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Ancient Greek Nudity & 300: History · Acedra
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Ancient Greek Nudity & 300: History
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hi I'm Professor Paul Christen let's answer your questions from the internet this is ancient gree [Music] support at zuga 69 so did ancient Greeks really just walk around naked all the time or are the people who made those statues and paintings just super horny the Greeks did not walk around naked all the time but the one time that it was socially acceptable to be Ned in public was when you were working out in a gym and in fact that comes from a good Greek word gim naaz literally the nude place
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so they're not enthusiasts for public nudity by any stretch of the imagination really fit bodies were a sign of being sound of character like you were a good moral person if you were in really good physical condition and you wanted to see their body so you could tell that they were in great physical shape so they needed to be nude at bite-size Dancy one how accurate is the movie 300 the movie 300 is pretty accurate in a lot of ways a lot of it's embellish but there are
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some things which are pretty much right on the mark the film is based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller the single most famous scene the Persian Ambassador comes to Sparta and asks for earth and water a simple offering of earth and water just a symbolic submission and Persians did actually do that the Spartans did throw the Ambassador in a well there are Spartan boys being sent out into the Wilderness on their own with very little equipment Spartans had conquered a big swath of territory
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around Sparta and Enslaved the local inhabitants were called Hots the hots were understandably very upset about this and were a constant security threat to the Spartans the Spartans had something called the cryp TAA which seems like the secret thing where boys were sent out into the countryside their goal was to go terrorize the helots the movie 300 tends to glorify the Spartans and tell the really positive side of the story about how Brave and well- trained
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they were what great soldiers they were and there's a lot of Truth in that it doesn't tell the story of the regular oppression and violence that the Spartans used to control the hilot at Gio honcho if Alexander the Great was so great why did he die at 32 Alexander was great I'm not sure we can make fun of him for dying at age 32 he didn't have a lot of choice in the matter going backwards a little bit Alexander started fighting in major battles very early around age 16 by the time he was 32 he
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had been wounded at least a dozen times so he wasn't like he was in great shape physically he had been fairly beaten up over the course of his relatively short lifetime like many macedonians Alexander spent a lot of time doing a lot of heavy drinking and so when he died from malaria Alexander had been drinking heavily for the previous three or 4 days he'd been wounded repeatedly he had some serious alcohol issues and if you combine that with the malaria you can
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see why he might have died young at by Brandon white wants to know was there a huge outdoor statue of Athena in the anci ient Greek Acropolis like in Assassin's Creed yeah there was a gigantic statue this clip is actually a really good reconstruction of the Acropolis around say like 440 BCE the Acropolis was a big rock in the middle of the city where the major religious sanctuaries were on top of that rock was a huge bronze statue that had been made by the sculptor fidus showing Athena
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this statue was called the Athena Pros battle ready Athena we can see on the left side one of the temples called the aricon and on the right side the paron we have this idea sometimes that Greek temples were all pure white but we actually know that's not true the Greeks Lov painting their temples they use a special wax-based paint especially bright blue and bright red the reason why we might think these temples are white is that most of the paint has flaked off at existential comms asks
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actually according to the ancient Greeks who invented Western Civilization everyone should each other all the time okay well yeah maybe so it's Greeks were very big on being married so the Assumption was that every adult male or female would be married that doesn't mean that you only had sex with the person to whom you were married so especially for men also had an active sexual life in addition to that the Greeks were very open to same-sex relationships so for them the best form
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of same-sex relationship among men involved an older man who was married and had a family with a teenage boy which we would consider to be a felony but the Greeks thought was a good idea because the older male would serve as a mentor for the younger male in the relationship so the same thing held true for women it was perfectly acceptable at least in some times in places in the Greek world for a married woman to have a sexual relationship with a teenage girl and we have some poetry written by
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a woman named safo with two women expressing their sexual desire for each other at Andy doodle 56 so why am I being assigned to read some long ass poem written by the dad from The Simpsons the dad from The Simpsons is Homer Simpson it's what we're thinking about here is Homer Homer was a very famous Greek poet around 700 BCE and he wrote two very long poems The Iliad and the Odyssey the iliad's a story about war but really telling the story of Achilles who's the big hero in the poem
