A Cabinet Of Greek Curiosities

by J. C. McKeown

  A man from Abdera tried to hang himself, but the rope broke and he hurt his head. He got a bandage from the doctor and put it on the wound; then he went off and hanged himself again. (Philogelos Joke Book 112)

  Rather ironically, Abdera produced several very significant philosophers: Democritus, Protagoras, Anaxarchus, and Hecataeus the Skeptic.

  The city of Cyme borrowed money, pledging its porticoes as security. When the loan was not repaid on time, the citizens were forbidden to stroll there. But when it rained, their creditors were embarrassed and had a herald announce that they were to go into the porticoes. So the herald declared, “Go into the porticoes,” but a rumor spread that unless they were actually told to do so by a herald, the people of Cyme did not understand that they were to go into the porticoes when it rained…. The historian Ephorus from Cyme is also mocked. When he had no achievements of his native city to include in his account of great events in history, but even so was reluctant to leave Cyme unmentioned, he declared, “At this time the people of Cyme took no action.” (Strabo Geography 13.3.6)

  Greeks were not above criticizing their own polis. Perhaps most famously, the poet Hesiod says of his hometown in Boeotia, “My father settled near Mt. Helicon, in a wretched village, Ascra, bad in winter, dreadful in summer, and never good” (Works and Days 639–640).

  Only two epigrams are credited to Demodocus of Leros, an obscure island colonized from Miletus:

  The people of Leros are bad: not just some and not others; all of them, except Procles—and Procles is a Lerian. (Greek Anthology 11.235)

  The people of Miletus are not stupid, but they do the sort of things that stupid people do. (quoted at Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1151a)

  SYBARIS

  All the Sybarites cultivated a decadent and luxurious style of living, but Smindyrides [see also p. 6] outdid everyone, drifting into particular voluptuousness; he fell asleep on a bed of rose petals, and when he got up he complained of blisters (Aelian Miscellaneous History 9.24).

  A wealthy Sybarite heard of someone rupturing himself while watching some men working. He said that it was not surprising, for he had a pain in the side just from hearing about it (Diodorus Siculus The Library 8.18).

  The Sybarites invited women to banquets with a year’s notice, so that they would have enough time to arrange to come in fine clothes and golden jewelry (Plutarch The Banquet of the Seven Wise Men 147e).

  More Sybaritic decadence recorded at Athenaeus Wise Men at Dinner 518–21:

  Noisy trades such as metalworking and carpentry were not permitted in Sybaris, to ensure that the citizens could sleep undisturbed.

  Likewise, it was forbidden to keep roosters [since their crowing would rouse sleepers; the word for “rooster” (ἀλεκτρυών, alektryon) was derived from ἀ and λέκτρον (a and lektron, “not” and “bed”)].

  Wealthy Sybarites used to spend three days on a one-day journey, even though they were carried along in litters.

  Even in the countryside, some of their roads were covered over, to provide shade and shelter.

  They had wine piped from their estates to their villas by the sea.

  They invented basins in which they took steam baths.

  They also invented chamber pots, which they took with them to symposia.

  If a chef created a particularly choice recipe, he alone was allowed to make that dish for a year, the purpose of this restriction being to encourage the other chefs to try to outdo one another with similar creations.

  DATES

  Time is a child playing checkers (Heraclitus frg. 52).

  There was little uniformity among Greek poleis in the organization of the calendar. In Athens the year started after the summer solstice, in Sparta after the fall equinox, and in Thebes after the winter solstice. Most states seem to have operated on a twelve-month calendar, but the Arcadians divided the year into three months, the Acarnanians into six (Macrobius Saturnalia 1.12). Even when they shared the same twelve-month system, the various poleis did not begin the months on the same day or use the same names for them. The best known are the Athenian months, all apparently named after festivals held at that time of year, but the precise significance of some of the names was probably obscure already by the classical period:

  Hecatombaeon

  Metageitnion

  Boedromion

  Pyanopsion

  Maimacterion

  Poseideon

  Gamelion

  Anthesterion

  Elaphebolion

  Mounychion

  Thargelion

  Scirophorion

  The inherent difficulty in this lack of consistency is apparent in Thucydides’s attempt to date the beginning of the Peloponnesian War as precisely as possible: In the fifteenth year of the Thirty Year Truce, in Chrysis’s forty-eighth year as priestess in Argos, when Aenesias was Ephor in Sparta, two months from the end of Pythodorus’s Archonship in Athens, eight months after the Battle of Potidaea, at the beginning of spring, a Theban force attacked Plataea (History 2.2).

