̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Ancient Greece

Ancient Greek ‘pop culture’ discovery rewrites history of poetry and song

ta385 — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 11:45:00 +0000

New research into a little-known text written in ancient Greek shows that ‘stressed poetry’, the ancestor of all modern poetry and song, was already in use in the 2nd Century CE, 300 years earlier than previously thought.

Epic dictionary re-defines Ancient Greek including the words which made the Victorians blush

ta385 — Thu, 27 May 2021 05:00:00 +0000

Recently published by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press, the Lexicon provides fresh definitions and translations gleaned by re-reading most of Ancient Greek literature from its foundations in Homer, right through to the early second century AD.

Introducing up-to-date English, the new dictionary clarifies meanings that had become obscured by antiquated verbiage in Liddell and Scott’s Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon which was first published in 1889.

Editor-in-Chief, Professor James Diggle of Queens' College said: “We don’t call βλαύτη 'a kind of slipper worn by fops' as in the Intermediate Lexicon. In the Cambridge Lexicon, this becomes 'a kind of simple footwear, slipper'.”

̽��ֱ��team has also rescued words from Victorian attempts at modesty. “We spare no blushes,” said Diggle. “We do not translate the verb χέζω as 'ease oneself, do one's need'. We translate it as 'to shit'. Nor do we explain 'βινέω as 'inire, coire, of illicit intercourse', but simply translate it by the f-word.”

̽��ֱ��two volumes are set to become instantly indispensable for Classics students as well as an important reference work for scholars.

̽��ֱ��team used online databases – the Perseus Digital Library and later the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae – to make this huge corpus more easily accessible and searchable.

̽��ֱ��researchers pored over every word, working steadily through the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet to build up a clear, modern and accessible guide to the meanings of Ancient Greek words and their development through different contexts and authors. ̽��ֱ��Lexicon features around 37,000 Greek words drawn from the writings of around 90 different authors and set out across more than 1,500 pages.

̽��ֱ��project, which began in 1997, was the brainchild of the renowned Classical philologist and lexicographer John Chadwick (1920–98). ̽��ֱ��initial plan was to revise the Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon. An abridged version of a lexicon published in 1843, it has never been revised, but until now has remained the lexicon most commonly used by students in English schools and universities. It was hoped that the project might be completed by a single editor within five years.

Diggle was then chair of the project's advisory committee. He said: "Soon after work began it became clear that it was not possible to revise the Intermediate Lexicon; it was too antiquated in concept, design and content. It was better to start afresh by compiling a new lexicon.

“We didn’t realise at the time the magnitude of the task, and it was only because of advances in technology that we were able to take it on. We then had to appoint additional editorial staff and raise a huge amount of financial support. It took us over 20 years because we decided that if we were going to do it we must do it thoroughly.

“At the outset of the project I undertook to read everything which the editors wrote. I soon realised that if we were ever to finish I had better start to write entries myself, and for the last 15 years or more I was fully occupied with it and did little else – it took over my life.”

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Greek Lexicon takes a fundamentally different approach to its Victorian predecessor. While entries in the Liddell and Scott lexicon usually start with a word’s earliest appearance in the literature, the Cambridge team realised this might not give its original, or root, meaning. Instead, they begin their entries with that root meaning and then in numbered sections trace the word’s development in different contexts.

Opening summaries help ease the reader into the longer entries, setting out the order of what is to follow, while different fonts signpost the way, helping the reader to distinguish between definitions, translations, and other material, such as grammatical constructions.

̽��ֱ��team tackled countless other interesting and challenging words, including πόλις, which will be familiar to many in its English form 'polis'. Diggle said: “Our article shows the variety of senses which the word can have: in its earliest usage 'citadel, acropolis', then (more generally) 'city, town', also 'territory, land', and (more specifically, in the classical period) 'city as a political entity, city-state', also (with reference to the occupants of a city) 'community, citizen body'.”

“'Verbs can be the most difficult items to deal with, especially if they are common verbs, with many different but interrelated uses. ἔχω, (ékhō) is one of the commonest Greek verbs, whose basic senses are 'have' and 'hold'. Our entry for this verb runs to 55 sections. If a verb has as many applications as this, you need to provide the reader with signposts, to show how you have organised the material, to show that you have organised the numbered sections in groups, and to show that these groups follow logically one from the other.”

