ancient Greek history Archives - Page 2 of 4

Why Are Some Names Used in the ‘Iliad’ Used in English Today While Others Are Not?

If you have ever read the Iliad, you have probably noticed that there are many characters in it who have names that are not commonly used as given names in countries that are predominantly English-speaking today. I’m talking about names like Agamemnon, Menelaos, Patroklos, Idomeneus, Hekabe, Andromache, and so forth. Meanwhile, there are also names like Alexandros, Helene, Hektor, and Kassandra that are still used today in Anglicized forms like Alexander, Helen, Hector, and Cassandra. Many people have wondered why some of these names are commonly used today in English, while others of them are not.

As it turns out, the vast majority of the names that are used in the Iliad have never been widely used in English, but a handful of these names have passed into English through various channels, mostly not through the Iliad itself. Of all the names of characters in the Iliad, the two that have been in continuous use as names for people in English the longest are Alexander and Helen, which passed from Greek into Latin and from Latin into English very early due to both of these names having been held by particularly famous and revered ancient figures. The names Hector and Cassandra first passed into English a bit later via the medieval “Matter of Rome” (i.e., the corpus of romances based on ancient Greek and Roman stories), but they didn’t become popular until the eighteenth century.

Were the Sophists Really So Bad?

The word sophist comes from the Greek word σοφιστής (sophistḗs), which originally meant “one who is highly skilled or learned in his craft.” In the fifth century BCE, various professional teachers of public speaking began to emerge in the Greek world calling themselves σοφισταί (which is the plural form of σοφιστής).

These teachers would typically come to a city and court wealthy patrons, offering to teach them how to speak persuasively in exchange for a tuition fee. Sometimes they would teach other subjects as well, such as philosophy, music, poetry, or mathematics. They would stay in a given city long enough to teach any wealthy people who were willing to pay them for lessons and then move on to the next city to teach anyone who was willing to pay for lessons there.

The sophists have a bit of a bad reputation nowadays. The very word sophist itself has come to mean a person who uses rhetorical trickery and fallacious arguments to deceive people into believing falsehoods. In this post, I want to peel back the millennia of negative portrayals to explore who the sophists really were and what they really wrote (for most part in their own words). By the end of it, hopefully it will be clear what the real differences were between the sophists and the philosophers like Plato (lived c. 428 – c. 347 BCE) and Xenophon (lived c. 430 – c. 354 BCE) who vilified them.

How Were Eunuchs Perceived in the Ancient Mediterranean World?

Eunuchs in the ancient world have become something of a major topic of interest for me over the past few years. The perception of eunuchs in various cultures throughout history has varied drastically, depending on the culture, the time period, and the kind of eunuch in question. In this post, I will describe the perception of eunuchs in the ancient Mediterranean world, which is my area of historical specialization.

In general, in the ancient Mediterranean world, eunuchs were heavily socially marginalized. They were often of enslaved status and, because of their castration, they were commonly seen as no longer men, but rather lesser, inferior creatures. Eunuchs, women, and children were commonly seen as belonging to the same essential category and eunuchs were often seen as more similar to women than to non-castrated men. In the highly misogynistic ancient world, this made them seen as inferior and, in some cases, even outright disgusting and debased.

No, Ares Was Not the Patron God of Sparta

Many people have gotten the impression that, in ancient Greece, Ares was the patron god of Sparta in the same way that Athena was the patron goddess of Athens. This impression, however, is not rooted in any kind of solid historical evidence, but rather solely in the fact that modern people popularly associate Ares and Sparta with many of the same general sorts of things, such as warfare, bloodshed, masculinity, unstoppable fighting abilities, et cetera. To modern observers, Ares seems to embody the Spartan ethos so perfectly that people simply assume without concrete evidence that the Spartans must have adored him.

The truth, though, is that Ares was not the patron god of Sparta in any sense. As one of the Twelve Olympians, he was certainly a significant deity in both Athens and Sparta, but, in both poleis, he was still relatively minor compared to other deities who were far more prominent. Indeed, ironically, Athena actually seems to have had a much more developed cult presence in Sparta than Ares.

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.

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.

No, Thales of Miletos Was Not “the First Scientist”

Thales of Miletos (lived c. 625 – c. 545 BCE, with those dates being very approximate) is widely revered today with monikers such as “the first philosopher,” “the first scientist,” or “the first mathematician.” Many people today admire him, believing that he was an astounding, once-in-a-millennium kind of genius akin to Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein who single-handedly invented the idea of science as we know it. There is even a French defense contracting company named after him called the “Thales Group” (presumably because the name “Thales” makes people think of science, innovation, and progress, which are all much-needed positive associations for a company that actually makes deadly weapons that governments use to kill people).

The Thales of the modern imagination, however, is predominantly a myth. Most of the stories that people have heard about him are legends that can’t possibly be true, that are first attested many centuries after his death, or both. Much like Pythagoras of Samos and Hippokrates of Kos, the historical Thales of Miletos is an obscure figure about whom very little is known with any certainty.

Alluring Anecdotes about the Olympic Games

The 2020 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo are now officially underway, having been delayed by a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I have absolutely no interest in sports and, in all likelihood, I will not watch any part of the ongoing Olympics. Nonetheless, I do know a little bit about Olympic history, due to my intense study of ancient Greece and Rome and, on account of the occasion, I’ve decided to share a few of my favorite anecdotes about Olympic history.

The first is a legend about why ancient Olympic athletes were required to compete naked, the second is about a woman who disguised herself as a man in order to attend the Olympic Games, the third is about how women were sometimes able to compete in the ancient Olympic Games due to a loophole, and the fourth is about how the modern Olympic Games at one point included competitions for literature and the arts.

Pamphile of Epidauros: A Female Ancient Greek Historian

Nearly all the historical writings that have survived from ancient Greece and Rome were written by men. Women’s voices in the historical record are few and far between. We do, however, know that there was, in fact, an extraordinarily prolific female ancient Greek historian named Pamphile of Epidauros, who lived in Greece in around the middle of the first century CE, when Greece was ruled by the Roman Empire.

Pamphile is known to have written a lengthy compilation of interesting historical anecdotes derived from various sources titled Historical Commentaries, an epitome of the writings of the historian Ktesias of Knidos (fl. c. 400 BCE), a work titled On Controversies that seems to have been perhaps a collection of essays on controversial topics, and a work titled On Sexual Pleasures, which seems to have been a sex manual. Sadly, everything or almost everything she wrote has been lost.

Pamphile is a truly monumental figure in the history of Greek historiography, not only because she is the only female ancient Greek historian about whom we have any significant information, but also because she seems to have been an especially important author in the development of the genre of “miscellaneous history,” which focused on retelling interesting anecdotes from earlier authors and became very popular in the Roman Empire during the second and third centuries CE.

Why Did the Patriarchal Greeks and Romans Worship Such Powerful Goddesses?

It is widely known that the ancient Greeks and Romans worshipped many powerful goddesses, whom they held in extremely high regard. At the same time, it is also widely known that ancient Greek and Roman societies were deeply patriarchal. Misogyny and machismo were rampant among men of all social classes. Women’s lives were, in general, strictly socially controlled and women were excluded from holding most official positions of power.

As a result of this, one of the most common questions people have asked me about classical mythology is how the Greeks and Romans were able to accommodate such powerful goddesses within their respective pantheons while simultaneously denigrating human women. In this essay, I will try to answer this question to the best of my ability. I will give several different plausible explanations in the hope that some of them, or the combination of all of them, may be satisfactory.