  In Sparta the Ephor Plistolas begins the truce on the fourth day from the end of the month of Artemisium; in Athens the Archon Alcaeus begins it on the sixth day from the end of the month of Elaphebolion (Thucydides History 5.19, recording the Peace of Nicias in March 421 B.C.).

  The Athenian month Thargelion began about the 20th of May. It is said that the sixth day of that month brought many good things, not only to the Athenians, but to many other people also:

  • The Persians were defeated at Marathon [490 B.C.], Plataea and Mycale [479], Gaugamela [331].

  • Socrates was born [ca. 469 B.C.].

  • Alexander the Great was born [356 B.C.] and died [323 B.C.].

  This information, given by Aelian at Miscellaneous History 2.25, is either wrong, unverifiable, or contradicted by other writers. But historians liked such coincidences. Plutarch (Life of Camillus 19) dates the fall of Troy to the 24th of Thargelion, the day on which Timoleon crushed the Carthaginians against all odds at the Crimissus [ca. 340 B.C.], and likewise he states that the battles of Chaeronea [338 B.C.] and Cranon [322 B.C.] took place on the 7th day of Metageitnion.

  Plutarch adds that King Attalus of Pergamum (who bequeathed his kingdom to Rome) and Pompey the Great died on their birthdays; had he not had his head hacked off, this coincidence might have pleased Pompey, who loved to imitate Alexander the Great, who also died on his birthday (see above). Plato likewise died on his birthday (Seneca Letters 58), but may have been disappointed that he was born on the 7th of Thargelion (Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers 3.2) and therefore did not share a birthday with Socrates, who was born on the 6th. He did, however, share a birthday with Apollo (as Socrates did with Apollo’s slightly older sister, Artemis [twins with different birthdays]). The birthdays of Socrates and Plato were still being celebrated in Athens in the 3rd century A.D. (Porphyry Life of Plotinus 2.39).

  Timaeus the Sicilian calculates (I do not know on what criteria) that Rome was founded at the same time as Carthage, thirty-eight years before the first Olympiad [i.e., in 814 B.C.] (Dionysius of Halicarnassus Roman Antiquities 1.74). The canonical dating of the foundation of Rome to 753 B.C. was established by Dionysius’s contemporary, Terentius Varro.

  According to some sources, Euripides was born on the day the Battle of Salamis was fought (in 480 B.C.).

  Recording the assassination of Caligula in Rome, Josephus notes that it is agreed that King Philip of Macedon was killed on that same day by Pausanias, one of his companions, as he was entering the theater (Jewish Antiquities 19.95). Suetonius adds that the same tragedy was being performed at the time of both assassinations (Life of Caligula 58).

  Alexander the Great was born on the same day as the temple of Artemis at Ephesus [one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World] was burnt down (Plutarch Life of Alexander 3). The orator Hegestratus the Magnesian said that it was hardly surprising that Artemis’s temple burned down, since she [as goddess of childbirth] was distracted by
the responsibility of watching over Alexander’s birth; Plutarch observes that this remark was frigid enough to have put out the fire.

  Alexander the Great and Diogenes the Cynic are said to have died on the same day.

  ARTIFACTS

  Fragments of two cups found at Naucratis in Egypt and now in the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford G.141.2 and G.141.15) are inscribed with the name Herodotus. This is a common name, but since they are both roughly contemporary with the historian Herodotus, who is known to have visited Egypt, scholars are tempted to link at least one of the cups with him. There are many graffiti inscribed by Greek and Roman tourists in the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. One is signed by Herodotus, but the scholar who published the inscriptions believed it to be a modern hoax (Mémoires de l’Institut français d’Archéologie orientale du Caire 42 [1926] no. 1078b).

