A Cabinet Of Greek Curiosities Read online

  A CABINET OF GREEK CURIOSITIES

  A CABINET OF GREEK CURIOSITIES

  STRANGE TALES

  AND

  SURPRISING FACTS

  FROM THE

  CRADLE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

  J. C. MCKEOWN

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McKeown, J. C.

  A cabinet of Greek curiosities: strange tales and surprising

  facts from the cradle of western civilization /J.C. McKeown.

  pages. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-19-998210-3 (alk. paper)

  1. Greece—Social life and customs. 2. Greece—Civilization. I. Title.

  DF78.M35 2013

  938—dc23 2012036875

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  Printed in the United States of America

  on acid-free paper

  For Jo

  sine qua non

  I have to report what is said, but I do not have to believe it all without discrimination (Herodotus Histories 7.152).

  People believe what is either true or probable; therefore, if they believe something that is implausible and not probable, it must be true, for it is not its probability or plausibility that makes it seem true (Aristotle Rhetoric 1400a).

  The only people who are skeptical about wonders are those who have not had anything wonderful happen in their own lives (Pausanias Guide to Greece 10.4).

  Someone I know who had spent a great part of his life immersed in reading gave me a book that he himself had written, packed with information amassed from a wide and varied range of abstruse texts. I took it eagerly and shut myself away to read it without interruption. But, my God, it was just a collection of curiosities! … I lost no time in returning it to its author (Aulus Gellius Attic Nights 14.6).

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I

  Food and Drink

  CHAPTER II

  Children and Education

  CHAPTER III

  Women

  CHAPTER IV

  Sex

  CHAPTER V

  Animals

  CHAPTER VI

  Athens

  CHAPTER VII

  Sparta

  CHAPTER VIII

  Alexander the Great

  CHAPTER IX

  Greeks at Sea

  CHAPTER X

  Greeks and Barbarians

  CHAPTER XI

  Athletics

  CHAPTER XII

  Homer

  CHAPTER XIII

  Drama

  CHAPTER XIV

  Spectators and Critics

  CHAPTER XV

  Books and Papyri

  CHAPTER XVI

  Philosophers

  CHAPTER XVII

  Mathematics

  CHAPTER XVIII

  Science and Technology

  CHAPTER XIX

  Art

  CHAPTER XX

  Tourists and Tourist Attractions

  CHAPTER XXI

  Religion, Superstition, and Magic

  CHAPTER XXII

  Prophecy

  CHAPTER XXIII

  Words and Expressions

  CHAPTER XXIV

  The Soros

  GLOSSARY

  THE COIN IMAGES

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  PREFACE

  THE ANCIENT Greeks were a wonderful people. They gave the Western world democracy and drama, and many forms of art and branches of science would be inconceivable without them. “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” may be a slightly unsafe overstatement, but the abiding influence of Greek philosophy is undeniable. Who can even speculate what our lives would be like without the improbable victories at Marathon and Salamis?

  The idea that the Greeks were a wonderful people has always been with us, for they were not shy about asserting their own special status in the world: they were Hellenes, and everyone else was a barbarian, a term that usually carried negative connotations. Greece had the great good fortune to remain more or less intact when it was absorbed into the empire of a people with a massive and, at least in the early generations after the conquest, well-deserved inferiority complex about intellectual and artistic matters. The Greeks therefore had no difficulty preserving their high opinion of themselves, and they would be gratified by the still prevailing tendency to idealize them. This tendency comes not just from our admiration for what they actually achieved, but also from a desire to create a past utopia in which things were better than they are now. This was the Greece imagined by the romantic movement that dominated European thought in the 18th and 19th centuries. J. J. Winckelmann, the father of modern classical archaeology and a towering figure in that movement, saw no need to set his wonderful Greeks in context by actually visiting Greece. Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Prussian minister of education early in the 19th century, caught the spirit of the age perfectly when he declared that “if every other part of history enriches us with its human wisdom and human experience, then from the Greeks we take something more than earthly—something almost godlike.” Such was the vision that inspired Lord Byron to fight and die for Greek freedom in the 1820s.

