Professor Answers Ancient Greece Questions From Twitter
Professor of Ancient Greek History Paul Christesen joins WIRED to answer your questions from Twitter. What do we know about the original Olympics? How did Ancient Greece elect leaders? Is the film ‘300’ accurate? Was there a huge outdoor statue of Athena in Acropolis as in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey? What exactly did we lose when the Library of Alexandria burned? Why did ancient Greeks place a coin in the mouth of the recently decesased? These questions and plenty more are answered today on Ancient Greece Support.
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00:00Hi, I'm Professor Paul Christesen.
00:01Let's answer your questions from the internet.
00:03This is Ancient Greece Support.
00:10Adzugati69.
00:12So did ancient Greeks really just walk around naked all the time?
00:15Or are the people who made those statues and paintings just super horny?
00:18The Greeks did not walk around naked all the time.
00:20But the one time that it was socially acceptable to be nude in public
00:25was when we're working out in a gym.
00:27And in fact, that comes from a good Greek word, gymnasion.
00:31Literally, the nude place.
00:33So they're not enthusiasts for public nudity by any stretch of the imagination.
00:37Really fit bodies were a sign of being sound of character.
00:41Like you were a good moral person if you were in really good physical condition.
00:46And you wanted to see their body so you could tell that they were in great physical shape.
00:50So they needed to be nude.
00:52At BitesizeDancy1, how accurate is the movie 300?
00:56The movie 300 is pretty accurate in a lot of ways.
00:59A lot of it's embellishment.
01:00But there are some things which are pretty much right on the mark.
01:02The film is based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller.
01:06The single most famous scene, the Persian ambassador comes to Sparta
01:10and asks for earth and water.
01:12A simple offering of earth and water.
01:15Just a symbolic submission.
01:17And Persians did actually do that.
01:19The Spartans did throw the ambassador in a well.
01:22There are Spartan boys being sent out into the wilderness on their own
01:25with very little equipment.
01:27Spartans had conquered a big swath of territory around Sparta
01:31and enslaved the local inhabitants who were called helots.
01:34The helots were understandably very upset about this
01:37and were a constant security threat to the Spartans.
01:40The Spartans had something called the cryptaea, which means like the secret thing,
01:44where boys were sent out into the countryside.
01:47Their goal was to go terrorize the helots.
01:49The movie 300 tends to glorify the Spartans
01:52and tell the really positive side of the story
01:54about how brave and well-trained they were,
01:56what great soldiers they were.
01:58And there's a lot of truth in that.
01:59It doesn't tell the story of the regular oppression and violence
02:03that the Spartans used to control the helots.
02:05Agio Honcho.
02:06If Alexander the Great was so great, why did he die at 32?
02:10Alexander was great.
02:11I'm not sure we can make fun of him for dying at age 32.
02:15He didn't have a lot of choice in the matter.
02:17Going backwards a little bit,
02:18Alexander started fighting in major battles very early, around age 16.
02:23By the time he was 32, he'd been wounded at least a dozen times.
02:27So he wasn't like he was in great shape physically.
02:30He had been fairly beaten up over the course of his relatively short lifetime.
02:34Like many Macedonians, Alexander spent a lot of time doing a lot of heavy drinking.
02:40And so when he died from malaria,
02:42Alexander had been drinking heavily for the previous three or four days.
02:46He'd been wounded repeatedly.
02:47He had some serious alcohol issues.
02:50And if you combine that with the malaria,
02:52you can see why he might've died young.
02:54Ad by Brandon White wants to know,
02:56was there a huge outdoor statue of Athena
02:59in the ancient Greek Acropolis like in Assassin's Creed?
03:02Yeah, there was a gigantic statue.
03:04This clip is actually a really good reconstruction of the Acropolis
03:08around say like 440 BCE.
03:11The Acropolis was a big rock in the middle of the city
03:13where the major religious sanctuaries were.
