classics Archives - Page 2 of 16 - Tales of Times Forgotten

No, Emily Wilson Isn’t the First Woman Ever to Translate Homer

If you pay any attention at all to news related to the ancient world (which, if you’re reading this blog, you probably do), you’ve most likely already heard that the publisher W. W. Norton has just released a new translation of the Iliad by Emily Wilson, the professor at the University of Pennsylvania who became a household name for her translation of the Odyssey, which came out in 2018. Both of Wilson’s translations have received widespread acclaim, both have now become commercial bestsellers, and they have gotten people who don’t normally read ancient Greek literature reading and talking about the Homeric epics. It’s definitely an exciting time to be someone who studies ancient Greece.

For better or worse, the media narrative surrounding Wilson’s translations has fixated heavily on the fact that she is the first woman to commercially publish a translation of the entire Odyssey in English. This has led to an incorrect impression among lay readers that Wilson is the first woman ever to translate Homer. In reality, as Wilson herself has repeatedly and emphatically pointed out, this is not true. Read on to learn more about some of the other women who translated Homer before her.

Why Do Men Spend So Much Time Thinking about the Roman Empire?

I’m a woman and I think about ancient Rome every day—but that’s not surprising, since I’m a graduate student in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies. Thinking about ancient Rome is an intrinsic part of what I do. What is rather surprising, though, is the fact that a viral trend has arisen on TikTok for women to ask their male partners and relatives how much they think about the Roman Empire. Invariably, the men respond that they think about it frequently and the women to act shocked to learn this.

Those who have been reading my blog for a while know that I am not on TikTok, so they may be surprised to find me writing about a trend that originated there. The trend, however, has gone so viral that it has spilled over onto Twitter—a platform which I do occasionally check up on, even though it is generally a cesspit and has only grown even more toxic since Elon took over. Additionally, a whole host of media outlets, including The Washington Post, Insider, The Independent, The New York Post, The National Review, and Wired, have all published articles about it.

Since everyone is apparently talking about this trend, in this post, I intend to explore and answer two closely related, but distinct, questions. First, what about the Roman Empire makes it seem (at least on a purely anecdotal basis) to be especially interesting to men? Second, why, in this particular historical moment, is a viral social media trend constructing interest in ancient Rome as specifically a masculine trait?

How Did Ancient Greek Women Make Themselves Look Seductive?

Imagine that you’re a woman in ancient Greece and, for some reason, you find yourself in a situation where you need (or want) to seduce someone. How would you go about doing it? What kind of clothes or cosmetics would you wear to do it? Some readers may be surprised to learn that there are actually a significant number of surviving texts from ancient Greece that describe in considerable detail how goddesses and mortal women made themselves look sexy in order to seduce people and, in this post, I will put my years of classics education to excellent use by introducing all my wonderful readers to them.

In general, these texts indicate that, if a woman wanted to look sexually attractive in order to seduce someone, she might engage in preparations such as bathing herself, anointing her skin with oil, putting on perfume, dressing herself in beautiful, expensive, and sometimes diaphanous clothing, putting on ornate and expensive jewelry, powdering her face with white lead to make herself look paler, painting alkanet dye rouge on her cheeks to make them look rosier, and removing her body hair.

The Most Twisted Scene in Any Ancient Greek Novel

It’s no secret that ancient Greek literature is full of all kinds of twisted and disturbing stories. I even previously wrote a post on this blog about some such stories in classical myth back in September 2019. There are, however, some truly messed-up incidents in ancient Greek literature that are not well known. In this post, I want to discuss an obscure episode of this nature that I think more people should hear.

Sometime around the second century CE or thereabouts, the Greek writer Xenophon of Ephesos (who is not to be confused with Xenophon of Athens, the much more famous Athenian writer of the fourth century BCE) wrote a novel known as the Ephesiaka or Ephesian Tale. The novel is, for the most part, not especially interesting. In fact, I think it’s probably the least interesting overall of all the surviving Greek novels; it mostly consists of a monotonous repetition of the same tropes that other ancient novelists do better. In book five, chapter one, however, Xenophon unexpectedly drops what is perhaps the freakiest moment in any surviving ancient Greek novel. It involves a man, a mummy, and some casual necrophilia.

The Lost Ancient Greek Novel with a Lesbian Love Plot in It

As I wrote about previously in this post from January 2020, the literary form of the novel (by which I mean a long work of narrative prose fiction) is vastly older than a lot of people believe. In fact, a significant number of novels written in the Ancient Greek and Latin languages by various authors from the first century BCE onward have survived to the present day. In fact, as of the time I am writing this, I have just completed a graduate-level course on the ancient Greek novel.

The central theme of many of the ancient Greek-language novels that have survived is ἔρως (érōs), which refers to sexual and romantic desire. (The ancient Greeks did not distinguish between the two.) The novels in which ἔρως is a central theme center around a pair of protagonists—invariably a young man and a young woman—who deeply and passionately erotically desire each other.

Many of the surviving novels, however, feature side characters who also have experiences with ἔρως, including some who either currently have or have previously had a partner of the same gender as themself. For instance, in the novel Leukippe and Kleitophon, written by Achilleus Tatios, a Greek-language writer from Alexandria in around the late second century CE, the male protagonist Kleitophon initially learns about ἔρως from his older male cousin Kleinias, who has a boyfriend. Fascinatingly, one ancient novel that has not survived—the Babyloniaka or Babylonian Tale, which a Syrian writer named Iamblichos wrote in the Greek language sometime between c. 165 and c. 180 CE—is known to have included a subplot involving two women characters who erotically desire one another and possibly end up marrying each other.

