Roman emperors Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

No, the Roman Emperor Hadrian Didn’t Invent Palestine

At this point, I’m sure that all my readers are well aware of the recent events in Israel-Palestine. I don’t intend to talk about those events on this blog, in part because I am not an expert on the present-day geopolitics of the region and, right now, a lot of public information about what is happening there is incomplete or unreliable. The first and foremost purpose of this blog is to inform and educate my readers; the last thing I want to do is misinform or misdirect them. The danger of misinformation is especially great when it comes to present-day political situations that hold serious, far-reaching impacts for a large number of people.

I do, however, wish to address a factually incorrect claim that, for years, I have seen and heard various people make in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict, which pertains directly to my own expertise in ancient Greece and Rome. Namely, a lot of people have claimed that the Roman emperor Hadrian, who ruled for twenty-one years from his accession in 117 until his death in 138 CE, was the first to apply the name Palestine to the entire land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River when he renamed the land that was previously known as Judaea “Syria Palaestina,” supposedly specifically in order to punish the Jewish people for the Bar Kokhba revolt (lasted 132 – 136 CE).

In reality, the name Palestine etymologically derives from the Greek name Παλαιστίνη (Palaistínē), which Greek-language authors were already regularly using as a name for the geographic region of the southern Levant that lies between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River as far back as the fifth century BCE—over six hundred years before Hadrian. Roman authors writing in Latin and Jewish authors writing in Greek were likewise already using this name long before Hadrian was born. Furthermore, although Hadrian did combine Judaea into a province which bore the official name Syria Palaestina sometime around the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt, his precise motives for doing so are far from clear.

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?

“The Man, the Myth, the Pumpkin” Podcast

Hello folks! My good friend Sophia Sarro is a fellow grad student in the Ancient Greek and Roman Studies program at Brandeis University. They are strongly committed to promoting scholarly engagement with the public and, for their master’s project, they decided to do something a little different; they’ve created a podcast about the history of fictional portrayals of the Roman emperor Claudius (ruled 41 – 54 CE), spanning all the way from his death to the present day, examining how portrayals of him have been shaped by their cultural and historical contexts, how they interpret him in different ways and convey radically different messages, and how they deal with major aspects of his life, including his disability.

Their podcast is titled “The Man, the Myth, the Pumpkin” and you can listen to it here. The first episode, which just came out yesterday, is about how the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger (lived c. 4 BCE – 65 CE) portrays Claudius in his famous satire Apocolocyntosis Claudii or The Pumpkinification of Claudius, which he wrote not long after the emperor’s death. Sophia will be dropping more episodes of the podcast over the course of the coming weeks.

I’ve just listened to the first episode and I cannot recommend their work highly enough! Sophia has put an enormous amount of time and labor into making this podcast and it really shows. Their writing is excellent and witty, their research is thorough, and their dramatic reading is spot-on. The podcast is both educational and entertaining and I’m sure that those who enjoy my blog will enjoy it as well. I personally loved listening to every second of the first episode and I eagerly await the next one.

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.

What Did the Ancient Romans Use Latin For?

Someone on Quora has asked: “What was Latin used for in ancient Rome?” At first glance, this question might sound rather silly. After all, it seems obvious that people in ancient Rome used Latin for all different kinds of oral and written communication. This may explain why the people who have answered this question so far have all given brief and flippant responses. I initially thought about giving such a response as well. After a bit of consideration, though, I realized that this is not actually a bad question, or a silly one.

Quite simply, Latin was not the only language that people in the Roman cultural sphere used. There were many Roman people in ancient times who could not speak Latin. Also, many Roman people who did speak Latin spoke it in addition to at least one other language. In this post, I intend to first explain who in ancient Rome actually spoke Latin and then explain in what sorts of contexts multilingual people who knew Latin used it.

A History of the “Common Era” (BCE/CE) Dating System

I functionally stopped believing in the existence of God sometime around late 2018 or early 2019. It’s difficult to say exactly when it happened, since it was a gradual process of realizing that all the theological arguments to which I had clung to support my belief in the existence of God were fundamentally flawed. Long after I became an agnostic, though, I still clung to many of the cultural trappings of Christianity. One of these trappings was the BC/AD dating system, which numbers the years from the supposed year of Jesus’s birth, with “BC” standing for “before Christ” and “AD” standing for “anno Domini,” which is Latin for “in the year of the Lord,” referring to Jesus.

