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AI slop is littering your feed and spreading misinformation, so WIRED’s here to set the record straight. Join Professor of Ancient Greek History Paul Christesen as we fact check the internet, Ancient Greece edition.
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00:00There's an explosion.
00:01This is ancient Greeks.
00:03They did not have gunpowder.
00:04A Greek architect would have literally had a stroke
00:07if they had built a building this way.
00:09I'm a professor of ancient Greek history.
00:11Let's fact check some AI slop.
00:14I just arrived in Olympia.
00:16Okay, people are looking at me weird again.
00:18Yeah, people would look at you quite weird.
00:21The Olympic games are held in Olympia,
00:23which is a place that kind of in the middle of nowhere
00:25in ancient Greece.
00:2640 or 50,000 men came from all over the Greek world,
00:29camped out in the countryside for about a week,
00:32did a lot of drinking, watched some sports,
00:35did some sacrifices to Zeus, and ate a lot of barbecue.
00:39Ancient sources tell us that married women
00:41were not allowed to attend,
00:43and you almost certainly did not want to bring
00:45your unmarried daughter to the scene.
00:47Ancient Greek women were expected to dress
00:49very modestly in public, virtually all the time.
00:52So first, a woman at Olympia, big problem to begin with,
00:55and women in Olympia wearing modern athletic gear,
00:59equally a problem.
01:01They're training right now, and oh my God,
01:03they're covered in oil.
01:04They would have been covered in oil, good for that.
01:06On the other hand, Greeks exercised in the nude.
01:09The Greek word for gymnasium,
01:11where we get our word gym from, means nude.
01:13The gymnasium is literally the nude place.
01:15Running, throwing the javelin, wrestling, boxing,
01:18all done in the nude.
01:18The only sport that people were clothed for was horse racing,
01:21where the jockeys and the chariot drivers were clothed.
01:24So showing Greek athletes exercising,
01:26wearing a tunic, kind of a problem.
01:28Okay, let's take a look at the next video.
01:30The year is 438 BC.
01:33Okay, so we're doing pretty well here.
01:35This is actually a very nice reconstruction
01:37of the Acropolis about this time.
01:39The Parthenon, that big building in the back right corner,
01:42was finished in the outside in 438, so that's great.
01:45The gateway, that wasn't started until the 437,
01:48so it would have been a construction site,
01:51but let's take what we can get.
01:52This gigantic bronze statue, that's an actual statue.
01:56There was a big statue on the Acropolis made out of bronze,
01:59called the Athena Promakos, carrying weapons.
02:02It stood about 30 feet tall.
02:03The sun glinted off the bronze,
02:05so people coming into the port of Athens several miles away
02:08could actually see the sun gleaming off the statue.
02:11Under the leadership of Pericles,
02:13Athens has reached the height of its power.
02:16Pericles was a very famous Athenian statesman, politician, general.
02:20And he was the leading figure in Athens between 460 and his death in 429.
02:26The Athenians elected 10 generals every year to run the army and the navy.
02:30Pericles was repeatedly elected as general and used that as his sort of base to exercise his control in Athens.
02:37He was renowned for being one of the world's most persuasive, smoothest speakers.
02:42There's a famous story that someone asked a wrestler,
02:45didn't you wrestle against Pericles? Did you win or lose?
02:48And he said, it doesn't make any difference because afterwards,
02:51he's just going to stand up and convince them that he won anyway, even if he did lose.
02:55There's a lot going on in the scene. Let's see if we can take a look at some things a
02:57little more closely.
02:58So we have an owl and three Greek letters here. Athena's animal was an owl.
03:03And owls lived on and around the Acropolis in Athens.
03:06So the owl was one of the basic symbols of Athens.
03:09And it appeared on the coinage along with these three letters,
03:12which are the first three letters of the Greek word for Athens, Athenae.
03:15Now, let's take a look back here on this triangular space on the roof called the pediment.
03:21The Parthenon was famous in the ancient Greek world
03:23because the Athenian government basically gave the architects a blank check.
03:27And so one of the things they did with that money was to put sculpture all over the building,
03:33including massive statues in the pediment that shows famous scenes from Athenian myths.