  Ephesian Artemis. The “breasts” are thought by some scholars to be bulls’ testicles, symbolizing fertility.

  A 5th-century B.C. cup with “I am the property of Phidias” (see p. 193) scratched on the base has been found at Olympia.

  A pot, datable to ca. 440 B.C. and inscribed with Euripides’s name, has been found in a cave on the island of Salamis. Euripides was said to have composed his plays in just such a cave. Puzzlingly, however, his name seems to have been scratched on the pot more than two hundred years after his death.

  Simon the shoemaker is not mentioned by either Plato or Xenophon, our best authorities for the life of Socrates. Diogenes Laertius, however, wrote a brief biography of him, in which he tells us that he used to record the discussions that Socrates (who almost always went barefoot) held in his shop in the Athenian agora (Lives of the Philosophers 2.122). A large number of hobnails, some rings that were probably eyelets for footwear, and the base of a cup (Agora P 22998) with the inscription ΣIMΩNOΣ (SIMONOS, “of Simon”) have been found on the site of what must have been his shop.

  Thirteen clay medicine bottles have been found in a building in the Athenian agora identified as the state prison. It has been speculated that they were used for the hemlock to be drunk by condemned criminals such as Socrates (a statuette of whom has been found in the same building).

  A bucket found in Athens (Kerameikos 7357) has on it the helpful inscription KAΔOΣ EIMI (KADOS EIMI, “I am a bucket”), presumably punning on the conventional vase inscription, “So-and-so is handsome,” by substituting KAΔOΣ for KAΛOΣ (see p. 96).

  CHAMBER POTS

  Socrates had two wives, Xanthippe and Myrto, Aristides’s granddaughter. They quarreled frequently, and he regularly bantered them for arguing over him, even though he was very ugly, with a snub nose, a receding hairline, hairy shoulders, and bandy legs. They attacked him together, beating him severely and chasing him out of the house. On one occasion Xanthippe shouted abuse at him from an upper window and soaked him with the contents of a chamber pot. But he merely wiped his head dry and said, “I knew we were in for a shower after such a loud thunderstorm” (St. Jerome Against Jovinian 1.48).

  My assailant began to sing, imitating roosters that have won a fight, and his friends started urging him to strike his elbows against his ribs like wings (Demosthenes Against Conon 9). The defendant and his gang were also alleged to have beaten up, emptied chamber pots over, and urinated on the slaves of the plaintiff and his friends.

  When Demetrius of Phalerum fell from favor in Athens [in 307 B.C.], he was condemned in absentia. Since they were not able to lay hold of Demetrius himself, his accusers vented their bile by pulling down his bronze statues. They sold some of them, others they threw into the sea, and others they cut up and turned into chamber pots (Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers 5.76).

  A fragment of a chamber pot found in the Athenian agora bears the inscription AMIΣ NIKO*** (CHAMBER POT OF NICO[***), scratched on it after firing (Agora P 28053).

  It is downright ludicrous how men carry round their silver urinals and crystal chamber pots, as if they were their retinue of advisors, and how silly rich women have receptacles for excrement made of gold, as if they, being so wealthy, cannot relieve themselves without a display of magnificence (St. Clement of Alexandria Paedagogus 2.3.39).

  The scholiast to this passage remarks rather primly on “crystal chamber pots”: If they are merely showing off their wealth, this criticism is fair enough; but if there is a medical reason, with the chance that a disease may be detected through the crystal, your mockery is unjustified. Joannes Actuarius notes: Chamber pots are made of fine white crystal, so that colors show through accurately (On Urine 2.1.1, in a 13th-century Latin translation of a Greek tract).