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ailles knows that he has very short time to live and he spends a lot of time thinking like if you know you're going to die what is worth living for that's a big question pretty much every human being has to face and Homer in The Iliad tries to give you some answers the Odyssey is about someone named adicus coming home from War and what is it like to come home from a war and try to reestablish your family life at one point a goddess offers to make him Immortal as long as he stays with her
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and adicus says listen I got to go home my wife and child are waiting I have to be home even if it cost me my life the the reason your teachers are going to sign these things in part is because they're really important documents about how ancient Greeks thought and saw the world but also because they're asking us important questions and encouraging us to think about things that you're going to have to think about at some point sooner or later at Golden yofa asked
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what's worse the fact that my draft folder was deleted or the burning of the Library of Alexandria what's in your draft folder would be a great question maybe there's something really profound in there that the world is now going to miss and can't be reproduced Alexander the Great conquered big stretches of territory including Egypt two or 300,000 Greeks immigrated they were worried about losing their Greek culture so they built a big Greek Cultural Center in Alexandria in Egypt and part of that
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Cultural Center was a big very famous Library which eventually was destroyed there's a lot of stories that the Library of Alexandria burned down at some point the modern scholarship now thinks that the library never really got burnt it just sort of fell apart over the course of time because it wasn't properly maintained the exact details are not very well known but it collected a huge number of very valuable books so I'm going to guess that the Library of Alexandria collectively was probably
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more important than your draft folder sorry to say that at wilster asked why did the ancient Greeks place a coin in the mouth of those who died after you died you went under the Earth to the underworld in order to get to the underworld you had to cross a river and if you didn't cross that River into the underworld you were doomed to wander the Earth forever as an unhappy ghost you had to take a ferry and you had to pay the guy who was running the ferry so you put a coin in the mouth of the dead
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person so when they got to the river they could pay the Fairman at fisel L anoir 51 who do you think was the best ancient Greek philosopher I'm going to have to give it to the Man himself diogenes you have to love diogenes he was a Greek philosopher committed to living a radically simple life he owned nothing except a cup he lived in a barrel by the side of the road but speaking purely for myself I would say Aristotle he went to Athens to study with Plato and later in his life he was
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the tutor for Alex the great he thought about every subject you can possibly imagine from marine biology to political systems but he thought very carefully about what are the traits that make you behave well that make you into a valuable good person at Eric Buel asks how did ancient Greece elect leaders ancient Greece is a big place there are lots of different communities and every Community had its own government and it changed over the course of time the one
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we know the most about is Athens and its democratic government that started around 500 and lasted to about 300 their view was that as soon as you set up an electoral system people with power and wealth will always find a way to gain the system to get themselves elected so that the rich will always dominate the government if you hold elections their solution was to pick most of their leaders through a lottery system so Athenian democracy was direct democracy
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in the modern day United States we elect a representative Representatives Goes to Washington and votes for us but in Athens every everyone went to the Legislative Assembly themselves and voted for themselves most of the population of Athens the simple majority could not participate no women were allowed to participate in government in any way shape or form they couldn't vote and they couldn't hold political office you also know that there was a significant population of enslaved
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persons in Athens they couldn't participate either and if you had immigrated to Athens you were not going to be allowed to participate in the government also not every Greek Community was a democracy and even Athens was not a democracy for all of its history before the Democracy they were governed by a general who would seize power through a Military Coupe and other Greek communities at different times and places had pretty much every kind of government that you can imagine
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Kings and narrow oligarchies where there were just like 30 people in charge there were federal states another really interesting facet of Athenian government is they loved the courts but they thought that in order to get a just judgment in a courtroom you needed to have a really big jury so the smallest jury that the Athenians used was 501 people and for the really important cases they sat juries of 6,000 people at geek God review how much do we know about the original Olympics in ancient