Jordan Peterson Does Not Understand Ancient Languages

I have written before on this blog about Jordan B. Peterson, a professor emeritus of psychology from the University of Toronto who rose to fame in 2016 when he publicly spoke out in opposition to an act passed by the Parliament of Canada to prohibit discrimination on the basis of “gender identity and expression.” Over the past seven years since then, he has attracted an enormous number of devoted followers as a self-help author and YouTube personality, appealing primarily to an audience of young, mostly white, straight, cisgender men from middle-class backgrounds who hold conservative political opinions. Peterson has used the platform he has built to publicly promote misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, and occasionally even white supremacist ideas.

In a blog post I wrote back in April 2021, I discuss in detail how Peterson routinely tries to use ancient myths and the Bible to support his various noxious viewpoints, despite the fact that he has absolutely no understanding of the academic study of these subjects and his interpretations of them display a profound ignorance of the historical and cultural contexts from which they originate and how ancient audiences understood them. I would recommend that readers who have not already read that post from two years ago go back and read it before continuing with this one, since this post is something of an addendum to that one.

In this post, I want to discuss the troubling way in which Peterson often tries to support his positions by making wildly unsupported claims about ancient languages, mainly Hebrew and Ancient Greek, despite the fact that he has never studied either of these languages in his life and he does not know them or any real information about them.

What Is the Correct Plural Form of ‘Octopus’?

It is something of a platitude among native speakers of English to say that our language is a motley one. It is a West Germanic language that has taken in an enormous amount of vocabulary from non-Germanic languages, especially French, Latin, and Ancient Greek. These other languages have systems for the pluralization of nouns that differ from the predominant system in English and, in some cases, users of English have favored pluralizing nouns derived from other languages according to the morphological rules of the word’s language of origin. As a result of this and other factors, pluralizing nouns in English is sometimes a controversial subject.

One of the most controversial of all English nouns to pluralize is octopus, which ultimately derives from the Greek word ὀκτώπους (oktṓpous), which is a compound of the Greek word ὀκτώ (oktṓ), meaning “eight,” and the noun πούς (poús), meaning “foot” or “leg.” English-speakers have tried to pluralize this noun in various ways, with the most popular plural forms being octopuses and octopi. But which plural for this word is the most pedantically correct? In this post, I will delve into the wonderful and exciting world of etymology to answer this question.

Does Classical Studies Really Make People Neurotic and Unhappy?

In March 2023, the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, a German economics research institute, released a discussion paper (i.e., a preliminary paper that is released for the purpose of discussion without being formally published) written in English by a group of four Italian economists Giorgio Brunello, Piero Esposito, Lorenzo Rocco, and Sergio Scicchitano titled “Does Classical Studies Open Your Mind?” The study frames itself as a response to the popular defense of classical studies which claims that studying the classics improves a person’s self-discipline, their ability to work hard, and their openness to others.

Directly contrary to this argument, the paper claims, based on an analysis of data from surveys conducted in Italy, that there is no statistically significant difference in the rate of conscientiousness or openness in students who studied the classics compared to students who studied STEM. Instead, the study claims that studying the classics significantly causally increases the likelihood of a person being neurotic and unhappy. I have already seen people on Twitter sharing this paper uncritically and I have a feeling that, in the coming years, people will probably try to use the paper to argue that people shouldn’t study the classics or even that schools and universities should stop teaching them altogether. The paper, however, has some absolutely glaring methodological problems, which I would like to point out in this post.

The Shocking True Origin of Dionysos

The ancient Greeks from at least the fifth century BCE onward commonly believed that the worship of the god Dionysos originated in Asia and was introduced to the Greek world relatively late. For most of the twentieth century, scholars simply accepted this belief at face value and deemed the elements of Dionysos’s cult that they perceived as strange and exotic as definitive marks of his cult’s eastern origin. If you pick up any book about Greek religion that was published before around 1960, it will almost certainly claim that Dionysos was a late addition to the Greek pantheon. Even today, people online still commonly repeat this claim as though it were fact.

For at least the past thirty years, though, scholars of ancient Greek religion have known for certain that Dionysos was not, in fact, a late entry to the Greek pantheon from the east at all. Instead, extremely ancient clay tablets written in a very early form of Greek definitively attest that the Greeks were already worshipping Dionysos as early as the fourteenth century BCE—a thousand years before Plato was even born. In light of this fact, the fact that the ancient Greeks believed that Dionysos was a recent addition to their pantheon takes on new meaning and potentially reveals much about how the Greeks thought about foreignness.

At What Age Did Ancient Greek Women Typically Marry?

It is well and widely known that ancient Greek parents typically compelled their daughters to marry at a shockingly young age, one at which they would legally be considered minors in most countries in the twenty-first century. Greek men, by contrast, typically married much older, usually when they were in their late twenties or thirties. As a result, the groom at an ancient Greek wedding was usually at least a decade older than the bride he was marrying—and in many cases much older than that.

Unmarried girls were effectively considered their father’s property. Marriages were usually arranged primarily between a girl’s father and her male suitor. The extent to which a father allowed his daughter to decide which man she would marry probably varied significantly depending on factors such as time period, region, and the specific father in question’s personality and attitudes; in some cases, girls probably had significant say over which man they married, but it is likely that, in other cases, they had little or no say.

Exactly how young did ancient Greek women really marry, though? Popular histories and even many academics routinely assert as fact that Greek parents typically forced their daughters to marry as soon as they began puberty, before they even turned fifteen. In this post, however, I will argue that this is based mainly on one literary passage describing a bride who was probably unusually young and was not typical for most city-states. Instead, a more comprehensive view of the evidence suggests that Greek girls actually most commonly married when they were a bit older, broadly between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. The ages at which girls married also varied significantly across regions; ancient authors record that, in certain parts of the Greek world, girls typically married significantly younger or older than they did in other parts.