03:38So the Parthenon sculptures, like those pedimental sculptures,
03:41those are actually mostly in London in the British Museum now.
03:44So if you go to a museum and you see a white statue from ancient Greece,
03:49almost certainly it was painted originally.
03:51Like for instance, the skin, they wanted to have a more natural looking skin tone
03:54and paint the colors of the eyes in and the clothing as well.
03:58This particular statue is a different case.
04:00It was bronze and Greeks did not paint bronze because they didn't want the color.
04:04They wanted the bronze.
04:05Women, though essential to family, religion, and the continuity of the city,
04:11have no political voice.
04:12In this shot, the AI is clearly animating a 19th century painting.
04:16Scenes of ancient Greek life were very popular in European art in 18th, 19th century.
04:22There was a big craze, especially in Britain and Germany in the 19th century,
04:27for everything having to do with ancient Greece.
04:29Their world is the household where they manage property, raise children.
04:34Let's talk a little bit more about women in ancient Greece.
04:37Even in Athens, which was a very democratic government, women had no political rights.
04:41They could not vote. They could not hold office.
04:43They were expected to be at home as much as possible.
04:46And the home was called an oikos, probably familiar to you from some yogurt experience of yours.
04:52There was a strong division of space and power in ancient Greece,
04:56which is to say that men ran the public life and women ran the private life in the household.
05:03Okay, let's move on.
05:05Many believed the Persians would be victorious at Marathon.
05:08A messenger named Pheidippides was sent to run from Marathon to Athens.
05:13This is a great story. Unfortunately, this never happened.
05:16What we see here is a reconstruction of the Battle of Marathon,
05:19which was fought a little bit northeast of Athens in the 490 BCE.
05:23And Battle of Marathon was incredibly famous.
05:26Lots of people wrote about it right away.
05:28We don't get any mention of Pheidippides running from Marathon back to Athens
05:33until about 300 or 400 years later.
05:36Clearly a story someone made up at some point,
05:38proven to be very popular up until the present day.
05:40When the modern Olympics were being constructed,
05:44the people who put together the Olympics were very attuned to ancient Greek history,
05:48and so decided they wanted a race called the Marathon race.
05:51There was no such race in the ancient world.
05:53Greeks did not run long distance races.
05:55The fleet of triremes, fast and deadly ships powered by the manpower of thousands of rowers.
06:02Trireme, the reason why the Greeks called it a trireme,
06:05tri is coming from Greek word for three, is that there were three vertically stacked layers of oars.
06:11And you can see here in our reconstruction just one bank of oars and the ships moving remarkably fast
06:16given that number of rowers.
06:17Athens was unusual in that it had big silver mines that produced fairly large revenues for the state.
06:24Most Greek communities did not build big navies because they were very expensive to maintain,
06:28but Athens could afford one.
06:30When it became apparent that they were going to have problems with the Persians,
06:34the Athenians built a massive fleet of triremes, about 200, 250 ships.
06:40In 371 BC, it was the sacred band that played a decisive role in shattering the Spartans.
06:47The sacred band, that actually did exist in Thebes.
06:50It was 150 pairs of men who had a homoerotic relationship with each other.
06:56Greeks were much more open about male-male relationships that had a physical element in it.
07:02The idea was that those pairs would be very tightly bonded with the older
07:06male playing the role of mentor to the younger male.
07:10In 413 BC, the Athenian fleet was destroyed.
07:14We are so used to seeing modern battlefields with explosions because of the invention of gunpowder.
07:19This is ancient Greeks. They did not have gunpowder.
07:22You can see on the screen there's an explosion and ships are on fire everywhere.
07:27There weren't explosions and there wasn't much in the way of fire and a naval battle.
07:31Okay, next video.
07:32When the doors closed in ancient Athens, the wine came out.
07:36Okay, so the symposium was a big thing in ancient Greece.
07:39And what it literally means in Greek symposium is to drink together.
07:43And so they would have drinking parties.
07:45The standard setup was they had built a special room for it called an andron.
07:49They were typically designed to hold seven couches and two people on each couch.
07:54So this room is too big.
07:56If you take a look in the background, there are paintings on the wall,
07:59probably frescoes painted on plaster.