  Idealism held sway unchallenged for far too long. Eventually Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, perhaps the greatest of the early modern Greek philologists, was moved to complain: “I once heard a prominent scholar regret that these papyri [Greek Magic Papyri] were found, because they deprive antiquity of the noble splendor of classicism.” He (sc. UvW) added, “They unarguably do so, but I am glad of it. For I don’t want to admire my Greeks, I want to understand them, so that I can judge them properly.” Wilamowitz was standing up for truth against the imaginative exploitation of the classical past by such luminaries as Nietzsche and Wagner (adhered to by Adolf Hitler, who maintained that “the Hellenic ideal of culture must remain preserved for us in its paradigmatic beauty”). The thoroughly unscholarly regret expressed by Wilamowitz’s “prominent scholar” resonates back to antiquity
. In the heyday of their intellectually vibrant democracy in the 5th century B.C., the Athenians voted to chop off the right thumbs of all their prisoners from Aegina, to brand the Athenian owl on the foreheads of all their prisoners from Samos, and to kill all the male inhabitants of Mytilene; writing more than six centuries later, Aelian wished not simply that the Athenians had not passed such brutal decrees, but that no record had been preserved of their having done so (Miscellaneous History 2.9).

  Nearly everything in this book illustrates the not-quite-so-wonderful aspects of Greek life and thought. As in the companion volume A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities (Oxford University Press, 2010), my aspiration here is simply to entertain. Nevertheless, over the course of many years, while accumulating the material presented here I have found my perspective on the Greeks changing gradually but remorselessly. I used to dismiss each individual little quirk and oddity as an aberration, not fitting into the noble and inspiring, or at least dignified and rational, world of Homer, Euripides, Plato, and Aristotle. But the more quirks and oddities I gathered, the more difficult it became for me to keep that world in focus. Did a werewolf win the boxing event at the Olympic Games? Did officials armed with canes ensure order among the spectators during Athenian dramatic performances, or only during pig-imitating contests? Did Greeks wear as an amulet promoting virility the penis of a lizard caught while mating? Did anyone really believe that Pythagoras flew about on a magic arrow?

  In some ways I hope to show in this book how much the Greeks were like us. Politicians were regarded as shallow and self-serving; fat people resorted to implausible methods of weight control; Socrates and the king of Sparta used to entertain their children by riding around on a stick pretending it was a horse; and jokes were in circulation that seem gruesomely familiar: “There were twin brothers and one of them died. Someone met the surviving twin and asked him, ‘Was it you or your brother who died?’” (Philogelos Joke Book 29).

  On the other hand, much of the book shows how very different the Greeks were from us. Shipping companies no longer safeguard their vessels from lightning by wrapping the hides of seals or hyenas around the mast; prisoners are not released on bail so that they can enjoy dramatic festivals; no one sows pieces of copper in the expectation that they will sprout and grow; voters are not paid to vote, nor are they herded to the polls by means of a rope dripping with red paint; and scapegoats are not thrown from cliffs to ward off evil, much less fitted out with feathers and live birds to give them a sporting chance of survival.

  Some material is included because it concerns particular people. It is interesting that Euripides had bad breath, that Sophocles was very handsome and an excellent ballplayer, that Aeschylus (according to Sophocles) wrote his plays while drunk, that his brother lost an arm while trying to hold back one of the Persian ships at Marathon, and that he died when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head. The earnest Skeptic philosopher Sextus Empiricus observed that “there is nothing sophisticated in recording that, for example, Plato’s real name was Aristocles and he rather decadently wore an earring when he was young” (Against the Professors of Liberal Studies 1.258). He is quite right, of course, but sophistication is not everything. There is a perennial fascination in comparing and contrasting the rich, the powerful, and the famous with ordinary folk; as Diogenes Laertius records, “When Diogenes the Cynic was asked whether philosophers eat cake, he replied, ‘We eat everything that other people eat’” (Lives of the Philosophers 6.56). It may not be particularly remarkable that Euripides suffered from halitosis, but we do perhaps gain a surprising perspective on that icon of Western intellectual achievement when we learn that he persuaded the king of Macedon to hand over to him for a whipping the person who had teased him about his bad breath.

  The austere historian Polybius criticizes his predecessor Timaeus for arguing that poets and prose writers reveal their own nature by what they choose to emphasize in their works, and that on this principle it is possible to infer from the frequent banquets in the Homeric poems that Homer himself was a glutton (Histories 12.24). Polybius suggests that if such deductions are valid, one might draw some rather negative conclusions about Timaeus’s own personality, given that his work “is full of dreams, marvels, incredible tales, and silly superstitions, and displays an effeminate interest in curiosities.” Neither athletics, nor mathematics, nor philosophy holds any special fascination for me; even so, whole chapters of this book are devoted to these topics simply because the Greeks were so preoccupied with them. One important aspect of Greek life may, however, be particularly conspicuous by its absence: because there is so much that might be said about Greek medicine, it has been isolated for treatment in a forthcoming volume of its own.

