women in the ancient world Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Men Have Been Finding Weird and Unsettling Ways to Describe Women’s Breasts Since Ancient Times

It is common knowledge that cisgender straight and bisexual men frequently possess an overriding fascination with women’s breasts—to such an extent that they often devote more attention to a woman’s breasts than to any other aspect of her person. As a result of this fixation, some male writers have a habit of throwing in references to or descriptions of breasts in places where they are contextually inappropriate. Sometimes they also describe breasts using goofy or perplexing figurative language.

These sorts of references and descriptions have become a subject of widespread memes and satire. There is even an entire subreddit called r/menwritingwomen, which is dedicated to examples of male authors writing about women in incompetent (and often comical) ways. A significant proportion of the examples discussed in the subreddit are breast references and its satirical headline reads: “She breasted boobily down the stairs…..”

One thing some people may not realize is that gynophilic men have been doing this exact same thing for literally thousands of years. In this post, I will discuss three different examples of goofy, weird, unsettling, or just downright creepy descriptions of women’s breasts in texts from the ancient Mediterranean world in three different languages: Biblical Hebrew, Ancient Greek, and Latin.

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.

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.

Did the Ancient Greeks and Romans Practice BDSM?

For those who are not aware, BDSM is a combined acronym for bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism. The term refers to a variety of sexual practices that fall under these umbrella categories. There are already many articles on the internet that talk about the supposed ancient history of BDSM, but I think that all these articles are hopelessly inadequate for anyone looking for accurate information on the subject.

Nearly all of these articles are clearly written by people who know very little about ancient history and are just looking for anything mentioned in modern secondary sources that seems to vaguely resemble contemporary BDSM practices. Additionally, most online articles about BDSM-like practices in the ancient world don’t cite any ancient sources whatsoever and repeat demonstrably false factoids as though they were true. In this article, I hope to counter the dearth of trustworthy information on this subject by providing my own analysis of it, using real ancient primary sources as evidence.

Pamphile of Epidauros: A Female Ancient Greek Historian

Nearly all the historical writings that have survived from ancient Greece and Rome were written by men. Women’s voices in the historical record are few and far between. We do, however, know that there was, in fact, an extraordinarily prolific female ancient Greek historian named Pamphile of Epidauros, who lived in Greece in around the middle of the first century CE, when Greece was ruled by the Roman Empire.

Pamphile is known to have written a lengthy compilation of interesting historical anecdotes derived from various sources titled Historical Commentaries, an epitome of the writings of the historian Ktesias of Knidos (fl. c. 400 BCE), a work titled On Controversies that seems to have been perhaps a collection of essays on controversial topics, and a work titled On Sexual Pleasures, which seems to have been a sex manual. Sadly, everything or almost everything she wrote has been lost.

Pamphile is a truly monumental figure in the history of Greek historiography, not only because she is the only female ancient Greek historian about whom we have any significant information, but also because she seems to have been an especially important author in the development of the genre of “miscellaneous history,” which focused on retelling interesting anecdotes from earlier authors and became very popular in the Roman Empire during the second and third centuries CE.

Why Were Women Prohibited from Fighting in Most Ancient Societies?

Someone on Quora recently asked the question “Is there a real reason why ancient armies didn’t have female soldiers, or was it just sexism?” This question immediately triggered a whole flurry of defensive replies from various male military history buffs proclaiming all the reasons why women are supposedly naturally unsuited for ancient warfare and why it was supposedly perfectly logical for ancient militaries to exclude women.

The most upvoted answer to the question is this one, written by a man named Alex Mann, arguing that women are naturally physically shorter, weaker, and smaller than men, that pregnancy and menstruation would hinder them from fighting, and that they would be an overall detriment to any ancient army. The answer currently has 2,722 upvotes and hundreds of comments, many of them showering praise on the author for his supposed clarity and perceptiveness.

Other men have provided answers drawing similar conclusions. The arguments that these men present, however, are demonstrably quite shoddy. In this essay, I intend to demonstrate that there is, in fact, no logical reason for an army to have a rule categorically excluding all women and that the real reason why women were excluded from ancient militaries is indeed simply sexism.

No, Transgender People Are Not a Sign of Cultural Collapse

In case you’ve had the good fortune of having never heard of her, Camille Paglia is a professor at the University of Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and, at this point, effectively a professional right-wing provocateur. She claims to be a feminist, but yet she disagrees with all the basic tenets of feminism and spends most of her time bashing feminists and defending patriarchy.

Paglia has been making the rounds over the past few years promoting transphobia, declaring that the growing prevalence of people identifying as transgender—especially the number of people assigned male at birth identifying as trans women—is a sign of growing effeminacy and an indication that “western civilization” is on the brink of collapse. In support of these claims, she has invented her own elaborate pseudohistory that focuses to a large extent on ancient Greece and Rome.

Unfortunately, Paglia is widely regarded as a serious social critic, especially by men on the far right, meaning her false claims about ancient history have spread widely. When I published my article about transgender people in the ancient world a few months ago, I got a lot of people leaving comments about her claims. I don’t have time to debunk everything Paglia has said about ancient history, so, for the purposes of this article, I will be focusing on what she says in one viral YouTube video in particular.

What Did Cleopatra Really Look Like?

There are a lot of misconceptions about Kleopatra VII Philopator of Egypt, the ancient queen most commonly known in English as simply “Cleopatra.” For instance, as I discuss in this article from March 2019, she actually lived closer to the present day than to the time of the construction of the pyramids of Giza. Meanwhile, as I discuss in this article from August 2019, the popular story about Cleopatra committing suicide by allowing an Egyptian asp to bite her on the breast is probably apocryphal and it is more likely that she actually committed suicide by drinking poison or by cutting herself and applying poison to the wound.

Perhaps the greatest misconception of all about Cleopatra, though, is what she looked like. Modern people have a very clear image of what Cleopatra looked like: a beautiful, pale, small-nosed woman like Elizabeth Taylor dressed in a revealing outfit with thick makeup, straight, black hair, bangs, and braids with gold ornaments going down to her shoulders. Unfortunately for fans of classic films, this image is inaccurate in almost every single way.

We actually have pretty good idea of what the historical Cleopatra looked like and it’s nothing at all like the image most people have in mind. For one thing, she didn’t have bangs. She did have a large, hooked nose, a prominent chin, and curly hair that she normally wore in a bun at the back of her head. There’s even a possibility that she may have been a redhead.