03:16On top of that rock was a huge bronze statue
03:19that had been made by the sculptor Phidias showing Athena.
03:23This statue was called the Athena Promachos, Battle-Ready Athena.
03:27We can see on the left side,
03:29one of the temples called the Erechtheion
03:31and on the right side, the Parthenon.
03:33We have this idea sometimes that Greek temples were all pure white,
03:37but we actually know that's not true.
03:39The Greeks loved painting their temples.
03:41They used a special wax-based paint,
03:43especially bright blue and bright red.
03:46The reason why we might think these temples are white
03:49is that most of the paint has flaked off.
03:51At existentialcoms asks,
03:53actually, according to the ancient Greeks
03:55who invented Western civilization,
03:57everyone should fuck each other all the time.
04:00Okay, well, yeah, maybe.
04:02So Greeks were very big on being married.
04:05So the assumption was that every adult,
04:07male or female, would be married.
04:09That doesn't mean that you only had sex
04:12with the person to whom you were married.
04:13So especially for men,
04:15also had an active sexual life in addition to that.
04:18The Greeks were very open to same-sex relationships.
04:21So for them, the best form of same-sex relationship among men
04:26involved an older man who was married
04:28and had a family with a teenage boy,
04:31which we would consider to be a felony.
04:33But the Greeks thought was a good idea
04:36because the older male would serve as a mentor
04:39for the younger male in the relationship.
04:42So the same thing held true for women.
04:44It was perfectly acceptable,
04:45at least in some times and places in the Greek world,
04:48for a married woman to have a sexual relationship
04:51with a teenage girl.
04:52And we have some poetry written by a woman named Sappho
04:56with two women expressing their sexual desire for each other.
04:59AtAndyDoodle56,
05:01so why am I being assigned to read some long-ass poem
05:04written by the dad from The Simpsons?
05:06The dad from The Simpsons is Homer Simpson.
05:08And so what we're thinking about here is Homer.
05:10Homer was a very famous Greek poet around 700 BCE.
05:14And he wrote two very long poems,
05:16The Iliad and The Odyssey.
05:18The Iliad's a story about war,
05:20but really telling the story of Achilles,
05:22who's the big hero in the poem.
05:24Achilles knows that he has very short time to live.
05:27And he spends a lot of time thinking,
05:29like, if you know you're going to die,
05:32what is worth living for?
05:33That's a big question pretty much
05:35every human being has to face.
05:36And Homer in The Iliad tries to give you some answers.
05:40The Odyssey is about someone named Odysseus
05:42coming home from war.
05:43And what is it like to come home from a war
05:45and try to reestablish your family life?
05:47At one point, a goddess offers to make him immortal
05:50as long as he stays with her.
05:52And Odysseus says, listen, I gotta go home.
05:54My wife and child are waiting.
05:56I have to be home, even if it costs me my life.
05:59The reason your teachers are going to sign these things
06:01in part is because they're really important documents
06:03about how ancient Greeks thought and saw the world,
06:06but also because they're asking us important questions
06:09and encouraging us to think about things
06:11that you're going to have to think about
06:13at some point sooner or later.
06:14At Golden Yofa asks, what's worse,
06:16the fact that my draft folder was deleted
06:18or the burning of the Library of Alexandria?
06:20What's in your draft folder would be a great question.
06:22Maybe there's something really profound in there
06:24that the world is now going to miss
06:26and can't be reproduced.
06:27Alexander the Great conquered big stretches of territory,
06:29including Egypt, 200 or 300,000 Greeks emigrated.
06:32They were worried about losing their Greek culture.
06:35So they built a big Greek cultural center
06:38in Alexandria in Egypt.
06:40And part of that cultural center
06:41was a big, very famous library,
06:44which eventually was destroyed.
06:46There's a lot of stories that the Library of Alexandria
06:48burned down at some point.
06:49The modern scholarship now thinks
06:51that the library never really got burnt.