  Polybius would not enjoy this book. He reports that some historians claim that there are two Greek cities in which neither snow nor rain ever fall on the statue of Artemis, even though it stands in the open air. Throughout my work I have resisted such assertions and rejected them with disgust, for they are impossible, not just improbable, and believing them is a sign of childish simplemindedness (Histories 16.12). Those who share Polybius’s ideals should read no further. But there may be readers with the cast of mind to wonder if these statues, despite being thought to be weatherproof, had little umbrellas over them, standard issue for Greek statuary to protect them from bird droppings; such readers may care to turn to p. 197.

  One further limitation in the book’s serviceability should perhaps also be acknowledged here. The Geoponica (Farm Work), a 10th-century Byzantine manual, draws on lore at least half a millennium old to assure us that intoxicated people can be restored to sobriety if they drink vinegar, eat radishes or honey-cakes, wear garlands of many types of flowers, or discuss topics in ancient history (7.33). It would be a fine thing if I could claim that reading this book might have such a useful application, but I have little faith in that last remedy.

  Many of the beliefs and opinions reported here are certainly misguided and incorrect. In most cases, however, the truth or falsehood of the statement is irrelevant, and the interesting, amusing, and possibly even thought-provoking point lies in the simple fact that someone in antiquity thought fit to record it at all. Even though I am not concerned to establish truth and dispel falsehood, the normal goal of scholarly research, I might perhaps add an afterword to one of the seemingly more bizarre assertions made by the elder Pliny and reported in A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities: that kissing a she-mule on the nostrils will stop sneezing and hiccups. I have subsequently acquired a she-mule and now believe that, however weird it may seem, this remedy has at least some efficacy: being so close to such a large animal perhaps distracts and relaxes the diaphragm, thereby relieving hiccups. I have yet to find anyone willing to try this experiment as a cure for sneezing.

  It may perhaps surprise some readers that so many Roman writers are quoted in a book about Greek life. It is quite understandable that we should associate Greek culture most immediately with Homer, Sappho, and the dramatists and philosophers of 5th- to 4th-century B.C. Athens, but Greece was part of the Roman Empire for about as long as the period from Homer to the conquest. Most surviving Greek literature dates from the Roman era, and it is inevitable that Roman writers should have a lot to tell us about Greece. The elder Pliny occasionally expresses contempt for Greeks; even so, in the first book of his Natural History, where he catalogs the sources from which he draws his material, he names 146 Romans, but 327 Greeks. Marcus Aurelius may have been a Roman emperor, but he wrote his Meditations in Greek, and Aelian, whose Greek collections On Animals and Miscellaneous History are quoted frequently in this book, was born near Rome and may never have left Italy.

  It is astonishing how persistently the same information was copied faithfully by author after author over the centuries. Photius, the 9th-century patriarch of Constantinople and the Byzantine world’s nearest approach to a one-man Reader’s Digest, is altogether justified in remarking rather despondently that “they all say the same things about the same things” (T
he Library 106b). He is referring to compilers of agricultural manuals, but the same complaint might be applied much more broadly. In quoting primary sources, I follow the practice established in A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities. I refer either to the best-known source, to the most coherent, or simply to the passage in which I happened to note it. To avoid cluttering the text and to ensure that the reader does not suppose that this book has academic pretensions, I frequently do not cite sources at all. When ancient authorities are quoted directly, this is indicated by either italicization or quotation marks. Such quotations should not, however, be assumed to be verbatim: details not relevant to the point being made are often omitted, and extra information is sometimes added to clarify the context. Almost all Greek words and phrases quoted in the book have been translated and also, where appropriate, transliterated, because it would appear that substantially more people in the United States are currently learning Klingon, the language of an alien race in Star Trek, than are learning classical Greek, the language of Sophocles and Plato.

  Greek culture is so diverse and spans so many centuries that no one can hope to master all aspects of it. I have therefore been shameless in exploiting the expertise and patience of many colleagues and friends, who have generously answered my numerous queries or read through some or all of the typescript. I am particularly grateful to William Aylward, Mary Beard, Jeffrey Beneker, Paul Cartledge, Raffaella Cribiore, James Diggle, John Dillon, Simon Goldhill, John Marincola, Silvia Montiglio, Christopher Pelling, Barry Powell, Richard Stoneman, John Yardley, and Sophie Zermuehlen. I have spent many stimulating afternoons discussing the book with Debra Hershkowitz, who has greatly improved it with her knowledge and acumen. I am indebted also to Amber Kleijwegt for her careful reproductions of ancient graffiti. An author could not hope for better editorial guidance than I have once again received from Stefan Vranka, and I am very grateful also to Sarah Pirovitz, Marc Schneider, and Sharon Langworthy for their help in the preparation of this book for publication.