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

Did Spartan Shields Really Bear the Letter Lambda?

In popular culture, ancient Spartan hoplites are virtually always portrayed as fighting with shields decorated with the Greek letter lambda (Λ). This letter, of course, stands for Λακεδαίμων (Lakedaímōn), which was the most common name in antiquity for the Greek polis (i.e., “city-state”) that included that settlement of Sparta.

In historical reality, Greek hoplites, including Spartan hoplites, were expected to provide their own equipment and they could decorate their shields however they wished. Although there is evidence to suggest that a few Spartans probably did choose to decorate their shields with the letter lambda, the vast majority seem to have decorated their shields with other symbols, geometric designs, and images.

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 Misogyny, Homophobia, and Antisemitism Influence Transphobia

I have developed a very unhealthy habit of deliberately seeking out bigoted and hateful content on the internet and studying it intensely in a mostly vain attempt to understand and analyze it. I really shouldn’t do this, because studying the deplorable things people have written online only intensifies my constant and overwhelming anxiety and makes me lose all faith in humanity. I have, however, learned some things from reading bigotry online about the ways bigoted people think.

Transphobia is a bigotry that has existed for a very long time. It is arguably already present in nascent form in the ancient Greek sources from the third century BCE that talk about the Galli, a group of ancient priests who, as I discuss in this article I published in August 2020, deliberately castrated themselves, wore their hair in feminine styles, dressed in traditionally feminine clothing, and worshipped the Phrygian mother goddess Kybele. Nonetheless, transphobia has only recently begun to develop its own discourse. In this article, I am going to use an example to analyze how contemporary transphobic discourse draws heavily on the older, more established discourses of misogyny, homophobia, and antisemitism.

Readers should be forewarned that this article discusses a wide range of the most unpleasant and depressing subjects imaginable, including sexual assault, transphobia, misogyny, homophobia, child molestation, antisemitism, conspiracy theories, Nazis, the Holocaust, ritual cannibalism, drug addiction, murder, pogroms, and mass genocide. There will also be some quotes with a lot of profanity, slurs, and extreme insults, which I have partly censored. This is not a piece that I enjoyed writing in the slightest, but I feel that the points I am about to make need to be made.

Lucifer Is Not a Name for Satan!

Most people believe that Lucifer is the true name for Satan. This notion has been reinforced by over a thousand years of western Christian tradition and by the constant appearances of Lucifer as a name for Satan in popular culture. In reality, however, the name Lucifer does not occur anywhere in any of the Hebrew or Aramaic texts that make up the Hebrew Bible, nor any of the Koine Greek texts that make up the Christian New Testament.

In fact, although the name does occur in many English translations of the Bible, it only occurs in one verse—the Book of Isaiah 14:12—which actually has nothing to do with Satan in any way. The only reason why anyone associates this passage in Isaiah with Satan at all is because some early Christians, including the church fathers Ioustinos Martys, Tertullianus of Carthage, and Origenes of Alexandria, spuriously interpreted it as an allegory for the fall of Satan.

Why That Fresco from Pompeii Isn’t Sappho

It is extremely common for modern people to misidentify ancient portraits of random people as portraits of famous people. This is partly because many famous authors and historical figures who lived in the ancient world have no surviving portraits and people are eager to find images to represent them. This is especially often the case for ancient women. I will confess that I am partly guilty of this myself; I couldn’t find any decent images to represent Pamphile of Epidauros in my article I wrote about her back in July, so I used a photo of a bust of an unidentified woman in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, paired with a photo of the Ancient Theatre of Epidauros, in an effort to the represent the idea of an ancient Greek woman from Epidauros.

In this article, there is one particular ancient portrait that is especially widely misidentified as a portrait of a famous woman that I want to discuss. The portrait in question is a fresco. It depicts a woman with short, curly brown hair, a gold hairnet, gold earrings, and clothes that are dyed purple and green. She gazes directly at the viewer, holding a set of wax tablets bound with ribbons in her left hand and pressing a writing stylus to her lips with her right hand as though she were in thoughtful contemplation. It dates to between c. 50 and 79 CE and was discovered on 24 May 1760 in the Insula VI region of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii.

Classical scholars immediately began to speculate that the fresco might be a portrait of the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho of Lesbos (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BCE), who is best known today for her poems about love and attraction between women and whose home island is the source for the contemporary word lesbian. (Whether Sappho herself was actually a lesbian is a subject I address in depth in this article I published in August 2021.) The fresco is currently held in the Naples National Archaeological Museum on the first floor in room seventy-six. It is still widely admired as a remarkable portrait of a literate ancient woman. Although the fresco is still widely circulated online as a supposed portrait of Sappho, art historians now generally agree that it actually depicts an unknown upper-class Pompeiian woman.