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Greece we know a lot about the original Olympics in ancient Greeks the Greeks took their Sports really seriously they used the Olympics as their calendar like what's the date what year is it so it's the third year of the 42nd Olympiad the ancient Olympics had a pretty limited program of events three or four running events there were some horse racing events the pentathlon which was like a multisport event that tested different disciplines if you won at Olympia there
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was a Grove of trees at Olympia of wild olive trees that was sacred to Zeus and the idea was they cut a branch off the sacred tree and put it on your head so it was kind of a gift from Zeus the stadium at Olympia in its final form seated about 50,000 people and they came from all over the Mediterranean cuz the Greeks lived out in what's now Spain and North Africa and Southern Russia if you were a painter or a writer or you wanted to sell something you could show up at
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the Olympics and recite your work aloud or show your paintings or your sculpture or sell something that you had made that you wanted to Market in addition to the sports there was a big religious element the Olympia was actually a sanctuary dedicated to Zeus olympos Zeus who lives on Mount Olympus on the third day of the Olympics they would have a sacrifice where they killed a 100 cows a huge all day long barbecue that included a a lot of drinking so the ancient Olympics must
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have been a crazy scene at Mr mzungu what did the Greeks invent Greeks invented all sorts of interesting things but quite possibly the thing that's had the most long-term significance is the alphabet this shows some letters from an ancient Greek inscription from Athens people had writing systems for a long time all across the near East but around 775 the Greeks were out in that part of the world and encountered a alphabet that was being used by the Phoenicians
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that had consonants but no vowels the Greeks looked at that and said well this would be a lot more useful if it had vowels as well this way if you combine the letters you can make any sound the Romans picked up that alphabet directly from the Greeks so our alphabet that we use every day is a direct descendant from that invention the Greeks used in 775 and that's had a huge impact because the alphabet made it much easier to learn how to read and write and made
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Mass literacy possible at C Priyanka 882 asks if you were thrown back into ancient Greece what would you most enjoy doing for entertainment so the Athenians starting around 500 BCE started putting on plays called tragedies and those plays are still very famous today they were all put on in the same theater in Athens the theater of dionis at a big Festival Every Spring and they were elaborate Productions with masks and costumes normally two or three or four actors on the stage A Chorus which is a
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group of 12 or 15 people who sang and danced so it was more like an opera than a modern play in addition to those tragedies there were a whole different kind of plays also performed in the same theater called comedies the most famous playright for the Athenian comedies with someone named Aristophanes the tragedies were very serious plays and serious language about serious subjects and the comedies were much more everyday sort of sitcom things at get normality esque the
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Greek gods were said to live on on Mount Olympus a specific and easily accessible location in Greece did anyone go and check well they could have certainly it's a big very prominent mountain in Greece you can walk to the top Greeks definitely went up there there was at the base of the mountain a big Sanctuary to Zeus and the way the Greeks thought about this like what's the highest point that they knew about which was the top of Mount Olympus and was sort of like a
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metaphor for living up in the heavens Greek religion is very different than our modern day monotheist religions in a whole number of different ways one is that the Greeks believed in lots and lots of gods they were polytheistic the prime example of a God would be Zeus right so Zeus is born from Gods he's always a God but there were also figures who were born mortal and then lingered on after they died in some special sense and continued to have some power after
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they died those are heroes Heracles is the great example of the Greek hero Zeus is his father but he has sex with a moral woman and gives birth to Heracles Heracles goes out and does all these amazing feats as a result he becomes a hero and lives on after he's dead so from the Greek perspective it was possible to become a hero their view was that the gods and heroes were always among them were always moving around and always present in a much more personal and immediate sense than we would think
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about in the modern world ad Val wants to know how did ancient Greece begin well we need to start by getting the Greeks into Greece where Greece is now is the Greek Homeland sort southern end of the ban Peninsula we think the Greeks arrived there around 2200 BCE there had been people living in this area for a very long time before that this is a replica of a painting from C from around 1600 BCE by a group that we call the Minoans and we know that the Minoans didn't speak Greek and they had been
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there for a long time before the Greeks got there so the Greeks arrive in Greece in what we call the Bronze Age period when the big metal that people were using on a regular basis for everything was bronze and the Bronze Age lasts all the way down to around 1200 BCE so at the later part of the Bronze Age on the Greek mainland the Greek itself there was a civilization called the means means are very rigidly hierarchical system when that system burnt down the Greeks went back to a much more