06:53It just sort of fell apart over the course of time
06:55because it wasn't properly maintained.
06:57The exact details are not very well known,
06:59but it collected a huge number of very valuable books.
07:02So I'm going to guess that the Library of Alexandria,
07:05collectively, was probably more important
07:06than your draft folder.
07:07Sorry to say that.
07:08At Wilster asks, why did the ancient Greeks
07:10place a coin in the mouth of those who died?
07:12After you died, you went under the earth to the underworld.
07:15In order to get to the underworld,
07:16you had to cross a river.
07:18And if you didn't cross that river into the underworld,
07:20you were doomed to wander the earth forever
07:22as an unhappy ghost.
07:23You had to take a ferry
07:25and you had to pay the guy who was running the ferry.
07:27So you put a coin in the mouth of the dead person.
07:29So when they got to the river,
07:30they could pay the ferryman.
07:31At Faisal El Anwar 51,
07:34who do you think was the best ancient Greek philosopher?
07:36I'm going to have to give it to the man himself, Diogenes.
07:39You have to love Diogenes.
07:41He was a Greek philosopher
07:43committed to living a radically simple life.
07:46He owned nothing except a cup.
07:48He lived in a barrel by the side of the road.
07:50But speaking purely for myself,
07:52I would say Aristotle.
07:54He went to Athens to study with Plato.
07:56And later in his life,
07:58he was the tutor for Alexander the Great.
08:00He thought about every subject you can possibly imagine
08:03from marine biology to political systems.
08:06He thought very carefully about
08:08what are the traits that make you behave well,
08:11that make you into a valuable, good person.
08:13At Eric Buchel asks,
08:15how did ancient Greece elect leaders?
08:17Ancient Greece is a big place.
08:18There are lots of different communities
08:20and every community had its own government
08:22and it changed over the course of time.
08:24The one we know the most about is Athens
08:27and its democratic government that started around 500
08:30and lasted to about 300.
08:32Their view was that as soon as you set up an electoral system,
08:35people with power and wealth
08:37will always find a way to game the system
08:39to get themselves elected
08:40so that the rich will always dominate the government
08:43if you hold elections.
08:44Their solution was to pick most of their leaders
08:48through a lottery system.
08:49So Athenian democracy was direct democracy.
08:52In the modern day United States,
08:53we can elect a representative.
08:55Representatives goes to Washington and votes for us.
08:58But in Athens,
08:59everyone went to the legislative assembly themselves
09:02and voted for themselves.
09:03Most of the population of Athens,
09:05the simple majority could not participate.
09:07No women were allowed to participate in government
09:09in any way, shape or form.
09:10They couldn't vote
09:11and they couldn't hold political office.
09:13You also know that there was a significant population
09:15of enslaved persons in Athens.
09:18They couldn't participate either.
09:19And if you had immigrated to Athens,
09:22you were not gonna be allowed to participate
09:24in the government also.
09:25Not every Greek community was a democracy
09:28and even Athens was not a democracy
09:30for all of its history.
09:31Before the democracy,
09:32they were governed by a general
09:34who would seize power through a military coup.
09:36And other Greek communities at different times
09:38and places had pretty much every kind of government
09:40that you can imagine.
09:41Kings and narrow oligarchies
09:43where there were just like 30 people in charge.
09:45There were federal states.
09:47Another really interesting facet of Athenian government
09:50is they loved the courts,
09:51but they thought that in order to get a just judgment
09:54in a courtroom,
09:55you needed to have a really big jury.
09:57So the smallest jury that the Athenians used
10:00was 501 people.
10:02And for the really important cases,
10:04they sat juries of 6,000 people.
10:07Add geek God review.
10:08How much do we know about the original Olympics
10:11in ancient Greece?
10:12We know a lot about the original Olympics
10:14in ancient Greeks.
10:15The Greeks took their sports really seriously.
10:18They use the Olympics as their calendar.
10:21Like what's the date?