  Unless water was extremely cold, he said it was hot, he kept pushing his cloak off his chest, and he refused to allow his chamber pot to be warmed (Hippocrates Epidemics 7.1.84, of a feverish patient). I know no other evidence for the warming of Greek chamber pots before use. Instead of “chamber pot” (ἀμίδα, amida), some manuscripts report a second term for “cloak,” the similar-sounding χλαμύδα (chlamyda).

  The Athenians once ostracized Themistocles, but then they recalled him to run the government. He declared, “I don’t think much of people who use the same jar both as their pisspot and as their wine jug” (Aelian Miscellaneous History 13.40). Themistocles uses a different image in making the same point more politely at Plutarch Life of Themistocles 18: He used to say the Athenians did not really honor and admire him for himself, but treated him like a plane-tree, running under his branches for shelter during storms, but plucking his leaves and lopping his branches as soon as the weather was fair.

  Stamp your foot and wave your fist, shout aloud and cough heartily, shake your whole body and shit from your innermost being, delight your mind, and may your stomach never pain you when you enter my house (a four-line graffito, based mostly on Homeric phrases, found on the wall of a latrine near the marketplace in Ephesus [Ephesus Inscriptions 456]).

  Strabo praises Smyrna as a beautiful city, with its streets laid out and paved exceptionally well, with large porticoes, a library, and a memorial to Homer, whom the citizens claim was born there. Unfortunately, the architects made one rather significant mistake: when they laid out the streets, they did not include any drains, and so sewage floats along on the surface, especially when it rains (Geography 14.1.37).

  Hegesander of Delphi says that the philosopher Prytanis once displayed some very expensive drinking cups to his guests at dinner. When the party was in full swing, the poet Euphorion, who was drunk, took one of the cups and urinated into it (Athenaeus Wise Men at Dinner 477e). Euphorion was one of the leading intellectuals of the 3rd century B.C., and his poetry, though now almost entirely lost, is known to have had a considerable influence on the greatest Roman poets.

  A slave boy holds a wine jar for a man to urinate into.

  This is the man who once threw a ludicrous missile at me, the foul-smelling pisspot, and he didn’t miss; when it hit me on the head, it crashed in pieces, breathing on me not from a vessel smelling of myrrh (Aeschylus frg. 174, preserved by Athenaeus at Wise Men at Dinner 17c). Athenaeus also quotes an imitation of that passage in a satyr play by Sophocles, with the comment that Homer is more restrained: when the suitors are represented as being drunk, the most indecorous detail is the throwing of an ox-hoof at Odysseus (Odyssey 20.299).

  Why do people yawn when other people yawn, and urinate when they see someone else urinating? Baggage animals are particularly prone to urinating in such circumstances (Ps.-Aristotle Problems 887a).

  A child sitting on a potty, or perhaps in a high chair.

  In Thebes, people banquet night and day, and everyone has a toilet near his door. There’s no greater good for a mortal when he’s full. It’s comical to see someone striding along, sweating profusely, and biting his lip, when he wants to relieve himself (Eubulus frg. 53).

  WEIGHT PROBLEMS

  They say that Philitas of Cos was very skinny and that, since he might easily be tipped over, he had the soles of his shoes made of lead, so that the wind
could not blow him down with a fierce gust. But if he was so weak that he could not withstand a breeze, how could he have been able to haul along such a heavy weight? I find this implausible, but I record it anyway (Aelian Miscellaneous History 9.14).

  Skinny Marcus once bored a hole with his head right through to the middle of one of Epicurus’s atoms.

  A mouse once came across little Macron sleeping in the summertime and dragged him into its hole by his little foot. But Macron throttled the mouse with his bare hands and said, “Father Zeus, you have a second Heracles.”

  Gaius was so underweight that he could not dive into the water unless he attached a stone or a lump of lead to his foot.

  Epicurus wrote that the whole universe consists of atoms, for he thought that atoms are the smallest things that exist. But, if Diophantus had been living then, he would have written that everything is made up of Diophantus, who is much smaller than atoms, or he would have written that everything else is made up of atoms, but that atoms themselves are made up of Diophantus.

  (Lucillius Greek Anthology 11.93, 11.95, 11.100, 11.103)