Professor Robin Osborne, Chair of the Faculty of Classics, said: “ ̽��ֱ��Faculty takes enormous pride in this dictionary and in the way Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press have aided us and produced it. It’s a beautiful piece of book making.”

“We invested in the Lexicon to make a contribution to the teaching of Greek over the next century. This puts into the hands of students a resource that will enable them access to Ancient Greek more securely and easily.

“It is hugely important that we continue to engage with the literature of Ancient Greece, not as texts frozen in a past world, but which engage with the world in which we live. There’s been continual engagement with them since antiquity, so we are also engaging with that history, which is the history of European thought.”

̽��ֱ��project’s attention to detail also extended to the Press and the typesetters, who took immense care to ensure that consulting the Lexicon would be an easy and pleasurable experience, right down to a specially-created text design. Diggle and his fellow editors inputted their entries for the Lexicon in xml, using a complex system of more than 100 digital tags to ensure each element was automatically rendered in the correct format.

This also allowed for a constant feedback loop between the editors, the Press and the typesetters, with proofs reviewed and corrected, and the style and content honed as work progressed.

Michael Sharp, the Lexicon’s Publisher, said: “ ̽��ֱ��Cambridge Greek Lexicon is one of the most important Classics books we have ever published. It represents a milestone in the history of Classics, the ̽��ֱ�� and the Press. I am elated, relieved and immensely proud of the part the Press has played in supporting this project.”

Professor Diggle said: “ ̽��ֱ��moment of greatest relief and joy was when I was able to sign off the very, very final proofs and say to the Press ‘It’s finished. You can print it’. You can’t imagine what it was like, to realise that we had finally got there; I literally wept with joy.”

For 23 years a team from Cambridge’s Faculty of Classics has scoured Ancient Greek literature for meanings to complete the Cambridge Greek Lexicon, a monumental piece of scholarship and the most innovative dictionary of its kind in almost 200 years.

It took over my life

James Diggle

Sir Cam

Professor James Diggle

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Ancient faeces reveal parasites described in earliest Greek medical texts

fpjl2 — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 04:15:11 +0000

Ancient faeces from prehistoric burials on the Greek island of Kea have provided the first archaeological evidence for the parasitic worms described 2,500 years ago in the writings of Hippocrates – the most influential works of classical medicine.

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researchers Evilena Anastasiou and Piers Mitchell used microscopy to study soil formed from decomposed faeces recovered from the surface of pelvic bones of skeletons buried in the Neolithic (4th millennium BC), Bronze Age (2nd millennium BC) and Roman periods (146 BC – 330 AD).

̽��ֱ��Cambridge team worked on this project with Anastasia Papathanasiou and Lynne Schepartz, who are experts in the archaeology and anthropology of ancient Greece, and were based in Athens.

They found that eggs from two species of parasitic worm (helminths) were present: whipworm (Trichuris trichiura), and roundworm (Ascaris lumbricoides). Whipworm was present from the Neolithic, and roundworm from the Bronze Age.

Hippocrates was a medical practitioner from the Greek island of Cos, who lived in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. He became famous for developing the concept of humoural theory to explain why people became ill.

This theory – in which a healthy body has a balance of four ‘humours’: black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm – remained the accepted explanation for disease followed by doctors in Europe until the 17th century, over 2,000 years later.

Hippocrates and his students described many diseases in their medical texts, and historians have been trying to work out which diseases they were. Until now, they had to rely on the original written descriptions of intestinal worms to estimate which parasites may have infected the ancient Greeks. ̽��ֱ��Hippocratic texts called these intestinal worms Helmins strongyle, Ascaris, and Helmins plateia.

̽��ֱ��researchers say that this new archaeological evidence identifies beyond doubt some of the species of parasites that infected people in the region. ̽��ֱ��findings are published today in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

“ ̽��ֱ��Helmins strongyle worm in the ancient Greek texts is likely to have referred to roundworm, as found at Kea. ̽��ֱ��Ascaris worm described in the ancient medical texts may well have referred to two parasites, pinworm and whipworm, with the latter being found at Kea,” said study leader Piers Mitchell, from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology.

“Until now we only had estimates from historians as to what kinds of parasites were described in the ancient Greek medical texts. Our research confirms some aspects of what the historians thought, but also adds new information that the historians did not expect, such as that whipworm was present”.

