Herodotos of Halikarnassos Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

What Was the “Epic Cycle” Really?

If you’re at all familiar with early ancient Greek literature, there’s a very strong likelihood that you’ve heard at some point that some ancient authors considered the Iliad and the Odyssey to belong to something called the “Epic Cycle.” This term refers to a particular group of eight epic poems in dactylic hexameter verse that originated from oral tradition during the Greek Archaic Period (lasted c. 800 – c. 490 BCE) and that all tell stories about the Trojan War and the mortal heroes who are said to have fought in it.

The poems that are included in the Epic Cycle are, in narrative order of the events they describe: the Kypria, the Iliad, the Aithiopis, the Little Iliad, the Iliou Persis or Sack of Ilion, the Nostoi or Homecomings, the Odyssey, and the Telegoneia. Sadly, of these poems, only the Iliad and the Odyssey have survived to the present day complete. Only a few tiny fragments of the other epics, preserved through quotation by later authors, and prose summaries of their contents remain.

Unfortunately, very few explanations of the Epic Cycle for a general audience exist and the vast majority of the ones that do exist are misleading and written by non-classicists. As a result, most people who are not classics specialists aren’t aware that it existed and most of those who are aware have some serious misunderstandings about what it was. That is why, in this post, I am going to discuss what the Epic Cycle was and—just as importantly—what it wasn’t. For the purposes of this post, I will assume that my readers have some basic knowledge about Greek myths of the Trojan War and at least a vague awareness of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but I will not assume that they have any familiarity with Greek literature, philology, or history beyond this.

No, Ancient Skythian Enarees Didn’t Drink Urine from Pregnant Mares as a Primitive Form of HRT

The Skythians were an ancient mostly nomadic people who inhabited the northern Eurasian steppes in what is now Ukraine, southern Russia, and Kazakhstan. They were known in antiquity as a very warlike people and were especially known for their skills at horseback riding and archery. The ancient Greeks generally regarded them as archetypal barbarians and Greek ethnographers were deeply fascinated by their culture. They wore trousers, which the Greeks regarded as the most barbaric kind of garment, and they practiced tattooing.

As I discuss in this post I wrote in August 2020, various groups of people existed in ancient world who might fit the definition of the modern word transgender. The Enarees were one such kind of gender-variant people who existed among the ancient Skythians. Although they were assigned male at birth, they wore women’s clothing, took on roles traditionally assigned to women, and spoke in a feminine manner.

A story has become widely circulated online in recent years claiming that the Enarees drank estrogen-rich urine harvested from pregnant mares in order to feminize their bodies as a form of primitive gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Sadly, as awesome as it would be if this story were true, it has absolutely no basis in any kind of historical evidence and is entirely a piece of unfounded modern speculation.

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, 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.

Did the Phoenicians Circumnavigate Africa?

The Phoenicians were an ancient Levantine people. Their original homeland was mostly located in what is now Lebanon and they spoke a Canaanite language closely related to Hebrew. They were known in antiquity for their expert sailors, who conducted extensive maritime trade with many different cultures throughout the Mediterranean world. From the ninth century BCE onwards, Phoenician settlers founded many colonies in the western Mediterranean. The most famous Phoenician colony was the city of Carthage in what is now Tunisia, which later grew into an empire that rivalled the fledgling Roman Republic. The Phoenicians also invented the very first abjad, which is the direct ancestor to both the Greek alphabet and the Latin alphabet that we still use to write the English language today.

One ancient account suggests that a group of Phoenician sailors may have circumnavigated the African continent sometime around 600 BCE—over two thousand years before the Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope. The ancient Greek historian and traveler Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) records in his Histories 4.42 that Pharaoh Necho II of Egypt (ruled 610 – 595 BCE) sponsored a group of Phoenician sailors who managed to successfully complete a clockwise circumnavigation of Africa by sailing south from the Red Sea and returning to Egypt through the Strait of Gibraltar between two and three years later.

The communis opinio among classicists, ancient historians, and online history buffs alike is that, although we cannot be 100% certain, the Phoenician voyage around Africa most likely really took place as Herodotos describes. Some skeptics, however, have raised what I think are serious objections to the story. In this article, I will review the arguments both in favor and against Herodotos’s story and come to a conclusion of what I think really happened.

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.

How Do We Know Ancient Texts Are Really Ancient?

There seems to be a lot of people who think that, because we do not have the original manuscripts of ancient texts, that is somehow deeply suspicious. While it is certainly true that there are some places in some texts where we are not completely sure what the original text said, in the vast majority of cases, it is possible to reconstruct exactly or at least almost exactly what the original text said. Even when the exact original wording of a text is unclear, we usually have a pretty good idea of what the original author wrote.

The Movie ‘300’ Is Fascist Propaganda

For those who don’t know, the 2006 fantasy action film 300, directed by Zack Snyder, written by Snyder, Kurt Johnstad, and Michael B. Gordan, is based on the 1998 limited comic book series 300, which was written and illustrated by the American comic book artist Frank Miller. Both the film and the comic book are very loosely based on the story of the three hundred Spartans who allegedly fought and died in the Battle of Thermopylai in 480 BC.

The film is almost entirely a work of fiction with very little basis in historical reality. Unfortunately, not everyone realizes this. Zack Snyder himself has boasted about how historically accurate the film supposedly is; he said in an interview with MTV: “… the events are 90 percent accurate. It’s just in the visualization that it’s crazy… I’ve shown this movie to world-class historians who have said it’s amazing. They can’t believe it’s as accurate as it is.”

I don’t know which “world-class historians” Snyder has been showing the film to, but I hope to demonstrate here that the film is not in any way an accurate reflection of historical reality and that it deviates markedly from the historical record in ways that clearly promote a message that is overtly racist, homophobic, ableist, and fascist.

A Life of Herodotos

The ancient Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos is renowned today as the “Father of History,” a title that was first conferred on him by the Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (lived 106 – 43 BC) in his dialogue On the Laws. Herodotos is often credited with having been the first person to methodically collect and critically analyze different accounts of events from different sources, compile them into a detailed historical narrative, and attempt to assess the causes of those events and analyze the motives and politics behind them.

Herodotos did these things in a book in nine volumes titled Ἱστορίαι (Historíai), meaning “researches” or “inquiries,” describing his research on the Greco-Persian Wars and their historical context. It is from the title of Herodotos’s book that we have gotten our English word history. Ironically, even though Herodotos has contributed so much to our understanding of history, very little is known about Herodotos’s own, personal history. In this article, I intend to discuss what is known about Herodotos’s own life.