10:22What year is it?
10:23So it's the third year of the 42nd Olympiad.
10:25The ancient Olympics had a pretty limited program
10:27of events, three or four running events.
10:30There were some horse racing events.
10:31The pentathlon, which was like a multi-sport event
10:34that tested different disciplines.
10:36If you won at Olympia,
10:37there was a grove of trees at Olympia
10:40of wild olive trees that was sacred to Zeus.
10:42And the idea was they cut a branch off the sacred tree
10:45and put it on your head.
10:46So it was kind of a gift from Zeus.
10:47The stadium at Olympia in its final form
10:50seated about 50,000 people.
10:52And they came from all over the Mediterranean
10:54because the Greeks really lived out in what's now Spain
10:57and North Africa and Southern Russia.
10:59If you were a painter or a writer,
11:01or you wanted to sell something,
11:03you could show up at the Olympics
11:05and recite your work aloud
11:06or show your paintings or your sculpture
11:08or sell something that you had made
11:10that you wanted to market.
11:12In addition to the sports,
11:13there was a big religious element.
11:14The Olympia was actually a sanctuary
11:17dedicated to Zeus Olympios,
11:19Zeus who lives on Mount Olympus.
11:20On the third day of the Olympics,
11:22they would have a sacrifice
11:24where they killed a hundred cows,
11:25a huge all day long barbecue
11:28that included a lot of drinking.
11:30So the ancient Olympics must've been a crazy scene.
11:33At Mr. Mizungu, what did the Greeks invent?
11:36Greeks invented all sorts of interesting things,
11:38but quite possibly the thing
11:40that's had the most long-term significance
11:42is the alphabet.
11:43This shows some letters
11:44from an ancient Greek inscription from Athens.
11:46People had writing systems for a long time
11:49all across the Near East,
11:51but around 775,
11:53the Greeks were out in that part of the world
11:56and encountered a alphabet
11:58that was being used by the Phoenicians
12:00that had consonants,
12:01but no vowels.
12:02The Greeks looked at that and said,
12:03well, this would be a lot more useful
12:06if it had vowels as well.
12:07This way, if you combine the letters,
12:09you can make any sound.
12:11The Romans picked up that alphabet
12:13directly from the Greeks.
12:14So our alphabet that we use every day
12:16is a direct descendant from that invention
12:19the Greeks used in 775.
12:21And that's had a huge impact
12:22because the alphabet made it much easier
12:25to learn how to read and write
12:26and made mass literacy possible.
12:29At SeaPriyanka82 asks,
12:31if you were thrown back into ancient Greece,
12:33what would you most enjoy doing for entertainment?
12:36So the Athenians,
12:38starting around 500 BCE,
12:40started putting on plays called tragedies.
12:43And those plays are still very famous today.
12:45They were all put on in the same theater in Athens,
12:48the Theater of Dionysus,
12:50at a big festival every spring.
12:52And they were elaborate productions
12:54with masks and costumes.
12:56Normally two or three or four actors on the stage,
12:59plus a chorus,
13:00which is a group of 12 or 15 people
13:02who sang and danced.
13:03So it was more like an opera than a modern play.
13:06In addition to those tragedies,
13:08there were a whole different kind of plays
13:10also performed in the same theater called comedies.
13:13The most famous playwright for the Athenian comedies
13:15was someone named Aristophanes.
13:17The tragedies were very serious plays
13:19and serious language about serious subjects.
13:22And the comedies were much more everyday
13:24sort of sitcom things.
13:26Adget Normality asks,
13:27the Greek gods were said to live on Mount Olympus,
13:30a specific and easily accessible location in Greece.
13:32Did anyone go and check?
13:34Well, they could have.
13:35Certainly it's a big, very prominent mountain in Greece.
13:38You can walk to the top.
13:39Greeks definitely went up there.
13:41There was at the base of the mountain,
13:43a big sanctuary to Zeus.