08:01We know Greeks did a lot of very fancy wall painting.
08:04Very little of it survives.
08:06A servant's mixed wine and water in a great crater.
08:09You can see they're mixing the wine and water in a big mixing bowl called a crater.
08:15That actually is correct.
08:17In fact, Greeks stored their wine more like as a syrup.
08:20To drink it undiluted was almost impossible.
08:22It was almost like drinking Coca-Cola syrup.
08:25You had to dilute it.
08:26Music filled the room.
08:27Philosophy turned into rivalry.
08:29The other things that happened at the symposium beyond drinking was a lot of talking.
08:33There was a lot of singing, composing a verse.
08:35Another form of entertainment was to have prostitutes come in.
08:39They could play musical instruments and sing, dance, do acrobatic events.
08:44And of course, also were expected to have sex with the guests.
08:47The Greeks had a very different attitude towards sexuality than we do.
08:51It was very common, perfectly socially acceptable for an older male to have a teenage boyfriend,
08:58regardless of not whether they were married.
09:00And at symposia, you would never bring your wife.
09:03Absolutely not a space for respectable women to participate.
09:06But you could quite frequently show up with your boyfriend who would share your couch with you.
09:11Guests poured libations to the gods.
09:13One of the things which is accurate here, if you take a look,
09:16there's a mosaic stone floor, and that was very common in Androns.
09:19Imagine you spent a whole night with a room full of people drinking,
09:24what the room would be like in the morning.
09:26It needs to be cleaned and it's much easier to do that with a stone floor.
09:30Let's move on.
09:32We have this idea in our heads sometimes that ancient cities were mostly built of stone.
09:37Certainly not the case in Athens in 430 BCE.
09:41Stone was incredibly expensive to quarry.
09:43Most of the city would have been dirt with mud brick walls, sometimes plastered so they were white
09:48or a color, but much less impressive physically than what you would see here.
09:52If you take a look in the back left corner, this is clearly a modern cafe.
09:57The only thing missing is a Cinzano umbrella.
09:59What they've done is overlaid ancient costumes on modern people.
10:03But you see this guy, he's still wearing his white t-shirt.
10:06There are no baths in Athens that look like this.
10:10They would have had some circular baths in public.
10:13There was very little hot water, certainly not in the kind of quantities you see here.
10:18And the walls look like they have Roman wall painting on it,
10:21so they're sort of imagining a Roman bath shrunk down to tiny residential size.
10:27So they're playing some sort of board game.
10:29Greeks did play board games at games called polis,
10:31where there were lines and you had to move pieces around, something like checkers or chess.
10:35We have some actual physical stones on which they were played.
10:39I honestly have no idea what this is supposed to be.
10:41It could be that they're supposed to be voting, but that's not actually how Athenians voted.
10:45Athenians had different kinds of ballots.
10:47You got two ballots, a yes and a no, essentially.
10:50One had a solid middle and one had a hollow middle.
10:53And you held your hands over them and dropped one in one and one in the other.
10:56So I don't know what they're doing here.
10:58Greeks did not build massive dome buildings like this.
11:02They simply didn't have the technology.
11:04Philosophers in these big, huge dome structures delivering dramatic lectures just didn't happen.
11:09Socrates and other philosophers would have worked mostly in gymnasia in a courtyard,
11:14places that doubled as both exercise facilities and educational facilities.
11:18And so they would sit in the shaded part of the courtyard and hang out and talk.
11:23Once a year, Athens had a big festival in honor of the goddess Athena.
11:27Athena was among other things, the goddess of weaving.
11:30So they weaved a massive peplos, a massive dress, very highly embroidered,
11:35and they marched it in a procession across town and up to the Acropolis
11:39and presented it to the goddess on the Acropolis.
11:41The surroundings are too grand, but there's an idea here.
11:45On the Acropolis of Athens, there were lots of statues of Athena, but two famous ones.
11:49One was a huge statue made out of gold and ivory.
11:52That was in the Parthenon itself, the big temple on the Acropolis.
11:55That one didn't get dressed because it had a beautiful ivory and gold surface.
12:01There was an older statue in a smaller temple called the Erechtheion.
