classics Archives - Page 5 of 16 - Tales of Times Forgotten

What Powers Do Demigods Really Have in Greek Mythology?

The most prominent portrayal of demigods in recent years occurs in the American author Rick Riordan’s mythology-based middle-grade children’s books, which include the series Percy Jackson & the Olympians (published 2005 – 2009), The Heroes of Olympus (published 2010 – 2014), Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard (published 2015 – 2017), and The Trials of Apollo (published 2016 – 2020). Since Riordan’s books have an enormous fanbase and Percy Jackson & the Olympians is currently being developed into a new series for Disney+, I thought I would write this post in which I will explore how the portrayal of demigods and their powers in ancient Greek mythology and literature differs from the portrayal in Riordan’s novels.

Riordan’s novels portray demigods as having supernatural powers that correspond to specific aspects of the domains their divine parents preside over. The reality, though, is that, in actual ancient Greek and Roman sources, demigods do not typically possess any special powers or abilities that correspond in any way to the specific domain of their divine parent. Instead, what they typically inherit from their divine parent are more general exceptional qualities that correspond to the demigod in question’s gender more than their divine parentage.

Demigod men are typically said to display exceptional qualities that the Greeks and Romans considered inherently masculine, such as extraordinary physical strength and skill at fighting. Meanwhile, demigod women are typically said to display exceptional qualities that the Greeks and Romans considered inherently feminine. Notably, although both demigod men and women in general are said to possess extraordinary physical beauty, the sources tend to emphasize this aspect more for women than for men. Both demigod men and women are said in some cases to possess extraordinary cunning. By far the most important thing that makes demigods in the Greek tradition special, though, is that their divine parents look out for them and are willing to give them things they ask for.

How Did People in the Ancient Mediterranean World View Abortion?

The United States Supreme Court is expected to announce its decision in the landmark abortion case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health at some point before the end of the present term, which will most likely end sometime in June or early July of this year. An initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito that has been obtained by Politico indicates that the majority of the justices have already privately decided to completely overturn the previous Supreme Court rulings in the cases of Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which held that the U.S. Constitution protects the inherent right of a pregnant person to choose to have an abortion until the point when the fetus becomes viable outside the womb, which is generally agreed to occur at around twenty-three or twenty-four weeks gestational age.

In this new case, the court is expected to rule that the U.S. Constitution does not protect any right of a pregnant person to choose to have an abortion at any point during pregnancy. Although the verdict is not final and the justices still have time to change their minds, it is unlikely at this point that they will do so. This will be the first (although possibly not the last) time in living memory that the Supreme Court has completely revoked something that it previously deemed a major fundamental right.

Given the current situation, I thought it would be useful to write a post about attitudes toward abortion in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world. This post will cover attitudes among peoples of the ancient Near East, Greeks, Romans, and early Christians and will give some insight about how and why ancient Christians came to disapprove of abortion in the first place.

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.

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.

Proselytism in the Ancient Mediterranean Before Christianity

Today, in the twenty-first century, Judaism is usually thought of as an ethnic religion and Jewish people are not generally known for their proselytizing. At least in the second and first centuries BCE and the first century CE, though, Jewish people in the Mediterranean world were far from totally disinterested in trying to convert other people to their religious practices and way of life. In fact, among ancient Greek and Roman authors in this period, one of the main things Jewish people became known for was their supposed habit of aggressively proselytizing.

Early Christianity’s strong emphasis on proselytism is best understood not as a completely sudden new development or an example of early Christians doing something that no Jewish people had ever done before, but rather an example of Christians taking something that some Jewish people had already been doing and making it a major focus for their movement.

The Ghost of Achilles on Snake Island

By this point, I imagine that most of my readers have probably already heard that, on 24 February 2022, the first day of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, a pair of heavily armed Russian warships attacked Snake Island, a small Ukrainian island in the western Black Sea that was protected at the time by only thirteen Ukrainian border guards.

One of the Russian warships ordered the Ukrainian border guards to surrender and one of the Ukrainians replied: “Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй,” which means “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.” This reply has become famous around the world and has widely become seen as emblematic of Ukrainian defiance. It was initially reported that the border guards were all killed, but the Ukrainian military has now publicly confirmed in a post on Facebook that they are actually “alive and well” in Russian captivity.

One thing that many of my readers may not know is that Snake Island—the exact same island where all the events I have described above took place—was known to the Greeks in ancient times as Λευκή (Leukḗ), which means “White Island.” This island is prominent in Greek literature, mythology, and folklore, chiefly because the Greeks believed that Achilles’s mother, the immortal goddess Thetis, transposed his mortal remains, along with those of Patroklos, and interred them in a hero shrine on this island, making it their final resting place.

Several classicists have already written posts about Snake Island’s classical connections, including Mateusz Stróżyński in the online open-access journal Antigone, Peter Gainsford on his blog Kiwi Hellenist, and Christopher Stedman Parmenter on the Society for Classical Studies blog. All of these posts, though, overlook what are, in my personal opinion, the most fascinating stories about the island, which are told by the Greek sophist Philostratos of Athens (lived c. 170 – c. 250 CE) in his dialogue Heroïkos, chapters 54–57. According to Philostratos, the ghosts of Achilles and Helene of Sparta haunt the island together as lovers. (Yes, you read that right; I said Helene, not Patroklos.) The stories he tells about their hauntings on the island are simultaneously captivating and bizarre.

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.

Fascinating Obscure Texts from Ancient Greece and Rome

People often talk about the texts from ancient Greece and Rome that have been lost, but it is worth noting that there are many fascinating texts from ancient Greece and Rome that have survived that are totally obscure and seldom ever read. In this post, I would like to highlight some of these works and hopefully bring them to somewhat greater attention.

Some of the texts I am about to list are better known than others, but the vast majority of them are texts that a person could at least in theory go through an entire undergraduate degree in classics without ever encountering. You will notice that this list skews heavily toward Greek texts over Roman; this is because my main area of interest is in Greek history, so I tend to be more familiar with obscure Greek texts than with obscure Roman texts. Without further ado, let’s dive in.

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.

No, Xerxes I Was Not an Eight-Foot-Tall Giant

In the 2007 epic fantasy action film 300, cowritten and directed by Zack Snyder and based on the 1998 limited comic book series of the same name by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, Xerxes I, the king of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, is portrayed by the Brazilian actor Rodrigo Santoro as a towering giant god-king who goes around almost completely nude, wearing only a very skimpy gold loincloth and a ton of really ornate gold jewelry, which is held on mostly through body piercings.

I’ve already written an entire post about how 300 is not historically accurate and it blatantly promotes a fascist, white supremacist message. Sadly, though, it has recently come to my attention that there are apparently some people on the internet who earnestly think that Xerxes I was really believed in antiquity to have been an eight-foot-tall giant.

Some have tried to prove this claim using a blatantly misquoted passage from the Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) and Achaemenid relief carvings as evidence. In this post, I will show that Xerxes I was not really an eight-foot-tall giant, that Herodotos never claimed that he was an eight-foot-tall giant, and that there is no evidence to suggest that anyone in antiquity ever believed that he was one.