For nearly two years after becoming an agnostic, I continued to use this dating system in all my articles. I felt that the alternative BCE/CE dating system (which uses the exact same numbers for the years, but with “BCE” standing for “before the Common Era” and “CE” standing for “Common Era”) was a relatively recent invention of atheists seeking to advance a secularist agenda by taking the Christian dating system and making it superficially “secular” by removing the explicit Christian references while retaining the years numbered from the supposed date of Jesus’s birth. I wondered why secularists didn’t just create a dating system that was actually secular and not based on the supposed date of Jesus’s birth.

Well, it turns out that the history of the “Common Era” dating notation is a lot more complicated and fascinating than I realized. In fact, it is not a recent invention of atheist secularists in any way; it is both quite old and originally Christian. Christians first began using the “Common Era” notation in the early seventeenth century and they have been using it continuously ever since. Jewish people widely adopted the notation in the nineteenth century so that they could use the Christian dating system that everyone around them was using while still upholding their religion by not applying the titles “Christ” and “Lord” to Jesus. The notation is now widely used among scholars and academics, primarily out of respect for followers of religions that don’t regard Jesus as Lord or Christ.

How Accurate Are “Photorealistic” Portraits of Roman Emperors?

In 2020, the digital artist Daniel Voshart used a neural net called Artbreeder to create a series of “photorealistic” portraits of fifty-four Roman emperors spanning from Augustus (ruled 27 BCE – 14 CE) to Carinus (who died in 285 CE). As the term “photorealistic” suggests, his portraits look almost like photographs. Unfortunately, a lot of people do not realize that these portraits are modern artistic impressions, not scientific recreations of what the Roman emperors really historically looked like.

I’ve seen many people over the past year cite Voshart’s portraits and others like them as though they were authoritative, scientific recreations of what the Roman emperors really looked like. In particular, I’ve noticed a worrying number of white supremacists trying to cite these kinds of portraits as “evidence” that the ancient Romans were all white. In this article I would like to discuss why Voshart’s portraits—and others like them—should be taken with several grains of salt.

Elon Musk Declares Himself “Imperator”?

On 12 April 2021, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who currently has a net worth of approximately $175 billion, changed his Twitter bio to say “Technoking of Tesla, Imperator of Mars.” This change immediately sparked headlines in Newsweek, NDTV, and dozens of other news outlets. Ordinarily, one person—even an ultra-wealthy CEO—changing their Twitter bio probably wouldn’t make the news. Elon Musk, however, has a massive cult following of adoring fans who, for the most part, wholeheartedly believe that he is a brilliant, forward-thinking, polymathic genius who is single-handedly ushering in a new era of technology and freedom. Thus, everything he does automatically attracts attention.

I’m sure that some of Musk’s fans are reading this. I hope they will forgive me for the fact that I am not one of them. Indeed, I think that Musk has risen to where he is to a large extent through exploitation, that he isn’t nearly as personally brilliant as most of his fans think he is, that he has an obnoxious personal ego the size of the planet Jupiter, and that he is generally a rather odious person. I do, however, want to talk about Musk’s updated Twitter bio because I think it reveals a lot of startling things about how Musk thinks of himself and his position in the world.

Transgender People Exist—And That’s Ok

If you’ve paid any attention whatsoever to the news over the past few years, you have almost certainly heard about how a lot of conservatives are really mad that transgender people exist. They routinely insist that acknowledging the existence of trans people is “gender ideology” and that it goes against both science and the Bible. They insist that there are only two genders—male and female—and that a person’s gender is determined by their chromosomes and can never, under any circumstances, truly be changed.

In this essay, I intend to demonstrate that these arguments are, in fact, incorrect and that the existence of more than two genders is totally compatible with both science and the Bible. This essay has taken me nearly a month to research and write, so it will be quite long and will incorporate evidence from a wide range of different fields, including biology, neuroscience, history, anthropology, and religious studies.

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.