12:04That statue was made out of wood and every year the Athenians put a fancy new robe on it,
12:10which they wove very carefully and was very highly embroidered,
12:13and also wore very fancy jewelry.
12:15So there's a huge problem here.
12:16Let's take a little closer look at what's going on here.
12:19Greek architects were fanatics about symmetry.
12:22The Parthenon was famous for having eight columns across the front.
12:25One, two, three, four on this side.
12:28One, two, three, four, five on that side.
12:31A Greek architect would have literally had a stroke if they had built a building this way.
12:35The sheep standing on the altar?
12:37That's a little weird.
12:39So Greeks did make animal sacrifices and there were altars in front of temples,
12:43but the animal was on the ground and then burnt it or cooked it on the altar.
12:47The animal would not have stood on the altar.
12:51Pretty much everything is wrong here.
12:53Greeks did use masks when they were doing tragedies.
12:57When they were doing plays, they would wear masks.
12:59This evidently is supposed to be a religious scene.
13:02The priest did not wear weird white masks like this.
13:04Enough of that one.
13:05Next video.
13:07In the ancient world, no war begun without first asking Delphi.
13:12So Delphi, it's the sanctuary of Apollo, built on the side of a mountain.
13:16It was a major oracular site, which meant that people came there to consult the Pythia, the priestess,
13:21and find out about the future.
13:23The Pythia was always chosen from the women of Delphi itself.
13:27And in these early centuries, a young, unmarried woman.
13:31The Pythia, at this time they're talking about in 500 BCE, was an unmarried female.
13:36The issue here is that in ancient Greece, most women would have been married at the age of 14.
13:43So it looks like she's considerably older than 14.
13:46On this seat, history was spoken.
13:48So she's sitting on a stone throne.
13:51Apollo's symbol was the tripod.
13:53And we know from art that the priestess sat in a tripod when she was giving prophecy.
13:58So the stone throne, that's a problem.
14:01She breathes in.
14:02The priests record every word and shape them into verse.
14:05People came to Delphi from all over the Greek world to consult the oracle.
14:09The idea was that Apollo spoke through the Pythia, the priestess.
14:13And the priestess would say sometimes nonsense words or chant, and there would be people there,
14:19priests, who would write down what she said and interpret it for you, make sense of it.
14:23The Pythia was famous for saying things which were a little difficult to understand or riddles.
14:27The most famous one is a king asked,
14:30if I launch an attack on the neighboring kingdom, what will happen?
14:33And the reply was, you will destroy a great kingdom.
14:36But what he didn't understand was he was going to destroy his own kingdom.
14:39Two fault lines crossed directly below, releasing sweet-smelling gases from the rock.
14:45We have some ancient sources starting relatively late, so starting around 100 BCE.
14:51Those sources say that there was gas leaking up through the floor of the temple where the
14:56priestess sat, and she breathed in the gas and went into this trance that allowed her to
15:01commune with the god Apollo.
15:03Modern scholars, for the most part, have thought that's not true.
15:06Some geologists took a look at the site of Delphi and say that there are faults running
15:11underneath and that ethylene gas would have been leaking into the temple, and the priestess
15:16could have been breathing in the ethylene gas and achieving some sort of intoxicated state.
15:21Ongoing argument.
15:22Let's move on.
15:23So we're doing sort of the greatest hits of Greek civilization here.
15:26One issue is we don't know when exactly the Greeks got to Greece, but probably around 2200 BCE.
15:32So Greece in 6000 BCE, there were no Greeks there.
15:36What they started with is the Bronze Age, and they've done a good job of identifying the two
15:42big Bronze Age civilizations, the Minoans who were in Crete.
15:45Those were actually not Greeks.
15:47They spoke some language we can't decipher.
15:49And then on the mainland, there were the Mycenaeans.
15:52So we see a Mycenaean warrior here.
15:54The scholars have debated for a long time whether the poems composed by Homer,
15:59the Iliad and the Odyssey, describe the Mycenaean period.
16:03In recent decades, the general view is that the Greeks had some very vague memories of
16:09the distant past.
16:10But for the most part, poems composed by Homer reflect the situation around 800 BCE in Greece,
16:16long after the Mycenaeans were gone.
