Making the Distant Past Relevant to the Present Day
Three and a half millennia ago, the people of the Bronze Age Minoan civilization revered the double-headed ax, which is conventionally known today as a labrys (plural form: labryes), as a religious symbol associated with powerful goddesses. Over a thousand years later, the historical Greeks and Romans often depicted Amazons, mythical female warriors who lived … Continue reading "How the Labrys…
Most people who know about Greek myth think that Hades is the ruler of the underworld. This is not wrong per se; early Greek poems do describe Hades as “ruler of those beneath the earth.” But, for the ancient Greeks, Hades was surprisingly not very important. Instead, across ritual, mythic, literary, and artistic contexts, Persephone, … Continue reading "Is Persephone the Main Ruler of the…
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is perhaps the most highly anticipated new film of the 2020s. It has already received near-universal acclaim from film critics and earned more at the box office in its opening weekend than any of Nolan’s previous films, including The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and Oppenheimer (2023). It has only been out … Continue reading "An Ancient Historian’s Breakdown of…
Because generative AI is in everything now, a shockingly high number of other blogs have adopted it, and, on Reddit, other people have occasionally accused my comments on that platform of being AI-generated, I’ve decided to make this short post clarifying my own position regarding its use. I began writing this blog in November 2016, … Continue reading "My Position Regarding Use of Generative AI"…
The new season of HBO’s epic fantasy series House of the Dragon is about to release its fourth episode. The show is set in the fantasy land of Westeros, which is loosely inspired by England in the High and Late Middle Ages. The story is based on the second half of George R. R. Martin’s … Continue reading "How Medieval Are the Dragons in ‘House of the Dragon’ Really?" The post How Medieval Are the…
If I told you to imagine what the Devil looks like, you would probably have a very clear image in your head: a man with horns, red skin, a goatee, cloven hooves, and a tail with a point on the end, holding a pitchfork. This image of Satan is ubiquitous in popular culture. But where … Continue reading "Where Does the Canonical Image of Satan Come From?" The post Where Does the Canonical Image of…
Even if you know nothing else about the historiography of the late Roman Empire, there is one work of scholarship on the subject that you’ve probably heard of: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, which was originally published in six volumes from 1776 to 1789. At the time, it was … Continue reading "Is Edward Gibbon’s ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ Worth Reading…
It is a fact of life that, for as long as people have been making laws, there have been people who have tried to break those laws and get away with it. Laws, of course, are extremely ancient; the oldest surviving formal, written law code is the Code of Ur-Nammu, which King Ur-Nammu of the … Continue reading "Did Ancient Civilizations Have Organized Crime?" The post Did Ancient Civilizations Have…
In the Iliad, Pandaros, son of Lykaon, is a Lykian archer who is allied with the Trojans. In Book 4 of the epic, the goddess Athena tricks him into firing an arrow at the Akhaian king Menelaos, which breaks a truce between the Trojans and Akhaians and causes fighting to resume. Pandaros briefly shows up … Continue reading "How an Obscure Character in the ‘Iliad’ Gave Us the English Word ‘Pander’"…
No one can deny that Death of a Unicorn, released in March of this year, is a very strange film. It is a horror comedy in which a man and his daughter driving their car through a remote forest accidentally hit and fatally injure a unicorn. Soon, the unicorn’s body ends up in the hands … Continue reading "Ancient and Medieval People Believed that Unicorns Were Real—and Murderous" The post Ancient…