in references to or descriptions of breasts in places where they are contextually inappropriate. Sometimes they also describe breasts using goofy or perplexing figurative language.

These sorts of references and descriptions have become a subject of widespread memes and satire. There is even an entire subreddit called r/menwritingwomen, which is dedicated to examples of male authors writing about women in incompetent (and often comical) ways. A significant proportion of the examples discussed in the subreddit are breast references and its satirical headline reads: “She breasted boobily down the stairs…..”

One thing some people may not realize is that gynophilic men have been doing this exact same thing for literally thousands of years. In this post, I will discuss three different examples of goofy, weird, unsettling, or just downright creepy descriptions of women’s breasts in texts from the ancient Mediterranean world in three different languages: Biblical Hebrew, Ancient Greek, and Latin.

Did Ancient People Really All Have Horrible, Crooked, Rotten Teeth?

A certain notion that frequently shows up in popular culture and online claims that everyone in the premodern world all had absolutely disgusting, crooked, and totally rotten teeth. There is some truth to this perception. Modern orthodontic practice did not exist in the premodern world, so the majority of people probably did not have perfectly straight teeth. Additionally, across the board, most people in the premodern world generally had poorer dental hygiene than what is considered normal in most western developed countries in the twenty-first century. Some premodern people did indeed have extremely disgusting, disease-ridden, and rotten teeth.

Nonetheless, the popular perception ignores a great deal of contravening evidence. Some premodern people had naturally straight teeth, just as some people do today, and perfectly straight teeth with no gaps haven’t necessarily always been seen as desirable in all cultures. Additionally, premodern people did have an interest in keeping their teeth clean and they had methods of cleaning their teeth, albeit ones that are not as effective as those in widespread use today.

Finally, most premodern people’s teeth were not all totally rotted and falling out due primarily to the fact that they rarely or never consumed simple sugars, which are the primary cause of most tooth decay today. People who lived in areas close to the sea also tended to eat lots of seafood, which is high in fluoride, which may have helped to protect their teeth. Consequently, some ancient and medieval people actually had relatively nice-looking, healthy teeth even by twenty-first-century standards.

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.

Why Are Dragons Obsessed with Treasure?

The trope that dragons are naturally obsessed or infatuated with treasure is absolutely pervasive throughout modern fantasy literature. You can pick up just about any modern book that has dragons in it and, more likely than not, the dragons will be obsessed with hoarding treasure of some kind. In this post, I will discuss where this trope originates from and how it became so ubiquitous.

In ancient Greece and Rome, drakontes (the ancient precursors of dragons) were primarily thought to serve as guardians, sometimes of treasure. The notion that dragons are obsessed with treasure seems to have arisen in classical antiquity or earlier as one of several different explanations for why they guard it. Thanks primarily to the Old English epic poem Beowulf and J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1937 children’s fantasy novel The Hobbit, which drew extensive inspiration from Beowulf, this explanation has now become accepted as standard in western popular culture.