16:18Okay, so we have the Battle of Marathon here.
16:20This was a big event in Greek history.
16:22So the Greeks and the Persians butted heads for a long time.
16:25490 BCE, the Battle of Marathon was the first time the Persian army invaded the Greek mainland.
16:31The Athenians were outnumbered and famously attacked and crushed the Persian army.
16:36Anytime you would talk to someone who had been at Marathon, the first thing they would say was,
16:40you know, I was at Marathon.
16:42And the very famous Athenian poet, playwright, Aeschylus, who was the most famous writer in
16:49the Greek world when he died, had on his gravestone, I fought at Marathon.
16:53Okay, so we have Socrates.
16:55He was a very famous Athenian philosopher.
16:57Anytime you would encounter him, he would ask you a question and you would respond,
17:01and then he would ask you another question.
17:03And this could go on for a very long period of time.
17:05This is where we get the idea about the Socratic method.
17:08Eventually, he annoyed enough people that he was put on trial.
17:12Very complicated trial.
17:13To a certain extent, he was blamed for the bad behavior of his relatives and students.
17:17But also, he was just spectacularly annoying.
17:20The way Athenian trials worked, first you were found innocent or guilty,
17:24and then there was a penalty phase where both the accuser and the defendant proposed a penalty.
17:30And Socrates stood up and said,
17:32I think you should punish me by giving me free meals for the rest of my life.
17:35It was clearly designed to annoy the jury into giving him death as his penalty.
17:39So Socrates was executed by being made to drink poison, hemlock.
17:43And this is a very famous scene painted by neoclassical painters of Socrates in prison,
17:49talking to his students right before he died or drinking the hemlock.
17:53Okay, next video.
17:54We have a video here about the Minoans.
17:56They're on the island of Crete, say roughly 1800 BCE.
17:59So this would be the Bronze Age.
18:01These are not Greeks.
18:03We have their written records, but it's not any language we recognize.
18:06Nossos sprawls across 20,000 square meters.
18:10This is the palace at a place called Nossos, which was famously big and elaborate.
18:15It's been excavated.
18:16You can go visit.
18:17And certainly, it's giving you a reasonably good sense of how large and fancy this building was.
18:24Frescoes in deep reds and blues cover the walls.
18:28This is drawing from Minoan art.
18:31Minoans were very fond of painting frescoes on walls, and we have some pieces of those.
18:35Women held power that wouldn't be seen again in Europe until the modern era.
18:40In most times and places in the ancient world,
18:42when we look at political art or we have political documents, it's all men.
18:47The Minoan situation is different because women feature very prominently.
18:51One common theory is that it was a theocracy and a matriarchy,
18:56which is to say the political system was run by women who were priestesses,
18:59in part because we see lots of women in art performing what seem to be religious rituals.
19:04There are figurines from the Minoan period showing women, presumably priestesses,
19:08with snakes on their arms probably doing some sort of snake handling,
19:11and the video is trying to get at that.
19:13In the central court, bull leaping ceremonies unfolded.
19:17The palace has been excavated and to a certain extent reconstructed,
19:20and it's full of images of bulls.
19:22We know from Minoan art that one of the things they did was they had people run at and jump
19:28over
19:28bulls as a spectacle.
19:31Grabbing, charging bulls by the horns and vaulting over their backs.
19:35You can see that here, although the AI is having some trouble.
19:38You're supposed to vault over the bull and she's sort of vaulting sideways from the bull
19:43and floating out in space, but you know, they got the general idea right.
19:48Okay, let's move on.
19:50No Greek architect could have built this structure.
19:53Greeks, the way they built and the materials they had,
19:55couldn't span a space of more than about 20 feet without a column.
19:58And this is an enormous open space.
20:01It's a beautiful building, looks maybe like an imaginary Roman Senate.
20:04Greeks did have democracy.
20:06Athens put together the first really formally structured democratic government in 508 BCE.
20:11In the United States, we have representative democracy.
20:13You vote for someone who then goes to DC and makes decisions for you.
20:18In ancient Greece, it was almost always direct.
20:20You showed up and voted on everything yourself.
20:23That meant there were these huge meetings.
