Until my student @pookastanley did a research project on the role of the Evil Eye in the Ancient Greek tradition, I had not realized how enduring and powerful this idea has been. Its history extends at least as far back as the 6th century BCE when Greek “eye cups” appear in the archaeological record, as shown in […]
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This is a replica of a Roman copy of a Greek fifth-century original of a man called Epimedes. We actually don’t know if he looked like this, because he lived earlier (6th-c BCE). But the eyes closed thing Epimedes has going on here is what I liked, because it’s the face many of us make
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The lunar crater you see here is Aristarchus, and we’re not going to be be able to get any closer than that to an accurate portrait of the eponymous Ancient Greek astronomer because most of his writings — as well as any contemporary sculpture or paintings of the man — are lost to the sands
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Here you see a picture of Achilles making sacrifices to Zeus. It is a unique image, coming from a 5th-century CE manuscript thought to be the only one from Antiquity illustrating Homer’s epic poem _The Illiad_. The scarcity of such depictions belies the importance of Homer on Ancient Roman culture, because all educated people would
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I’ve got Troy on my mind lately, and thought I would do a post about the ancient city and the legendary war for which it is most famous. Located in modern-day Hisarlik, Turkey, the city of Troy was an actual inhabited place that got its start about 3600 BCE. Famously excavated by the German businessman
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Time for an amusing Ancient Greek philosophers anecdote. This one is about the clash between Diogenes of Sinope (d 323 BCE) and the famed Athenian philosopher Plato.According to Diogenes Laëtius (no relation – he lived about 500 years after but preserved ancient sources), Plato had defined men as featherless bipeds. This provoked the OG Diogenes
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This is the sixteenth-century painter Federico Barocci’s _Aeneas’ _Flight from Troy_. If the composition looks unsettling and chaotic, it should: it attempts to capture the turmoil of a man having to flee his homeland because of war. The violence propelling the family of Aeneas to escape Troy is mostly offstage, but the billowing fabric, darkened
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This Greek tablet from the seventh century BCE shows slaves in a mine, surely one of the worst expressions of forced labor in human history. For Ancient Greek history, the most well-known group of forced laborers were the helots of Sparta. Outnumbering the Spartan citizens by a ratio of at least 5:1, the helots were
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This small bronze figure comes from 5th-century BCE Sparta, when the Ancient Greek polis was at the height of its power. Contemporaries and later Ancients had much to report on the education of Spartan boys at this time, which was infamously brutal and unique. Starting at age 7, boys were grouped into “herds” — the
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The Ancient Spartans deliberately cultivated an image of uniform, hyper-masculine, aggressive, militarized toughness. This picture helped maintain their power over their enslaved helots, upon whom the Spartans depended for their labor, wealth, and food. The statue here, known as “Leonidas,” comes from 480-470 BCE at the acme of Spartan dominance. The plumed helm, nude and
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“They will see that there is in it nothing more than Natural, and nomore than the necessary result of the Motions of the Sun and Moon.” — so wrote astronomer Edmond Halley about the solar eclipse that he predicted for 1715. For millennia, eclipses – especially solar eclipses — had been considered frightening events that
How we treat the dead reflects much about what the living believe. In the Ancient Mediterranean, pagan cultures considered the proper burial of the deceased to be of critical importance: otherwise, the dead person’s spirit would have a restless afterlife. On the other hand, the world of the living was to be kept separate from
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In the United States today is the Thanksgiving holiday, and a common symbol (besides a turkey cross-dressing as a Pilgrim) is the cornucopia, or “Horn of Plenty”. This sounds like a magical item from the modern gaming world, but it goes back to Ancient Greek and Roman times. Here, for instance, is a fourth-century
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This painting documents one of the oldest stories ever recorded, and it’s all about how evil entered the world. And the blame goes straight onto women, and frankly it’s exhausting. _Eva Prima Pandora_, or “Eve the First Pandora”, done by Jean Cousins around 1550, conflates the stories of the Ancient Greek first mortal woman,
The Ancient Greek art that most of us know features able-bodied people up-front: athletes with six-pack abs and fit and trim muscular physiques. But these images skew what we know to be the reality for many Ancient Greeks, and recent work by Dr. Debby Sneed aims to show that disabled people were not only commonplace,
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No, this isn’t what you think it is, readers: I know it *looks* like a penis, but really it’s not. Rather, what you see is a 16th-century woodcut illustration of the dissected genitals of a woman. Er, if that’s not obvious to you, don’t worry. Commissioned for Andreus Vesalius’s famous _De humani corporis fabrica_
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Let’s talk about apotheoses in domes in art, shall we? This term comes from Ancient Greek and means “to make into a God.” Some heroes of Classical myths ended up ascending into the heavens to be with the other Olympians, such as Hercules. In Ancient Rome, emperors beloved by the Senate could be given the
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This surrealist painting by Mariusz Lewandowski, called “demiurgos unmoved mover” shows a haloed figure standing outside of a frame which contains a scene of a vast sky and water tumbling over the lip of the picture — maybe the figure is just watching the image, or maybe they are actually tipping it. Either way, the
The Phaistos Disk has resisted scholarly attempts at translation for over a century, illustrating the ways that cryptography operates exactly the opposite of the “Indiana Jones” method: no flash of laterally thinking insight will work here. Dating from about 1700 BCE, the Phaistos Disk was found on the Island of Crete, and is made of
Both birth control and abortion were common practices in the Ancient Mediterranean world. Although many examples of imperfect methods exist in our sources, (for instance, in the fourth century BCE Hyppocrates suggested that prostitutes wanting to abort should jump up and down, slamming their heels into their glutes) there were effective ways of ending or
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