Professor Answers Ancient Greece Questions From Twitter

Hi, I'm Professor Paul Christensen.

Let's answer your questions from the Internet.

This is Ancient Greece Support.

[uptempo music]

@Zugatti69: 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?

So the Greeks did not walk around naked all the time,

but the one time that it was socially acceptable

to be nude in public was when we're working out in a gym.

And in fact, that comes from a good Greek word, gymnasion,

literally the nude place.

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.

@bitesizeddancie1: How accurate is the movie '300?'

The movie 300 is pretty accurate in a lot of ways.

A lot of it's embellishment,

but there are 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 were Spartan boys being sent out into the wilderness

on their own with very little equipment.

Spartans had conquered a big swath of territory

around Sparta and enslaved the local inhabitants

who were called helots.

The helots were understandably very upset about this

and were a constant security threat to the Spartans.

The Spartans had something called the Krypteia,

which means 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 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 helots.

@Gio_Hancho: 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

[chuckling] 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 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 four days.

He'd been wounded repeatedly,

he had some serious alcohol issues,

and if you combine that with the malaria,

you can see why he might have died young.

@bybrandonwhite wants to know,

Was there a huge outdoor statue of Athena

in the Ancient 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 four 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 Phidias, showing Athena.

This statue was called the Athena Promachos,

Battle-ready Athena.

We can see on the left side

one of the temples called the Erechtheion,

and on the right side, the Parthenon.

We have this idea sometimes

that Greek temples were all pure white,

but we actually know that's not true.

That Greeks loved painting their temples.

They used a special wax-based paint,

and 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.

@existentialcoms asks,

Actually, according to the Ancient Greeks,

who invented western civilization,

everyone should [beep] each other all the time.

[chuckling] Okay, well, yeah, maybe.

So 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,

who 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

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 sometimes an 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 a woman named Sappho,

with two women expressing their sexual desire

for each other.

@Andydoodle56: 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,

and so 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 is story about war,

but really telling the story of Achilles,

who's the big hero in the poem.

Achilles 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 Odysseus

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.

And Odysseus says, Listen, I gotta go home.

My wife and child are waiting.

I have to be home, even if it costs me my life.

The reason your teachers are gonna assign 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.

@Goldenjofa asks, 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 gonna miss and can't be reproduced.

Alexander the Great conquered big stretches of territory,

including Egypt.

200, 300,000 Greeks emigrated.

They were worried about losing their Greek culture,

so they built a big Greek cultural center

in Alexandria in Egypt,

and part of that 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 burned,

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 gonna guess that the Library of Alexandria

collectively was probably more important

than your draft folder.

Sorry to say that.

@Wiltster asks, 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 person

so when they got to the river, they could pay the ferryman.

@FaisalAnwar51:

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 the tutor for Alexander 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.

@EricBuechel 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 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 game the system

to get themselves elected

so that the rich 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.

In the modern day United States, we elect a representative,

representative goes to Washington and votes for us.

But in Athens,

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.

We also know that there was a significant population

of enslaved persons in Athens.

They couldn't participate either.

And if you had immigrated to Athens,

you were not gonna 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 coup,

and other Greek communities at different times and places

had pretty much every kind of government

that you can imagine, 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.

@geekgodreview: How much do we know

about the original Olympics in Ancient Greece?

We know a lot about the original Olympics in Ancient Greece.

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 multi-sport event

that tested different disciplines.

If you won at Olympia, there 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,

'cause 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 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 Olympios, Zeus who lives on Mount Olympus.

On the third day of the Olympics,

they would have a sacrifice where they killed 100 cows,

a huge all day long barbecue

that included a lot of drinking.

So the ancient Olympics must have been a crazy scene.

@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 an alphabet

that was being used by the Phoenicians

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 combined 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 mass literacy possible.

@CPriyanka82 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 Dionysus 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,

plus a chorus,

which is a 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 playwright for the Athenian comedies

was someone named Aristophanes.

The tragedies were very serious plays

in serious language about serious subjects,

and the comedies were much more everyday

sort of sitcom things.

@getnormality asks, The Greek Gods were said

to live 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 metaphor

for living up in the heavens.

Greek religion's very different

than our modern day monotheistic 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 they died.

Those are heroes.

Heracles is the great example of the Greek hero.

Zeus is his father, but he has sex with a mortal 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 about

in the modern world.

@Valuz 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,

the sort southern end of the Balkan 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 Crete

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 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 Mycenaeans.

Mycenaeans are a very rigidly hierarchical system.

When that system burnt down, the Greeks went back

to a much more 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 of 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,

Parthenon, Pericles, Socrates,

the great playwrights like Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes,

Thucydides the great historian,

all those people come from Athens

in this very limited time span.

And then the reason that 200 is a possible endpoint

is that around 200 BCE,

the Greeks were conquered by the Romans.

@Azadeth311 asks, 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 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 the 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 the Greeks really didn't have an empire

in the sense like the Romans built a single empire

that everyone lived in.

@BatterfishBlog 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 was 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 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 and place, there were lots of famous writers,

Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripedes, Thucydides.

The single most famous Greek building

is easily the Parthenon,

this temple built in Athens just about this time.

So if you were gonna pick a golden age in Ancient Greece,

it would almost certainly be Athens

in this 200 year time span between roughly 500 and 300.

@clifforeilly 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's actually a very warm body of water

and it's not a great 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.

@James_Hawke1 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 worked.

They spent a lot of time observing the stars.

They inherited some knowledge from the Ancient Near East,

and they spent a lot of time doing fancy math.

The Greek mathematician Eratosthenes 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.

@ZarathustraCap: 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 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 ostraca.

You could write down the name of any person you wanted,

and sometimes add an insult too.

Get rid of Megacles,

that guy who likes the Persians too much.

And then they would collect them 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.

@slayyyn asks, 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 big city, especially like Washington, D.C.,

you're gonna 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, D.C. was being built,

just when this architectural craze was happening.

So those are all the questions for today.

Thanks for watching Ancient Greek Support.

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