No, Thales of Miletos Was Not “the First Scientist”

Thales of Miletos (lived c. 625 – c. 545 BCE, with those dates being very approximate) is widely revered today with monikers such as “the first philosopher,” “the first scientist,” or “the first mathematician.” Many people today admire him, believing that he was an astounding, once-in-a-millennium kind of genius akin to Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein who single-handedly invented the idea of science as we know it. There is even a French defense contracting company named after him called the “Thales Group” (presumably because the name “Thales” makes people think of science, innovation, and progress, which are all much-needed positive associations for a company that actually makes deadly weapons that governments use to kill people).

The Thales of the modern imagination, however, is predominantly a myth. Most of the stories that people have heard about him are legends that can’t possibly be true, that are first attested many centuries after his death, or both. Much like Pythagoras of Samos and Hippokrates of Kos, the historical Thales of Miletos is an obscure figure about whom very little is known with any certainty.

“There Are No Pronouns in the Bible”?

I’m sure that most of my readers already know what a pronoun is, but, just in case you happened to skip (or forget) every grammar lesson in elementary, middle, and high school, a pronoun is a word that takes the place of a noun. Pronouns are considered a part of speech. They have also generated a lot of controversy in recent years, due to the fact that personal pronouns are sometimes gendered.

Some people with left-leaning or progressive political inclinations have started stating their pronouns in their social media profiles or (less frequently) when they introduce themselves in person, so that other people will know how to refer to them. They do this because, in some cases, a person’s gendered pronouns may not be obvious from their name or appearance. This is especially often true in the case of transgender people.

Naturally, many conservatives are outraged over this. In fact, the word pronouns has become such a buzzword among conservatives that some conservatives seem to have forgotten what the word itself actually means. Some conservatives, falsely assuming that pronouns are something that only transgender people have and seeking to undermine them, have made the assertion: “There are no pronouns in the Bible.” This claim, however, is false, regardless of whether you are reading the Bible in English or in the original languages.

The Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis Is Racist and Harmful

The so-called “ancient astronaut hypothesis” is a popular genre of pseudohistory which centers around the claim that extraterrestrial beings visited earth in pre-modern times, leaving behind supposed evidence of their presence. The supposed “evidence” for this “hypothesis” is based entirely on flagrant misinterpretations and misrepresentations, tendentious reasoning, false assumptions, forged artifacts, and often outright lies. As a result, the “hypothesis” is universally rejected among professional academic scholars, historians, and archaeologists.

I have written about the ancient astronaut hypothesis before. For instance, I wrote an article back in January 2020 about how we actually know that the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids as tombs for their pharaohs, in which I debunked claims made on the show Ancient Aliens. I also posted an article a few days ago in which I debunk the popular ancient astronaut theorist claim that Alexander the Great saw flying saucers while on his campaigns. In this article, however, I am not going to try to debunk the ancient astronaut hypothesis. Instead, I want to explain the history of the ancient astronaut hypothesis, why it is not just a “harmless” conspiracy theory, and why it is actually harmful.

No, Alexander the Great Didn’t See Flying Saucers

If you’ve ever been on the internet or happened to turn on virtually any show that has aired on the History Channel within the past ten years, you’re probably aware that there are tons of people who are, shall we say, highly enthusiastic about so-called “unidentified flying objects” or “UFOs.” These UFO enthusiasts love to repeat a story which claims that the ancient Makedonian king Alexander the Great and his soldiers saw UFOs in the sky that looked like giant silvery shields at some point while he was on his campaigns.

The story that UFO enthusiasts keep repeating, however, is demonstrably entirely fictional. No version of the story ever appears in any ancient or medieval source. In fact, the earliest known mention of the story dates to the year 1959. Other people have debunked this story before, but I am going to debunk it again because UFO enthusiasts keep repeating it.

The Shocking Truth about Ancient Greek Makeup

There are tons of articles, blog posts, and YouTube videos online about ancient Greek makeup. Unfortunately, I have found that all of them are of utterly abysmal quality. None of the articles that I could find contained any citations to specific passages in ancient sources and all of them contained wildly egregious errors of fact and misconceptions seemingly derived from earlier online sources that, in turn, did not cite any ancient sources.

I have decided to remedy this situation by writing my own article about ancient Greek makeup. Everything I am about to say in this article will be concretely supported by specific passages from actual ancient Greek texts. If you’ve ever wanted to make yourself look like an ancient Greek beauty, or simply wondered what Greek women would look like in movies if they were portrayed historically accurately, then this is exactly the article for you!