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egalitarian system and then by the time we get down to around 500 BCE that trajectory has resulted in the Greeks building the first democracy so this is a real turning point where the history of Greece sort changes Direction in a fundamental way and there's a period between 500 and 300 BCE which we typically call The Classical period when things were going really well in the Greek world and a lot of the people and buildings that you hear about parnon Pericles Socrates the great playwrights
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of the escalus Sophocles Ides all fuses the great historian all those people come from Athens in this very limited time span and then the reason that 200 00 is a possible end point is that around 200 BCE the Greeks were conquered by the Romans at azade 311 ask did Greece have an empire did they have an Empire bro Greece is a complicated subject because the Greeks lived all over the Mediterranean so the Greek Homeland is where Greece is now right down here at the southern end of the
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peninsula and so we know the Greeks got there around 2200 BCE but not long thereafter they started spreading out and so all the dark blue on this map are areas where the Greeks migrated in and built themselves communities and so there were thousands of separate Greek communities all over the Mediterranean they were never all part of a single state for instance Alexander the Great ran all of Greece and then all of this area out here but his Empire never included the Western Mediterranean so
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the Greeks really didn't have an empire in the sense like the Romans built a single Empire that everyone lived in at batterfish blog asks the School of Athens by Raphael depicts the greatest thinkers of ancient Greece when was there truly a golden age well let's start by looking at the actual picture so this is painted by Raphael much later than ancient Greece obviously and it's Raphael's idea about all the great figures of ancient Greece being in the same place at the same time we've got
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Plato here and Aristotle standing next to him we've got our old friend diogenes and over here is Socrates who was Plato's teacher so was there a golden age Athens had a real golden age between around 480 500 when they were inventing democracy down to around 300 BCE in that time in place there were lots of famous writers Sophocles escalus Ides thiddies the single most famous Greek building is easily the Parthenon this temple built in Athens just about this time so if you
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were going to pick a golden age in ancient Greece it would almost certainly be Athens in this 200e time span between roughly 500 and 300 at Cliff O'Reilly asks don't forget that the ancient Greeks had no rice no pasta no tomatoes and no potatoes what did they eat the Greeks subsisted largely on three things olives grapes in the form of wine and some sort of grain either barley or wheat the Mediterranean is actually a very warm body of water it's not a great
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place to fish for the most part and they didn't have a lot of animal livestock and so they didn't eat a lot of meat either at James Hawk one asks how did the Greeks know they lived on a planet in outer space there were lots of ancient Greeks who had different opinions on this but the high-end Scholars who thought about this a lot had a very clear idea about how things work they spent a lot of time observing the Stars they inherited some knowledge from the ancient near East and they
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spent a lot of time doing fancy math the Greek mathematician aranes around 275 BCE calculated the circumference of the earth within a high degree of accuracy so some Greeks were very much aware that we live on a spherical body in outer space add zaratusa cap best Greek invention ostracism okay so what's ostracism well it really took place mostly in Athens although some other Greek communities had things like it there would just be a vote once a year and if you won this vote you would be
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exiled from Athens for 10 years you just had to leave and the idea was the community would identify someone who was a real threat to the stability of the community and would get rid of them paper was expensive and so they would use broken pieces of pottery what the Greeks called asria you could write down the name of any person you wanted and sometimes add an insult too get rid of meac that guy who likes the Persians too much and then they would collect them
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all up and count them a lot of the time what happened was there were two political factions in town and they couldn't come to an agreement the leader of one of those factions would get thrown out of town for 10 years and that made the decision at slain asked what do Greek columns represent Greek columns came in basically three flavors so this is Doric and that's ionic and that's Corinthian and each one had a very particular cap if you're in any City especially like Washington DC you're
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going to see lots of these Greek style capitals around there's a reason for that it's like around 1750 the people especially in Germany and England looked at the remains of the ancient Greek buildings and Drew them in really very high level of detail and so just around 1800 it became very stylish to put up buildings that look like Greek buildings and that's exactly when Washington DC was being built just when this architectural craze was happening so those are all the questions for today
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