13:46And the way the Greeks thought about this,
13:47like what's the highest point that they knew about,
13:49which was the top of Mount Olympus.
13:52And it was sort of like a metaphor
13:53for living up in the heavens.
13:55Greek religion is very different
13:56than our modern day monotheistic religions
13:59in a whole number of different ways.
14:01One is that the Greeks believed in lots and lots of gods.
14:04They were polytheistic.
14:05The prime example of a god would be Zeus.
14:07So Zeus is born from gods.
14:09He's always a god.
14:10But there were also figures who were born mortal
14:13and then lingered on after they died in some special sense
14:16and continued to have some power after they died.
14:18Those are heroes.
14:19Heracles is the great example of the Greek hero.
14:22Zeus is his father, but he has sex with a mortal woman
14:26and gives birth to Heracles.
14:28Heracles goes out and does all these amazing feats.
14:31As a result, he becomes a hero and lives on after he's dead.
14:35So from the Greek perspective,
14:37it was possible to become a hero.
14:39Their view was that the gods and heroes
14:41were always among them,
14:42were always moving around and always present
14:45in a much more personal and immediate sense
14:47than we would think about in the modern world.
14:49Advailius wants to know, how did ancient Greece begin?
14:52We need to start by getting the Greeks into Greece.
14:55Where Greece is now is the Greek homeland,
14:57sort of southern end of the Balkan Peninsula.
14:59We think the Greeks arrived there around 2200 BCE.
15:05There had been people living in this area
15:06for a very long time before that.
15:08This is a replica of a painting from Crete
15:11from around 1600 BCE by a group that we call the Minoans.
15:16And we know that the Minoans didn't speak Greek
15:18and they had been there for a long time
15:20before the Greeks got there.
15:21So the Greeks arrived in Greece
15:23in what we call the Bronze Age period
15:25when the big metal that people were using
15:26on a regular basis for everything was bronze.
15:29And the Bronze Age lasts all the way down
15:30to around 1200 BCE.
15:32So at the later part of the Bronze Age
15:35on the Greek mainland, the Greek itself,
15:37there was a civilization called the Mycenaeans.
15:40Mycenaeans are very rigidly hierarchical system.
15:43When that system burnt down,
15:45the Greeks went back to a much more egalitarian system.
15:49And then by the time we get down to around 500 BCE,
15:52that trajectory has resulted
15:54in the Greeks building the first democracy.
15:56So this is a real turning point
15:58where the history of Greece sort of changes direction
16:00in a fundamental way.
16:01And there's a period between 500 and 300 BCE,
16:05which we typically call the classical period
16:08when things were going really well in the Greek world.
16:10And a lot of the people and buildings that you hear about,
16:14Parthenon, Pericles, Socrates,
16:17the great playwrights like Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides,
16:21all Thucydides, the great historian,
16:24all those people come from Athens
16:25in this very limited time span.
16:27And then the reason that 200 is a possible end point
16:30is that around 200 BCE,
16:32the Greeks were conquered by the Romans.
16:35At azadeth311 asks, did Greece have an empire?
16:38Did they have an empire, bro?
16:40Greece is a complicated subject
16:42because the Greeks lived all over the Mediterranean.
16:45So the Greek homeland is where Greece is now,
16:47right down here at the southern end of the peninsula.
16:49And so we know the Greeks got there around 2200 BCE,
16:52but not long thereafter, they started spreading out.
16:55And so all the dark blue on this map
16:57are areas where the Greeks migrated in
17:00and built themselves communities.
17:02And so there were thousands of separate Greek communities
17:05all over the Mediterranean.
17:06They were never all part of a single state.
17:08For instance, Alexander the Great ran all of Greece
17:11and then all of this area out here,
17:14but his empire never included the Western Mediterranean.
17:16So the Greeks really didn't have an empire
17:19in the sense like the Romans built a single empire
17:22that everyone lived in.
