It has always been the case that many things that have a basis in fact lose their credibility because the truth is covered over with falsehood … for those who enjoy listening to stories have a tendency to embellish them and corrupt the truth by tainting it with lies (Pausanias Guide to Greece 8.2). Pausanias seems rather more scrupulous than some authors in the stories he is willing to record, but it is difficult to endorse his addition to the story of Scyllias, that he taught his daughter Hydna to dive, and then they, father and daughter, contributed to the destruction of the Persian fleet during the violent storm by dragging away the anchors and any other protection the triremes had (Guide to Greece 10.19).
People often take Maltese lapdogs or monkeys to distract them on a voyage. A ship once capsized in a storm off Cape Sunium near Athens. A dolphin spotted a monkey swimming away from the wreck and took it on its back, thinking it was a human being. When they approached Piraeus, the port of Athens, it asked the monkey if it was an Athenian, and the monkey replied that it belonged to a distinguished Athenian family. Then the dolphin asked it if it knew Piraeus, and the monkey said they were close friends. The dolphin, irritated at the monkey’s lies, dived and left it to drown (Aesop Fable 75). Aesop directed this tale at those who, despite their own ignorance, think that they can trick other people.
A soldier riding a dolphin.
The rest of the crew were farmhands, who had never even touched an oar a year before, and every one of them had some physical defect. So long as we were sailing along in safety, they kept exchanging banter, calling each other, not by their real names, but according to their misfortunes—Limper, Ruptured, Lefty, Squinter—for each of them had some such distinguishing feature. This caused us no little amusement, but when danger came, it was no longer a laughing matter (Synesius Letter 4).
When the architect Sostratus had completed the lighthouse at Pharos [one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World], he inscribed his own name on the stonework and then plastered it over. On the outer facing he inscribed the name of the ruling king [Ptolemy I], being well aware that the inscription on the plaster would soon fall off, revealing the words, “Dedicated to the Savior Gods by Sostratus, son of Dexiphanes, from Cnidus, on behalf of those who sail the sea” (Lucian How to Write History 62).
There is a house in Acragas called “The Trireme” because some young men got very drunk there and thought they were sailing in a trireme that was caught in a storm. They were so out of their minds that they threw all the furniture and bedding out of the house as if they were jettisoning cargo into the sea (Timaeus frg. 149).
There are those who maintain that the people of Cyme are mocked for their stupidity because they imposed no harbor taxes for the first three hundred years after the foundation of their city, and hence they did not enjoy this revenue; it seemed as if it took them a long time to realize that they were living in a city by the sea (Strabo Geography 13.3.6; for the Cymaeans’ stupidity, see also pp. 5, 248). Such revenue could be very lucrative: the tax on wine imported into Egypt in the Ptolemaic period was 33 percent.
In the military and financial crisis of 413 B.C., instead of exacting tribute the Athenians imposed a 5 percent tax on their allies on all goods imported or exported by sea. They reckoned that this would bring in more revenue [as well it might, nearly all the allies being island-poleis] (Thucydides History 7.28).
We grumble at customs inspectors, not when they examine goods that are being imported openly, but when they rummage through the baggage of private individuals, looking for things that have been hidden (Plutarch On Curiosity 518e).
When someone was admiring the dedications made on the island of Samothrace [to the gods who protected seafarers], Diogenes the Cynic said, “There’d be far more if those who weren’t saved had also set up dedications” (Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers 6.59).
I’m not astounded if someone goes to sea, but I am if he does it a second time
(Philemon frg. 183).
X
GREEKS AND BARBARIANS
I am grateful to Fortune for three things; first, that I was born a human being, not a beast; secondly, that I was born a man, not a woman; thirdly, that I was born a Greek, not a barbarian (Hermippus of Smyrna frg. 13). This sentiment is attributed to both Thales and Socrates. Plutarch records that, on his deathbed, Plato thanked Fortune that he was born a human being, not an irrational animal, a Greek, not a barbarian, and that he lived during the lifetime of Socrates
(Life of Marius 46).
According to Aristotle:
• Races living in cold places and in northern Europe are full of spirit, but rather lacking in intelligence and skill, and so they manage to stay free, but lack the political qualities needed to rule their neighbors.
• The races of Asia are intelligent and skillful, but lack spirit, and so they tend to suffer subjection and slavery.
• But just as Greece is situated between these types, so the Greeks share the characteristics of both. They are free and enjoy the best political institutions, and have the potential to rule the world, if only they could attain political unity.
(Politics 1327b)
Capitoline Venus
ROMANS
Whereas the Greeks defined a barbarian as anyone who was not Greek, the Romans defined a barbarian as anyone who was not Greek or Roman.
Pompey never went into battle without first reading Iliad XI, for he was a great admirer of Agamemnon [whose most heroic deeds are recounted in that book], and Cicero was reading Euripides’s Medea as he was being carried along in a litter, until the murderers chopped off his head (Ptolemy the Quail quoted by Photius at The Library 190.151a).
