ancient Roman culture Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Ancient Greek and Latin Insult Poetry

The ancient Greeks and Romans are known for their many revered works of literature, art, and philosophy. One thing they are not known for (but perhaps should be!) is their insult poetry. In this post, I have collected some insulting ancient Greek and Roman poetic passages from a wide variety of sources, including the Homeric epics, Sappho, Hipponax, Catullus, and Martial, that I find especially amusing or revealing about ancient Greek and/or Roman society.

Readers should be aware that many of the passages I am about to discuss are extremely misogynistic, classist, racist, and/or shockingly sexually obscene. Some passages contain references to sexual violence. Some readers may find some of these poems disturbing.

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.

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.

How Were Lesbians Regarded in Ancient Greece and Rome?

Within the past month, I have encountered at least three different people asking the question of how lesbians were perceived in ancient Greece and Rome. This is a topic that is rarely covered in ancient history and classics courses, so I decided that it was worth taking the time to write an in-depth article on the subject.

Unfortunately, while references to men’s homoerotic attraction and relationships are absolutely ubiquitous throughout the surviving ancient Greek and Roman sources, women’s homoerotic attraction and relationships are very poorly attested. To say that the primary sources on this subject are scant is an understatement. This paucity of evidence is mainly the result of the fact that nearly all the surviving ancient sources were written by men who were generally not interested in writing about anything women did among themselves when there were no men around.

Based on the admittedly very few sources that we have, though, homoerotic attraction and relationships seem to have been relatively common and not heavily stigmatized among Greek women in the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic Eras. Attitudes toward women’s homoeroticism in the Roman world, by contrast, seem to have varied drastically. Roman-era sources variously portray women’s homoeroticism as a degenerate Greek perversion, as something that should amuse and titillate male audiences, as an absurd impossibility, as an allegation against which a woman’s reputation must be defended, and, finally, in some cases, something that should be accepted as normal.

Same-Gender Attraction May Be Much More Common Than Previously Thought

One thing that often puzzles modern people about the ancient Mediterranean world, which I study, is the fact that certain kinds of sexual and romantic attraction and relationships between people of the same gender are attested so widely and spoken of so openly in the ancient sources. This seems very strange to many modern people, who assume that same-gender attraction is a rare phenomenon that only a tiny minority of the population experiences.

Contemporary evidence, though, is starting to show that same-gender attraction may be much more common than many people have previously assumed. Last week, on 17 February 2022, the polling agency Gallup published the results of a new survey, which found that no less than 7.1% of all adults in the United States now openly identify as some variety of LGBT+. This is quite significant, because this is nearly double the percentage it was ten years ago in 2012 when Gallup first started polling the question. Especially striking is the fact that, apparently, in the U.S., around 20.8% of adult members of Generation Z (my own generation) now identify as LGBT+, with the overwhelming majority of that percentage identifying as bisexual.

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.

Shocking, Taboo Sex in Ancient Greece and Rome

Ancient Greek and Roman sexuality seems to be a huge topic of interest with the general public. I’ve found that my posts on the subject are regularly among my most popular. Readers seem to be especially fascinated by stories of lurid depravities. For a very long time, the post I wrote in February 2019 about Roman orgies was consistently one of my most frequently viewed articles.

Well, if that’s what you’re interested in, you’re in luck, because, in this post, I will be discussing some of the sexual acts that the ancient Greeks and Romans regarded as the most shocking, disgraceful, unnatural, and taboo. We’ll even discuss some of the most scandalous and lurid tales of Roman imperial debaucheries. Be forewarned that some readers may find some of the acts discussed in the ancient sources I am about to analyze disturbing.

The Shocking Ancient Pagan Origins of Halloween Monsters

I’ve written an awful lot about how, contrary to popular belief, there is extremely little about the way people celebrate holidays in the United States in the twenty-first century that can actually be historically traced back to ancient “paganism.” (See for, instance, this article I wrote in April 2017 about how there’s very little about modern Easter that is legitimately “pagan,” this article I wrote in December 2019 about how there’s very little about modern Christmas that is legitimately “pagan,” this article I wrote about the history of Santa Claus, this article I wrote in February 2020 about how there’s nothing “pagan” about Groundhog Day whatsoever, and this article I wrote in April 2020 about how Easter has nothing to do with the ancient Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar.)

Until now, I have not published any articles about whether Halloween has any connections to “paganism.” This is partly because I think Halloween’s connections to ancient pre-Christian belief systems are much more substantial and complex than Christmas or Easter’s (which are extremely minimal). Although Halloween itself is nominally a holiday of Christian origin, there is an awful lot about how we celebrate Halloween today that is demonstrably influenced by genuine, ancient “pagan” ideas.

In particular, the most famous monsters that are most closely associated with Halloween today—including ghosts, werewolves, revenants, and reanimated mummies—have real and well-attested origins in ancient, pre-Christian belief systems. The association of these monsters with Halloween is a relatively recent development, but the monsters themselves have origins that go way back. In this article, I will explore the ancient origins of the monsters I have just named, using ancient historical sources as evidence.

Are There More Surviving Ancient Writings in Greek or Latin?

Most people are aware that the vast majority of everything that was written in ancient times has been lost. Some languages, however, have more surviving works than others. To give a somewhat extreme example, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder (lived c. 23 – 79 CE) records in his Natural History 18.5.22 that the city of Carthage contained libraries of scrolls written in the Punic language. In 146 BCE, however, the Romans utterly destroyed Carthage. They burned the entire city to the ground and killed or enslaved every single person who lived there.

The Romans dispersed whatever survived of the contents of the Carthaginian libraries among the various kings of North Africa—except, Pliny tells us, for a treatise on agriculture written in a set of twenty-eight scrolls by the Carthaginian writer Mago, which the Senate ordered be translated into Latin. The Latin translation of Mago’s treatise was later lost and is only known today from references in Greek and Roman sources. The Punic language itself went extinct sometime around the fifth century CE. As a result, not a single literary work that was originally written in the Punic language has survived to the present day complete; even the works that are known are known only in name, summary, or fragmentary quotation.

Ancient texts written in the Greek and Latin languages have been relatively fortunate in terms of their survival. Scholars often estimate off-the-cuff that around 1% of the known works written in Greek and Latin in ancient times has survived to the present day. This may not seem like a lot, but it is still far more writing than any individual can possibly hope to read, even in a lifetime, and it is a great deal more than what has survived in Punic. Given these circumstances, it is only natural that many people are curious which of these two languages has more surviving ancient texts: Greek or Latin? The answer, for reasons I will explain shortly, is almost unquestionably Greek.

Did the Ancient Greeks and Romans Practice BDSM?

For those who are not aware, BDSM is a combined acronym for bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism. The term refers to a variety of sexual practices that fall under these umbrella categories. There are already many articles on the internet that talk about the supposed ancient history of BDSM, but I think that all these articles are hopelessly inadequate for anyone looking for accurate information on the subject.

Nearly all of these articles are clearly written by people who know very little about ancient history and are just looking for anything mentioned in modern secondary sources that seems to vaguely resemble contemporary BDSM practices. Additionally, most online articles about BDSM-like practices in the ancient world don’t cite any ancient sources whatsoever and repeat demonstrably false factoids as though they were true. In this article, I hope to counter the dearth of trustworthy information on this subject by providing my own analysis of it, using real ancient primary sources as evidence.