classics Archives - Page 13 of 16 - Tales of Times Forgotten

No, Transgender People Are Not a Sign of Cultural Collapse

In case you’ve had the good fortune of having never heard of her, Camille Paglia is a professor at the University of Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and, at this point, effectively a professional right-wing provocateur. She claims to be a feminist, but yet she disagrees with all the basic tenets of feminism and spends most of her time bashing feminists and defending patriarchy.

Paglia has been making the rounds over the past few years promoting transphobia, declaring that the growing prevalence of people identifying as transgender—especially the number of people assigned male at birth identifying as trans women—is a sign of growing effeminacy and an indication that “western civilization” is on the brink of collapse. In support of these claims, she has invented her own elaborate pseudohistory that focuses to a large extent on ancient Greece and Rome.

Unfortunately, Paglia is widely regarded as a serious social critic, especially by men on the far right, meaning her false claims about ancient history have spread widely. When I published my article about transgender people in the ancient world a few months ago, I got a lot of people leaving comments about her claims. I don’t have time to debunk everything Paglia has said about ancient history, so, for the purposes of this article, I will be focusing on what she says in one viral YouTube video in particular.

No, History Doesn’t Need to be “Mathematized”

On 12 November 2020, The Atlantic published an article titled “The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse.” This article, written by a staff writer named Graeme Wood, is primarily a profile piece about Peter Turchin, a Russian American entomologist-turned-pseudohistorian. It is also, however, to a large extent a full-on polemic against real historians, whom Wood portrays as obsolete curmudgeons who don’t really understand the past and are allergic to science.

As can only be expected, the entire article displays an absolutely flagrant ignorance of what the historical discipline is and what historians actually do. Indeed, it is full of all kinds of outlandish howlers, bordering on outright silliness. Unfortunately, many of the misconceptions that the article promotes are becoming more and more common as our society continues to devalue the study of history.

How Historically Accurate Is Netflix’s ‘Barbarians’?

There have a been a lot of Netflix originals related to ancient history recently. One such show is the German historical drama series Barbarians, which was first released on Netflix on 23 October 2020. The show is very loosely based on the historical events leading up to and surrounding the Battle of Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE, in which an alliance of several Germanic tribes won a crushing victory against the Romans and destroyed three whole Roman legions.

A lot of people have commented on Barbarians’ similarities to the History channel series Vikings, but there are a couple factors that differentiate it. One is that Barbarians is set about eight hundred years earlier than Vikings in the world of antiquity rather than the world of the Middle Ages. The other factor is that Barbarians is overtly a German show that is clearly made for a German target audience with German concerns; whereas Vikings was clearly made with British and North American target audiences primarily in mind.

Barbarians is mostly fiction, but, so far at least, it does generally stick more closely to the broad outline of historical events than Vikings. (There are, for instance, no bizarre scenes in which historical figures who actually lived centuries apart are portrayed as meeting in person.) In this article, I want to talk about aspects of the show that are historically accurate and other aspects where the makers of the show have taken some creative license.

Was Julius Caesar a Roman Emperor?

People who know very little about the Roman Empire will tell you that Julius Caesar was a Roman emperor. People who know a little bit more about the Roman Empire will tell you that Julius Caesar never held the title of emperor, but rather only the title of dictator perpetuo, meaning “dictator in perpetuity.”

Both of these groups of people are wrong. The truth is that things are complicated. Our English word emperor is derived from the Latin word imperator, which is a title that Julius Caesar actually held. Nonetheless, this title didn’t quite mean what we think of as “emperor” in the time when Julius Caesar was alive. In order to answer the question of whether Julius Caesar was a Roman emperor, we need to talk about how titles can change meaning over time.

Did Cleopatra Really Dissolve a Pearl in Vinegar?

There are a lot of famous stories about the Greek-Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII Philopator that are probably not historically true. For instance, as I discuss in this article from August 2019, while it is highly probable that Cleopatra killed herself, it is highly unlikely that she really did so by allowing an asp to bite her on the breast. Similarly, as I discuss in this article from October 2020, it is virtually certain that she never owned any sort of vibrator powered by angry bees.

One of the most famous stories about her that I have not yet addressed, though, is the story that she once dissolved an ancient pearl that was worth tens of millions of sesterces in vinegar as a party trick to impress her lover Marcus Antonius. Unlike the bizarre vibrator story, the story about the pearl is actually found in the ancient sources. Nevertheless, it is almost certainly a fabrication invented by Roman propagandists to portray Cleopatra in the worst possible light.