Some naked men would have been put to death as a result of a chance encounter with Livia, the wife of Augustus, if she had not saved them by observing that, to decent women, men in such a state are just like statues (Dio Cassius History of Rome 58.2). The Romans tended to be suspicious or contemptuous of the Greeks’ liberal attitude to nudity. But there are exceptions. The statue on the right is presumed to represent Marcia Furnilla, who was married briefly to the future emperor Titus in the 60s A.D. Whether or not the precise identification is correct, the blend of Roman verism with the Greek idealism of the Capitoline Venus on page 92 is rather startling.
Marcia Furnilla
Nero was keen to win the tragic competition at the Isthmian Games, but neither threats nor an enormous bribe would make a talented rival named Epirotes give way to him. So the emperor had his men pin Epirotes to a pillar in the theater and crush his throat with the straight edges of their ivory writing tablets (Philostratus Nero 9).
I have sent you an account of my consulship written in Greek. There may be things in it that might seem to an Athenian to be slightly less than polished Greek, but I won’t repeat what I think Lucullus said about his Histories, that he had inserted barbaric expressions and solecisms here and there to make it easier to recognize as the work of a Roman (Cicero Letters to Atticus 1.69).
If you point your nose toward the sun and open your mouth wide, you’ll be able to tell the time to passersby (Greek Anthology 11.418; i.e., you will be like a sundial). The word for “nose,” ῥίνα (rhina) here has a short first vowel; this is incorrect, a surprising violation of the extremely strict Greek metrical practices. It is possibly significant, therefore, that the epigram was written by the emperor Trajan (ruled A.D. 98–117); when Tiberius (ruled A.D. 14–37) had queried the propriety of using a Greek term when speaking Latin, a court flatterer had told him that, because he was emperor, he could do as he wished (Suetonius On Grammarians 22).
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (ruled A.D. 161–180), the nearest Rome ever came to a “philosopher-king,” are written in simple but fairly elegant Greek and may not have been intended for publication. Their content is wide ranging and varied; for example:
• From my tutor, I have learned not to support either the Green or the Blue stable in the horse-races, nor to be a fan of either the light-shield or the heavy
-shield fighters in the gladiatorial contests (1.5).
• From Diognetus, I have learned not to be preoccupied with trivial things, not to believe in what magicians say about incantations and driving away evil spirits, and not to tap quails [see p. 52] (1.6).
• You are a little soul, carrying around a corpse, as Epictetus used to say (4.41).
• Mankind’s affairs are ephemeral and cheap; yesterday is a drop of semen, tomorrow is a pickled fish and ashes (4.48).
• Soon you will be ashes or a skeleton, a mere name or not even a name: a name is just a sound, a faint echo. What we value most in life is vain, rotten, and petty; we are like puppies snapping at each other, or quarrelsome children who laugh but soon start to cry (5.33).
• Consider anyone who is disgruntled or discontented with anything to be like a piglet kicking and squealing when it is being sacrificed (10.28).
Sacrificing a piglet. The dish has an inscription, added before the cup was fired: EΠIΔPOMOΣ KAΛOΣ (EPIDROMOS KALOS, “Epidromus [is] handsome.”
OTHER FOREIGNERS
Children are not reared properly among the Germans. But this work of mine is not written for the benefit of the Germans or for any other wild and barbaric people, any more than for bears, or lions, or wild boar, or any savage beasts; rather it is meant for Greeks and those who, even if they are barbarians by birth, nevertheless aspire to Greek customs (Galen On Preserving Health 6.51).
If it is not actually true that King Sardanapallus of Assyria was killed while working wool with his womenfolk, it might well have happened to someone else (Aristotle Politics 1312a).
The Persians regard themselves as being in every respect by far the best race … and those who live furthest away from them to be the worst (Herodotus Histories 1.134).
The Egyptians regard as barbarians all those who do not speak the same language as they do (Herodotus Histories 2.158).
The Pharaoh Neco sent a Phoenician expedition south from the Red Sea to circumnavigate Africa…. They claimed something that I find incredible, but others may believe: that they had the sun on the right hand [i.e., to the north] as they sailed around (Herodotus Histories 6.64). Their claim is validated by precisely the detail that arouses Herodotus’s disbelief.
While Rhodopis, a very beautiful prostitute, was bathing, and her attendants were guarding her clothes, an eagle swooped down, snatched one of her shoes, and flew off with it. It carried it to Memphis, where the Pharaoh Psammetichus was judging lawsuits, and dropped it into his lap. Psammetichus was amazed at the shapeliness and craftsmanship of the shoe and at what the eagle had done. He ordered a search to be made throughout Egypt for the woman whose shoe it was. When he found Rhodopis, he married her (Aelian Miscellaneous History 13.33). This tale may not be the direct ancestor of the Cinderella story, but The Sorcerer’s Apprentice has a clear classical pedigree, being based, via a ballad by Goethe, on a story in Lucian’s Lover of Lies.
Some Greeks maintain that the prostitute Rhodopis built the Pyramid of Mycerinus. But they are wrong…. They are unaware that she lived many generations after the kings who built the pyramids…. She was brought to Egypt as a slave and had her freedom bought for her by Charaxus, the brother of Sappho the lyric poet. She stayed in Egypt and, because of her great beauty, earned a large amount of money for someone of her status, but not enough to finance such a pyramid (Herodotus Histories 2.134). Mycerinus ruled at the end of the 26th century B.C., two thousand years before Sappho. Psammetichus II, a pharaoh of the 26th dynasty, ruled from 595 till 589 B.C. and might at least have been Rhodopis’s contemporary.