20:24In Athens, six, eight, 10,000 people would show up for an assembly meeting.
20:28Those meetings were always held outdoors because Greeks could not build a structure
20:32large enough to hold that many people.
20:34He looks like he's someone from a 1960s Hollywood movie.
20:39In the 1950s, 60s, 70s, they made these huge epics about ancient Greece and Rome,
20:45called sword and sandal movies, as opposed to a Western, for example.
20:49Some costume designer and screenwriter sitting in Hollywood in the 1950s came up with an idea
20:55of what an ancient Roman or Greek would have looked like, put it on film,
21:00and now it's being reproduced by a computer model in the 21st century.
21:04This may be my personal favorite.
21:06So of course, we all know the story of the Trojan horse, right?
21:08The Greek soldiers pop out and gain control of the city.
21:11Interestingly, very unclear if the Trojan War ever happened.
21:14So the Trojan War in the Homeric poems is set in what's now Northwestern Turkey.
21:20The Greeks call that site Ilion, and there is a site that many scholars believe corresponds
21:25roughly to that place.
21:27It has been excavated for a long period of time, since the 19th century.
21:30So the Greeks believed it happened, and they told stories about it.
21:34They were sure it did.
21:35I'm personally very skeptical that the Trojan War ever happened.
21:39Leaving aside the issue that the Trojan horse is a mythical story,
21:43what we have here is a Greek city that looks like, from the architecture,
21:49around 400 BCE maybe.
21:51And the Trojan horse, if it ever took place, if it ever happened,
21:55would have been like 800 years earlier.
21:57Okay, next video.
21:58This has a million views, huh?
22:01Three million views.
22:02Wow.
22:03I have no doubt this is supposed to be the Acropolis in Athens,
22:06and that's supposed to be the Propylaia, the gateway.
22:08The gateway didn't look anything like that,
22:11and the staircase didn't look anything like that.
22:13We have here a sort of generic imagination of what ancient Greece might have looked like
22:17without any attempt to actually ground it in historical reality.
22:21Yeah, they did have produce like that.
22:23Greeks ate a lot of fruits and vegetables.
22:25Meat was a specialty, pretty rare to eat a lot of meat.
22:28One thing I like about this scene is if you look on the temple in the background,
22:31there's a gigantic statue sitting on the roof of the temple.
22:35Just absolutely not possible.
22:37I'm done with this one. Next.
22:40I'm currently worshiping Dionysus very thoroughly.
22:43Greeks took Dionysus very seriously, and Dionysus was the god of wine.
22:48In Athens, for example, there was a big Dionysus festival every spring.
22:52A lot of drinking, raunchy behavior, carrying big phaluses around in processions,
22:57a lot of dirty talk.
22:58So big parties with people doing a lot of drinking associated with Dionysus?
23:03Absolutely.
23:03But on the other hand, the guy they're interviewing looks much more like a modern fraternity boy
23:09than he does an ancient Greek.
23:10What's the secret to a good harvest?
23:12Talk to your trees.
23:14So you can see in the background, he's got an olive tree, which is great.
23:17And they took their olive trees extremely seriously because they were a huge source of important
23:22calories.
23:22What do you see in my future?
23:24You'll eat lunch, then trip on a goat.
23:27I don't know what to say about that one.
23:28She's wearing this weird white makeup.
23:30Greek women wore makeup and they would whiten their face.
23:33They actually used like a lead paste for that.
23:35If you take a look, though, underneath her eyes, she's got sort of black mascara coming down her eyes.
23:40Looks like a sort of 1970s rock look.
23:43Definitely not accurate.
23:45Okay, next video.
23:47So we have a lot of statues from ancient Greece.
23:49The statue's showing figures from, say, before 450 or 500 BCE, almost certainly just imaginary.
23:55The later ones, like Socrates and Plato, those might be actual portraits.
24:00Okay, there's Aristotle.
24:01He was actually from northern Greece in ancient times, modern times called Macedonia.
24:05Came to Athens to study with Plato, spent a long time there.
24:09When Plato died, he was expecting to be put in charge of Plato's school.
24:14He didn't get the job, left in a huff, and ended up working as the tutor for Alexander the Great
24:19for a while.
