Ancient Greece Archives - Page 6 of 18 - Tales of Times Forgotten

No, Cerberus’s Name Does Not Mean “Spot”

In Greek mythology, Cerberus—or, to use a spelling that is more faithful to the Greek pronunciation, Kerberos—is the ferocious, many-headed watchdog who guards the entrance to the underworld. Ancient Greek sources disagree on exactly how many heads he has. The Theogonia, a long narrative poem in dactylic hexameter composed by the poet Hesiodos of Askre in the late eighth or early seventh century BCE, says (in lines 308–312) that Kerberos has fifty heads. The later poet Pindaros of Thebes (lived c. 518 – c. 438 BCE) says in a fragment (F249a/b SM) that he has no less than one hundred heads. In Greek vase paintings, he is usually portrayed with either two or three heads. He is often also depicted with a serpent for a tail. From the fourth century BCE onward, though, three heads seem to have become the standard.

There is a popular meme that has been circulating on the internet for a long time claiming that the name Κέρβερος (Kérberos) actually means “Spot.” This is a cute story. How deliciously ironic it would be for a literal Hellhound to have such a normal dog name like “Spot”! Unfortunately, the story probably isn’t true. Kerberos’s name certainly does not mean “Spot” in Ancient Greek, and it probably doesn’t mean this in any language at all.

Did Ancient People Really Think That Gods People Didn’t Believe in Would “Fade”?

The idea that gods derive their power from people believing in them and worshipping them and that gods whom people stop believing in and worshipping will “fade” or possibly even die out pops up fairly frequently in modern popular culture. Most notably, it forms a major part of the premise for Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novel American Gods (originally published in 2001 by William Morrow in the United States and Headline the U.K.) and the television series of the same name based on it (originally released on the premium cable network Starz from 2017 through 2021).

Some people have wondered, though: Does this idea have any kind of basis in ancient sources? Did ancient people really believe that their deities drew their powers from people worshipping them? As it turns out, although the version of the idea that is best known today through American Gods and other works is utterly contrary to how ancient people normally thought about their deities, similar ideas about deities being, to some degree, dependent on worship, do crop up in ancient literature.

Nabis, the Last King of Sparta, and His Torture Robot

The last king of Sparta to actually wield real political power was Nabis, who staged a coup d’état in 207 BCE, in which he seized the throne and murdered the reigning king Pelops. He claimed that he was a remote descendant of the Eurypontid king Demaratos of many centuries earlier and initiated sweeping social reforms that he designed to fortify his power.

Ever since antiquity, Nabis’s reputation has consistently been that of an extraordinarily cruel and sadistic tyrant. He is probably most notorious today for having supposedly constructed a horrifying torture robot modeled after his wife Apega that he could control and use to torture people into giving him large amounts of money and precious valuables. In this post, I will briefly look at who Nabis was, the events of his life, and, of course, the story of the evil torture robot.

Were Ancient Civilizations Conservative or Liberal?

I have repeatedly encountered questions on Quora asking whether ancient civilizations were “liberal” or “conservative,” so I thought I would write an in-depth response to those sorts of questions here. I think these questions arise from people perceiving what seems like a fundamental paradox: we revere ancient civilizations for things people generally see as progressive, such as technological advancements and the invention of democracy, while, at the same time, it is widely known that basically all ancient societies had slavery, oppressed women to some degree or another, and were often imperialistic, xenophobic, and culturally chauvinistic.

It’s true that ancient civilizations were generally very conservative in the sense that they tended to value traditions very highly, they were usually culturally resistant to change, and people in those civilizations rarely challenged long-established cultural assumptions and social institutions. For instance, as far as we have evidence, few people in the ancient world ever challenged the idea that men are naturally superior to women or the idea that slavery is normal and morally acceptable.

At the same time, though, it would be misleading to describe ancient civilizations as “conservative” or “liberal” without careful clarification because, among individual people in the ancient world, there was tremendous ideological diversity. Furthermore, the normative values of ancient civilizations were often very different from the values of both contemporary people who call themselves conservatives and contemporary people who call themselves liberals.

The Surprisingly Long History of the Conspiracy Theory that Ancient Rome Didn’t Exist

Despite the fact that I am currently twenty-two years old, I do not have an account on TikTok and I have no intention to create one. It often feels like I’m the only person my age who doesn’t have one, but I don’t mind because I’ve never really been one to follow the crowd. I have, however, over the past week or so, encountered a large number of classicists and ancient historians online discussing a conspiracy theorist named Donna Dickens who uses the TikTok handle “momllennial_” who is apparently attracting an enormous amount of attention on that platform by making absolutely ridiculous claims about ancient history. Their most recent such claim is that the ancient Romans never existed and they were totally invented as “a figment of the Spanish Inquisition’s imagination.”

Right now, all the historians, classicists, and archaeologists who are on TikTok seem to be busy debunking Dickens’s claims. I, however, am not going to try to debunk their claims, because other people are already doing it and, frankly, anyone who knows anything at all about Roman history and literature, the Latin language, archaeology, scientific dating methods, or historical methods in general can easily spot the patent ridiculousness of the things they are claiming.

Instead, I want to do something very different from what I have seen anyone else doing; I want to talk about the history of the conspiracy theory that ancient Rome didn’t exist. Believe it or not, Dickens is not the first person to promote these assertions. In fact, they are actually peddling a conspiracy theory that originated with a reactionary Catholic Jesuit in the seventeenth century CE.

Did Spartan Shields Really Bear the Letter Lambda?