17:23At batterfishblog asks, the School of Athens by Raphael
17:27depicts the greatest thinkers of ancient Greece.
17:29When was there truly a golden age?
17:31Well, let's start by looking at the actual picture.
17:34So this is painted by Raphael
17:35much later than ancient Greece, obviously.
17:37And it's Raphael's idea about all the great figures
17:40of ancient Greece being in the same place at the same time.
17:43We've got Plato here and Aristotle standing next to him.
17:47We've got our old friend Diogenes
17:49and over here is Socrates who was Plato's teacher.
17:52So was there a golden age?
17:54Athens had a real golden age between around 480, 500
17:58when they were inventing democracy down to around 300 BCE.
18:03In that time and place, there were lots of famous writers,
18:07Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Thucydides.
18:10The single most famous Greek building is easily the Parthenon,
18:14this temple built in Athens just about this time.
18:17So if you were gonna pick a golden age in ancient Greece,
18:20it would almost certainly be Athens
18:22in this 200 year time span between roughly 500 and 300.
18:26At Cliff O'Reilly asks, don't forget that the ancient Greeks
18:29had no rice, no pasta, no tomatoes and no potatoes.
18:32What did they eat?
18:33The Greeks subsisted largely on three things.
18:37Olives, grapes in the form of wine and some sort of grain,
18:40either barley or wheat.
18:42The Mediterranean is actually a very warm body of water
18:44and it's not a great place to fish for the most part
18:47and they didn't have a lot of animal livestock
18:49and so they didn't eat a lot of meat either.
18:51At James Hawk One asks, how did the Greeks know
18:53they lived on a planet in outer space?
18:55There were lots of ancient Greeks
18:56who had different opinions on this
18:58but the high-end scholars who thought about this a lot
19:01had a very clear idea about how things work.
19:04They spent a lot of time observing the stars.
19:06They inherited some knowledge from the ancient Near East
19:10and they spent a lot of time doing fancy math.
19:12The Greek mathematician Eratosthenes around 275 BCE
19:16calculated the circumference of the earth
19:18within a high degree of accuracy.
19:20So some Greeks were very much aware
19:22that we live on a spherical body in outer space.
19:25At Zarathustra Cap, best Greek invention, ostracism.
19:29Okay, so what's ostracism?
19:30Well, it really took place mostly in Athens,
19:32although some other Greek communities had things like it.
19:34There would just be a vote once a year
19:36and if you won this vote,
19:38you would be exiled from Athens for 10 years.
19:40You just had to leave.
19:41And the idea was the community would identify someone
19:44who was a real threat to the stability of the community
19:47and would get rid of them.
19:48Paper was expensive
19:50and so they would use broken pieces of pottery,
19:52what the Greeks called ostraca.
19:55You could write down the name of any person you wanted
19:57and sometimes add an insult too.
19:59Get rid of Megacles,
20:01that guy who likes the Persians too much
20:03and then they would collect them all up and count them.
20:05A lot of the time what happened was
20:07there were two political factions in town
20:10and they couldn't come to an agreement.
20:11The leader of one of those factions
20:13would get thrown out of town for 10 years
20:15and that made the decision.
20:16At Slanes, what do Greek columns represent?
20:19Greek columns came in basically three flavors.
20:22So this is Doric and that's Ionic and that's Corinthian
20:25and each one had a very particular cap.
20:27If you're in any big city, especially like Washington DC,
20:30you're gonna see lots of these Greek style capitals around.
20:33There's a reason for that.
20:34It's like around 1750,
20:37the people, especially in Germany and England,
20:40looked at the remains of the ancient Greek buildings
20:42and drew them in really very high level of detail.
20:46And so just around 1800,
20:47it became very stylish to put up buildings
20:50that look like Greek buildings
20:52and that's exactly when Washington DC was being built,
20:55just when this architectural craze was happening.
20:57So those are all the questions for today.
20:59Thanks for watching.
21:00Ancient Greek support.