Stolen Artworks in Museums

When most people today think of stolen artworks, they usually tend to think of artifacts being stolen from museums. There are many famous cases of this, such as the notorious theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre Museum in 1911, which generated international headlines. Unfortunately, most people are not aware of the fact that many of the artifacts that are currently on display in museums in western Europe and North America were themselves stolen from the peoples of other countries all around the world.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, western Europeans and people of western European descent pillaged countries all over the world, taking their cultural artifacts and putting them in museums back in their home countries, where they could admire them, but the peoples of the countries to whom the artifacts rightfully belonged could not. There are so many stolen artworks on display in museums that it would be impossible for me to cover them all, but today I want to talk about just a few of the more famous examples.

Was Cleopatra Really Hypersexual?

In popular culture, the Ptolemaic Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII Philopator is routinely portrayed as wildly hypersexual. If you’ve been on the internet lately, there’s a good chance you’ve heard a lot of crazy stories about how she supposedly threw wild sex orgies, had sex with over a hundred men in one night, had a vibrator that was powered by angry bees, and once offered to have sex with anyone who wanted it under the condition that they would be executed the next morning.

None of these stories have any kind of basis in the ancient sources, however. In fact, historically speaking, Cleopatra is only known for certain to have had sex with two men in her entire life: Julius Caesar and Marcus Antonius. The popular image of Cleopatra as an insatiable nymphomaniac is ultimately rooted in a vicious Roman propaganda campaign to discredit her, but modern authors, filmmakers, video game developers, and internet factoid-mongers have taken it to a whole new level.

Why Is Hollywood So Fixated on Cleopatra Anyway?

On 11 October 2020, it was officially announced that Gal Gadot, a white Israeli actress, had been cast to play the Hellenistic Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII Philopator in an upcoming epic period drama titled Cleopatra, which will be directed by Patty Jenkins and scripted by Laeta Kalogridis. This casting predictably set off outrage on social media over the fact that Cleopatra will not be portrayed by a Black actress.

I’ve already written an entire article in which I discuss Cleopatra’s ancestry and her appearance in great detail. In short, her ancestry was almost entirely Greek and her only known ancestor with non-Greek ancestry was her three times great-grandmother Kleopatra I of Syra, who was of mixed Greek, Persian, and Sogdian ancestry. There is one argument that people have tried to make that Cleopatra’s mother may have been a native Egyptian woman, but it is founded on multiple layers of wishful thinking and dubious assumptions and it is far more likely that her mother was Cleopatra V Tryphaina, her father’s only known wife, who was also his sister or his cousin.

In this article, though, I want to answer a different question: Why Cleopatra? Why is it that, out of three thousand some years of ancient Egyptian history, the only Egyptian queen that Hollywood is interested in making movies about is the one who was definitely of European ancestry? It’s clear that a very large section of the general public wants a movie about a native Egyptian queen portrayed by an actress of color. I say that, if that’s what people want, Hollywood should give that to them. Thankfully, there are plenty of native Egyptian queens and goddesses that Hollywood could potentially make movies about.

Where Does the Myth of Medusa Come From?

Medusa is one of the most fascinating figures in classical mythology and one who bears a deep contemporary resonance. Indeed, just yesterday, it was announced that a controversial statue of her would be installed in Collect Pond Park in New York City. In order to understand this statue and the controversy surrounding it, we need to talk about the bizarre and fascinating history of how the Medusa myth has evolved over the past 2,800 years or so.

The story about Medusa that most people today are familiar with holds that she was once an extraordinarily beautiful mortal woman, but then she was raped by the god Poseidon in the temple of the goddess Athena. Athena was disgusted by the desecration of her temple, so she cursed Medusa, giving her snakes for hair and making it so that anyone who saw her face would be instantly turned to stone. Then, eventually, the hero Perseus came along and beheaded her.

This story, however, is actually radically different from the story the ancient Greeks were familiar with. In the oldest surviving sources for the Medusa myth, she is seemingly born a Gorgon with the ability to turn people to stone at a glance, she is never raped by Poseidon, and she is never cursed by Athena. Oh, and she apparently also had the four-legged lower body of a horse.

Were Achilles and Patroklos Lovers?

In twenty-first-century adaptations of the story of the Trojan War, Achilles and Patroklos are often portrayed as gay lovers. This is how they are portrayed, for instance, in Madeline Miller’s novel The Song of Achilles (published in 2012) and in the BBC television series Troy: Fall of a City (released in 2018). Many people have wondered how faithful these portrayals are to the ancient sources. In other words, were Achilles and Patroklos really in a sexual relationship?

As it turns out, the debate over whether Achilles and Patroklos were lovers goes all the way back to antiquity. There are some surviving ancient sources that unambiguously portray them as lovers—but there are also ancient sources that explicitly deny that their relationship was ever sexual.