̽��ֱ��mention of infections by these parasites in the Hippocratic Corpus includes symptoms of vomiting up worms, diarrhoea, fevers and shivers, heartburn, weakness, and swelling of the abdomen.

Descriptions of treatment for intestinal worms in the Corpus were mainly through medicines, such as the crushed root of the wild herb seseli mixed with water and honey taken as a drink.

“Finding the eggs of intestinal parasites as early as the Neolithic period in Greece is a key advance in our field,” said Evilena Anastasiou, one of the study’s authors. “This provides the earliest evidence for parasitic worms in ancient Greece.”

“This research shows how we can bring together archaeology and history to help us better understand the discoveries of key early medical practitioners and scientists,” added Mitchell.

Earliest archaeological evidence of intestinal parasitic worms infecting the ancient inhabitants of Greece confirms descriptions found in writings associated with Hippocrates, the early physician and ‘father of Western medicine’.

This research shows how we can bring together archaeology and history to help us better understand the discoveries of key early medical practitioners and scientists

Piers Mitchell

Left: Piers Mitchell/Elsevier. Right: Department of Classics, ̽��ֱ�� of Cincinnati.

Left: whipworm egg taken from ancient Greek faecal matter. Right: excavation of the Bronze Age site of Ayia Irini on the island of Kea.

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A rare discovery will shed new light on Mycenaean funerary practices

amb206 — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 09:18:59 +0000

For the first time, archaeologists have uncovered and carefully documented an intact burial in a monumental chamber tomb of the Mycenaean palatial period, around 3,350 years ago. Research into the material uncovered has only just begun but the discovery will expand our knowledge of Mycenaean funerals – from the treatment of the body to the selection of objects placed for burial.

̽��ֱ��tomb is approached by an impressive rock-cut passageway, 20 m long, which leads to a deep façade some 5.40 m in height. A doorway gives access to the burial chamber. Its area of 42 sq m makes this the ninth largest known to date out of 4,000 examples excavated in the last 150 years in Greece. ̽��ֱ��partial collapse of the original chamber roof has helped to preserve the burial layer intact.

“Mycenaean chamber tombs are generally found by archaeologists to have been disturbed or looted. Most contain many burials, making an association between individual people and objects very difficult or impossible,” said Dr Yannis Galanakis of Cambridge’s Faculty of Classics, co-director of the five-year Prosilio project and an expert in Aegean archaeology.

“Finding an intact burial, let alone in a monumental tomb of the palatial period, 1370-1200 BC, makes our discovery all the more special for the knowledge we can now acquire about the tomb-using group and the practices they performed during and after the funeral.”

Once huge quantities of soil and rubble had been carefully excavated, the archaeologists found in the chamber the remains of a man, aged 40 to 50 years. He was accompanied by a selection of fine objects: jewellery made in a range of materials, combs, pins, a pair of horse bits, arrowheads, a bow, a sealstone, a signet ring, and a group of tinned clay vessels of various shapes.

“ ̽��ֱ��size and quality of construction of the tomb correlates well with the discovered objects, all of which speak of a man from the upper echelons of the local society,” said Galanakis.

“Initial examination of the finds suggests a conscious selection by the tomb-using group responsible for the burial’s preparation of the objects interred with the body. ̽��ֱ��impression we get is that the tomb was built during the man’s life. It is indeed astonishing, and a very rare instance, to be able to excavate the remains of the man for whom the tomb must have been constructed.”

Galanakis was struck by the placement of different shapes and types of jewellery with a male burial, which challenges the commonly held assumption that jewellery in Mycenaean Greece should be chiefly associated with female burials. “It also chimes with the discovery of considerable quantities of jewellery by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cincinnati in 2015 in the burial of the ‘griffin warrior’ at Pylos, which is older by a century than that of the man at Prosilio.”

Striking too is the absence of painted pottery, with the exception of two painted stirrup jars, often taken to contain aromatic oils and which may be associated with the final use and closure of the tomb around 1300 BC. Painted pottery is very common in Mycenaean tombs. Its absence from the initial burial is further confirmation of the conscious choices made in the selection of objects placed alongside this man’s burial at Prosilio.