24:20Okay, next video.
24:28Alexander actually would have really liked this.
24:30He was very conscious of his public image.
24:33So he had a sculptor, an authorized court sculptor, who made authorized images of him
24:38and always wanted himself to be looking up and to the left.
24:41So he had sort of an ethereal look to him.
24:43The idea of a carefully crafted vision of the warrior king,
24:49the beautiful young leader would have appealed to him.
24:53He would have kind of liked this thing.
24:54Okay, so Alexander is described as king of kings here.
24:57So what happened?
24:58So Alexander is king of Macedonia, a small kingdom in northern Greece.
25:02He goes east and he conquers the Persian Empire.
25:05And the Persian king, one of his titles was frequently the king of kings.
25:09When Alexander took over the Persian Empire, he had to figure out how to govern it.
25:12And one of his solutions was basically to present himself to the Persians and their subjects
25:16as a Persian king and therefore took on the title king of kings.
25:20Okay, let's move on.
25:22Zeus summoned the gods for final judgment.
25:26I don't know about that one.
25:27Final judgment.
25:28Greeks didn't believe in final judgment.
25:30They just thought life went on.
25:31The gods lived forever.
25:32They were immortal.
25:33By definition, things didn't change.
25:35So no final judgment in the Greek world.
25:38Before Olympus fades, you will speak.
25:40So the Greeks did believe in gods.
25:42They believed in 12 gods who lived on Mount Olympus, which was a big mountain.
25:47The most powerful god in Greek belief was Zeus.
25:49And he's got a glowing scepter with a lightning bolt on it.
25:53Zeus's symbol was really the eagle, so he would have had a scepter with an eagle on it.
25:57First, Poseidon rose and the hall bowed to the sea.
26:02So Zeus looks like he's 70, 80 maybe.
26:06And Poseidon, his brother looks like Jason Momoa, looks like he's in his 20s or 30s.
26:11Very fit.
26:13Hades followed, and silence ruled the room.
26:16Okay, so Zeus was in charge of the sky, Poseidon's in charge of the ocean,
26:20and Hades is in charge of the underworld.
26:22Hades appears with a burst of flame.
26:24That's a very Christian idea.
26:26The underworld is where people go to be punished in flames.
26:29In Greek art and literature, what makes the underworld different is that there's no sun,
26:35and it's dark and gray and cold all the time.
26:38So the idea of fire in the underworld, not really a Greek thing.
26:41Hermes appeared in a breath.
26:46Hermes is the messenger god in Greek religion.
26:50And he's supposed to be able to zip to one place to another.
26:53But in Greek art, he's shown with wings on his feet, not big gigantic angel wings.
26:59For the Greeks, they believed in literally tens of thousands of supernatural beings,
27:04and they were much more intermixed with everyday life.
27:08So, for example, when Greeks sacrificed on altars,
27:11the reason they did that in front of temples was that in the temple was a statue of the god.
27:15And the idea was this god could see through the statue and watch you making the sacrifice.
27:21They believe that the gods are much closer to human life on an everyday basis.
27:25Let's watch this next video about Sparta.
27:28Every male citizen existed for one purpose alone, to be a soldier.
27:34So Sparta, a really complicated, interesting place.
27:37In the ancient world, the Spartans had a reputation for being very heavily militarized.
27:41The whole city being an armed camp with the men doing nothing but training all day long to be
27:46soldiers and living this very austere life.
27:49This is where we get the word Spartan from, like Spartan accommodations, Spartan lifestyle.
27:53That's the idea.
27:54No private wealth, no luxury, no walls.
27:58We know from the materials that we found in Sparta that they lived a pretty good life.
28:03There was a huge population of enslaved laborers, which the Spartans kept oppressed and repressed.
28:10They produced the food that the Spartans ate, and the Spartans never went to work.
28:14So if you were talking to an ancient Greek and asked them about the Spartans, the person you're
28:19talking to probably said, well, listen, they're living the most luxurious lifestyle imaginable.
28:23They don't go to work.
28:24They have more than enough to eat.
28:26They hang around all day.
28:27Things are pretty good for these guys.