In popular culture, ancient Spartan hoplites are virtually always portrayed as fighting with shields decorated with the Greek letter lambda (Λ). This letter, of course, stands for Λακεδαίμων (Lakedaímōn), which was the most common name in antiquity for the Greek polis (i.e., “city-state”) that included that settlement of Sparta.

In historical reality, Greek hoplites, including Spartan hoplites, were expected to provide their own equipment and they could decorate their shields however they wished. Although there is evidence to suggest that a few Spartans probably did choose to decorate their shields with the letter lambda, the vast majority seem to have decorated their shields with other symbols, geometric designs, and images.

Did the Phoenicians Circumnavigate Africa?

The Phoenicians were an ancient Levantine people. Their original homeland was mostly located in what is now Lebanon and they spoke a Canaanite language closely related to Hebrew. They were known in antiquity for their expert sailors, who conducted extensive maritime trade with many different cultures throughout the Mediterranean world. From the ninth century BCE onwards, Phoenician settlers founded many colonies in the western Mediterranean. The most famous Phoenician colony was the city of Carthage in what is now Tunisia, which later grew into an empire that rivalled the fledgling Roman Republic. The Phoenicians also invented the very first abjad, which is the direct ancestor to both the Greek alphabet and the Latin alphabet that we still use to write the English language today.

One ancient account suggests that a group of Phoenician sailors may have circumnavigated the African continent sometime around 600 BCE—over two thousand years before the Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope. The ancient Greek historian and traveler Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) records in his Histories 4.42 that Pharaoh Necho II of Egypt (ruled 610 – 595 BCE) sponsored a group of Phoenician sailors who managed to successfully complete a clockwise circumnavigation of Africa by sailing south from the Red Sea and returning to Egypt through the Strait of Gibraltar between two and three years later.

The communis opinio among classicists, ancient historians, and online history buffs alike is that, although we cannot be 100% certain, the Phoenician voyage around Africa most likely really took place as Herodotos describes. Some skeptics, however, have raised what I think are serious objections to the story. In this article, I will review the arguments both in favor and against Herodotos’s story and come to a conclusion of what I think really happened.

Was Thucydides Biased?

Thucydides (lived c. 460 – c. 400 BCE)—or, to use a transliteration of his name that is more faithful to the Greek spelling, Thoukydides—was an ancient Athenian general and historian. He is best known today as the author of the work Histories of the Peloponnesian War, a historical account of the famous war fought between the Delian League, led by the city-state of Athens, and the Peloponnesian League, led by the city-state of Sparta. The war lasted from 431 until 404 BCE, with an interlude of peace in the middle lasting from 421 to 415 BCE.

Since the late nineteenth century, Thoukydides has often been held up as a paragon of the “objective,” “unbiased,” “scientific” historian. Although this conception of Thoukydides is, at any rate, no longer as fashionable among scholars as it once was, it persists in popular descriptions of his work and has greatly influenced how the general public perceives him. In this essay, I intend to debunk this perception by pointing out five examples of how Thoukydides’s biases seem to influence his narrative.

Ganymedes: The Adolescent Boy Zeus Abducted and Raped

The ancient Greeks told many stories about their god Zeus raping mortal adolescent girls, often shape-shifting into various animal and human forms in order to do so. Just to name a few examples, he is said to have abducted the Phoenician princess Europe in the form of a bull and raped her, raped the Aitolian princess Leda in the form of a swan, raped the Boiotian princess Antiope in the form of a satyr, raped the Argive princess Danaë in the form of a shower of gold coins, and tricked his own great-granddaughter Alkmene into having sex with him by impersonating her husband Amphitryon (which is, of course, another form of rape).

There’s a popular modern joke that 90% of the problems in Greek mythology are caused by Zeus not being able to “keep it in his pants,” but, even in ancient times, Zeus’s rapacious habits were already the subject of mockery. The Athenian playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BCE) wrote a comedy titled The Clouds, which was first performed at the City Dionysia in Athens in 423 BCE and later revised at some point between 420 and 417 BCE. In the play, an amoral character gives advice on what a man should do if he is caught in the act of adultery, saying, in lines 1080–1081, that he should “. . . ἐς τὸν Δί᾽ ἐπανενεγκεῖν, κἀκεῖνος ὡς ἥττων ἔρωτός ἐστι καὶ γυναικῶν:” (“. . .point at Zeus, and how he is also overcome with lust for women!”)

Many people, however, are not aware that Zeus’s habit of raping adolescents was not exclusively heterosexually oriented. In fact, in ancient times, one of the most famous stories about Zeus abducting and raping someone was about how he abducted a handsome adolescent boy named Ganymedes in the form of an eagle and forced him to become his catamite.

Lucifer Is Not a Name for Satan!

Most people believe that Lucifer is the true name for Satan. This notion has been reinforced by over a thousand years of western Christian tradition and by the constant appearances of Lucifer as a name for Satan in popular culture. In reality, however, the name Lucifer does not occur anywhere in any of the Hebrew or Aramaic texts that make up the Hebrew Bible, nor any of the Koine Greek texts that make up the Christian New Testament.

In fact, although the name does occur in many English translations of the Bible, it only occurs in one verse—the Book of Isaiah 14:12—which actually has nothing to do with Satan in any way. The only reason why anyone associates this passage in Isaiah with Satan at all is because some early Christians, including the church fathers Ioustinos Martys, Tertullianus of Carthage, and Origenes of Alexandria, spuriously interpreted it as an allegory for the fall of Satan.