The Egyptian word for a pyramid is mr, the derivation of which is unknown, but that term cannot have produced pyramis in Greek. It may be that Greek mercenaries in Egypt in the 6th or 5th centuries B.C. compared them to the pyramous, a type of cake made with honey and wheat, or possibly with cheese.
The pyramids were built on a foundation of heaps of salt. When the work was complete, the Nile was diverted through them, completely dissolving the salt (Diodorus Siculus The Library 1.63).
We are astounded when we see the soaring summits of the pyramids, even if we are unaware that (as I have heard from the priests) they extend just as far underground (Aristides The Egyptian Speech 122).
The Nile, unlike all other rivers that empty into the Mediterranean, floods in summer rather than in winter. The Greeks did hit on the true explanation for this phenomenon, the monsoon rains in the Ethiopian highlands, but it seemed improbable, and many other theories were suggested. For example:
• It rises from an immeasurably deep spring between two mountains called Crophi and Mophi (according to an Egyptian priest, as reported skeptically by Herodotus at Histories 2.28).
• It comes from Oceanus, the stream that surrounds the inhabited world.
• It comes from somewhere far to the west, or to the east, or from the antipodes, where it would be winter during the northern summer.
• North winds keep it back in the winter.
• The ground soaks up water like a sponge in the cooler months and sweats it out in the hotter months.
• Alexander the Great thought he had discovered the source of the Nile when he reached the River Indus, for there were crocodiles there and a type of bean that grew also in Egypt (Arrian Alexander 6.1).
• There was also a theory that the Euphrates disappears into a marsh and rises again south of Ethiopia to become the Nile (Pausanias Guide to Greece 2.5).
Cats and ibises were so venerated in Egypt that to kill one even accidentally was punishable by death. Diodorus Siculus records how, in about 60 B.C., he witnessed a crowd in Alexandria lynching a Roman official who had inadvertently caused a cat’s death (The Library 1.83). Neither their fear of Rome nor the officials sent by King Ptolemy could restrain them. Diodorus goes on to say that this extreme reaction is not so surprising when one considers that the Egyptians had once resorted to cannibalism during a famine rather than eat any sacred animal.
There are no guards on the frankincense trees in Arabia, for the owners do not steal from each other. But, by Heracles! at Alexandria, where the perfume is processed, it is just not possible to guard the factories well enough. The workers’ aprons have a seal put on them, they have to wear a mask or a close-meshed net, and they are strip-searched before they leave work (Pliny Natural History 12.59).
There was an island, full of savage people. The women far outnumbered the men and had hairy bodies. The interpreters called them Γόριλλαι (Gorillae). When we pursued them, we could not catch any of the males, for they clambered up the crags and defended themselves with rocks. But we did catch three females, who bit and scratched those who were bringing them reluctantly along. We killed and flayed them and brought the skins back to Carthage (Hanno Voyage Around Africa 18).
In Libya there is a city called Dionysopolis that can never be located twice by the same person (Strabo Geography 7.3.6).
Herodotus is wrong to maintain that the semen of Ethiopians is black [Histories 3.101, where he says the same also of some Indians], as if every part of a person with black skin should be black; he said this even though he could see that a black-skinned person’s teeth are white (Aristotle On the Generation of Animals 736a).
Amitrochates, the king of the Indians, wrote to King Antiochus, asking him to buy and send to him some sweet wine, some dried figs, and a sophist. Antiochus wrote back: “We shall send you the figs and the wine, but it is against the law in Greece for sophists to be put up for sale” (Athenaeus Wise Men at Dinner 14.652f).
Perhaps referring to the distant and mysterious island of Sri Lanka, Diodorus Siculus reports:
The tongues of the inhabitants have an odd quality, occurring by nature and deliberately accentuated. Their tongue is split along part of its length, and they divide it even further, so that it is double all the way to the root. This gives them the ability to imitate not only any articulate human utterance but also the various chatterings of birds and any type of sound. The strangest thin
g of all is that, if they meet two people, they can converse perfectly well with both of them, answering questions and discussing appositely whatever the topics of conversation may be: they talk to one person with one half of their tongue, and to the other with the other half (The Library 2.56).
Each community rears a very large bird of a unique type, which they use to test the temperament of their infant children. They place the children on the bird’s back, and it takes flight. Those that tolerate being carried through the air, they rear, but those that become nauseous and are filled with fear, they reject, believing that they would not live long and that they are of inferior temperament (The Library 2.58).
The Scythians take the seed of the hemp plant and go into their tent, where they throw the seed on to red-hot stones. It burns like incense and produces a vapor such as no Greek steam bath could surpass. The Scythians revel in the steam and howl like wolves. They do this instead of bathing. They never wash their bodies with water at all (Herodotus Histories 4.75).
A Cabinet Of Greek Curiosities Page 9