28:29And it said all this was made possible because of this huge enslaved labor force called Helots
28:33that the Spartans had conquered and made work for them.
28:37Did they spend a lot of time for military training?
28:39Yes.
28:39But they could do that because they were not working to support themselves or their families.
28:44No city wall because Spartan ideology considered walls a symbol of weakness.
28:50Okay, so this fact did not have a wall until relatively late because Sparta was a very big,
28:55powerful state with a large army and didn't really need to defend the main urban center.
29:01Most Greek cities were pretty unimpressive, dirt streets, mud-brick houses.
29:04So Sparta wasn't all that unusual in that sense.
29:08Athena of the bronze house, walls lined with intricately worked bronze plates.
29:14There was actually a temple called Athena Halkioikos on the Acropolis of Sparta.
29:18And it did have some sort of bronze reliefs.
29:22Now, their reconstruction, they just showed you that that's a problem.
29:26The Spartans, for reasons known only to themselves, decided to not build temples with columns around it.
29:34Lots of Greeks did that.
29:35We call that a peripteral temple.
29:37Spartans did not build those temples.
29:39One way to spiff up that kind of building without the columns and without the fancy marble
29:44was to take bronze sheets and to hammer figures into them so that they were decorated showing
29:50scenes of Greek myth, for example, and then literally nail them to the walls of the temple.
29:55Now, interestingly, the British excavated this temple.
29:58The bronze reliefs are all gone except maybe ones and fragments,
30:02but we have lots of nails.
30:04The actual bronze nails that they used to hammer the bronze sheets into the walls.
30:08Around the Agora stood the tombs of Spartan heroes buried within the city.
30:13In the city of Sparta itself, there were tombs.
30:16Lots and lots of tombs.
30:18About 150 known tombs.
30:20Now, most Greek cities, after, say, 700 BCE,
30:24they did not want you burying your dead inside the city.
30:27You had to go to a cemetery at the edge of town for that.
30:30Spartans always allowed people, at least some people, to bury their dead in the city.
30:35That definitely was highly unusual.
30:37So when you walked around Sparta, you walked past a lot of graves.
30:40One thing which is not accurate here, you see their tombstones in the video there.
30:45It looks like a modern tombstone.
30:46That's very sort of 19th century New England sort of thing.
30:49Very much not a Spartan thing.
30:50You were not allowed to mark the tomb.
30:52Spartan women were free.
30:54Free in a way that Athenian women could scarcely imagine.
30:58Okay, so there is some truth in this.
31:00Spartan women enjoyed a lot more freedom to move around
31:03than women in most other communities.
31:05One of the things that really set them apart was that they played sports.
31:08Their big thing was running and wrestling.
31:12That's extremely unusual.
31:13There's no other place in the Greek world where women are regularly playing sports.
31:17Another thing which set them apart is that when they were playing sports,
31:20they wore very little.
31:22They wore an outfit that left one breast bare and was cut off at roughly mid-thigh.
31:29One Greek poet called Spartan women thigh flashers because if you were a Greek and you spent time
31:35walking around town, you never saw a woman's legs.
31:38Like, her dress always went down to her ankles.
31:40Most Greek women throughout their lives when they were out in public were expected to be dressed
31:45very modestly.
31:46And we know, for instance, that in a lot of instances, Greek women covered their hair
31:50and sometimes wore veils.
31:52So the idea that there are women out in public wearing an outfit where you could see their legs
31:57was absolutely shocking.
31:58Question of why Spartan women enjoyed relative freedom is a more complicated one.
32:03If you were a woman in any other Greek city, the husband was out of the house, but you were
32:07home
32:08raising kids, making clothes, grinding grain, cooking, cleaning the house.
32:12You had an enormous amount of work to do.
32:15So Spartan women didn't do all of those things.
32:18They had very few children because they didn't need the children to support them in their old age
32:23because the enslaved labor did that for them.
32:25They had enslaved labor to do all the cooking, cleaning, making clothes.
32:30So instead of carrying this enormous labor burden that women elsewhere in Greece did,
32:35Spartan women had relatively little to do.
32:37And so they had a lot more free time to go do other things outside the household.
32:41I think that's enough slop for today.
32:42Thanks for watching.