̽��ֱ��Prosilio team believes that this monumental structure, known as tomb 2, is associated with ancient Orchomenos, a major centre which controlled northern Boeotia, a region of Greece. Orchomenos, which is only 3.5 km away, oversaw in the 14th and 13th centuries BC the partial drainage of Lake Kopaïs – once the largest lake in Greece – a project that yielded a sizeable area of land for agriculture.

At its peak (1350-1250 BC), Orchomenos’s power is reflected in its most famous monument, the tholos tomb ‘of Minyas’, first excavated by Heinrich Schliemann in the 19th century and comparable only in size and refinement to the tholos tomb ‘of Atreus’ at Mycenae.

“Despite the tholos ‘of Minyas’ and some earlier important discoveries by Greek and German teams in the area, we still know very little about ancient Orchomenos. We hope that the continuation of our project will help us understand better Orchomenos’s position in the region and learn more about its population and their practices,” said Galanakis.

“ ̽��ֱ��discovery this year enables us to ask questions such as why certain objects were selected for burial while others were not – and what kind of rituals were performed as part of funerary and post-funerary practices. ̽��ֱ��finds will spark new discussions about the role of burials in Mycenaean life during the palatial period.”

̽��ֱ��five-year Prosilio project is in its first year. In subsequent years, the team aims to excavate more tombs and study and publish the archaeological data collected. ̽��ֱ��initiative is a collaboration between the Ephorate of Antiquities of Boeotia and the British School at Athens. Its directors are Dr Alexandra Charami (Director of the Ephorate of Antiquities of Boeotia) and Dr Yannis Galanakis, (Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Classics and Director of the Museum of Classical Archaeology, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge).

̽��ֱ��Prosilio team also includes Kyriaki Kalliga, archaeologist of the Ephorate of Antiquities of Boeotia, Dr Panagiotis Karkanas, geo-archaeologist and Director of the Wiener Laboratory at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Dr Ioanna Moutafi, bio-archaeologist and senior researcher at the Wiener Laboratory, Emily Wright, field supervisor and PhD candidate in Archaeology at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, and Professor Ann Brysbaert of the ̽��ֱ�� of Leiden and Principal Investigator of the ERC project SETinSTONE. Some 25 students, specialists and workers helped in this year’s fieldwork.

̽��ֱ��Prosilio project was conducted with permission from the Hellenic Ministry of Culture & Sports and Ioannis Papadopoulos, the owner of the land. ̽��ֱ��project was generously funded by, among other sources, the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge (Faculty of Classics, the McDonald Institute, the Cambridge Humanities Research Grant scheme, and Sidney Sussex College), the Institute for Aegean Prehistory (INSTAP) and the British School at Athens.

Inset images: entrance to Prosilio tomb 2; horse bits found with the burial (Yannis Galanakis).

̽��ֱ��discovery this summer of an impressive rock-cut tomb on a mountainside in Prosilio, near ancient Orchomenos in central Greece, will shed new light on Mycenaean funerary practices.

Finding an intact burial, let alone in a monumental tomb of the palatial period, 1370-1200 BC, makes our discovery all the more special.

Yannis Galanakis

Excavation of a Myceneaen tomb at Prosilio in central Greece, summer 2017

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Opinion: Ancient Greeks would not recognise our ‘democracy’ – they’d see an ‘oligarchy’

Anonymous — Fri, 03 Jun 2016 10:20:30 +0000

We owe to the ancient Greeks much, if not most of our own current political vocabulary. All the way from anarchy and democracy to politics itself. But their politics and ours are very different beasts. To an ancient Greek democrat (of any stripe), all our modern democratic systems would count as “oligarchy”. By that I mean the rule of and by – if not necessarily or expressly for – the few, as opposed to the power or control of the people, or the many (demo-kratia).

That is the case even if – and indeed because – the few happen to be elected to serve by (all) the people. For in ancient Greece elections were considered to be in themselves oligarchic. They systematically favoured the few and, more particularly, the few extremely rich citizens – or “oligarchs”, as we now familiarly call them thanks to Boris Berezhovsky and his kind, who are also known as “plutocrats” or just “fat cats”.

On the other hand, there are some significant commonalities between ancient and modern ways of thinking politically. To both ancient and modern democrats, for example, freedom and equality are of the essence – they are core political values. However, freedom to an ancient Greek democrat didn’t just mean the freedom to participate in the political process but also freedom from legal servitude, from being an actual slave chattel.

Aristotle favoured the democratic model. Jastrow, CC BY

And freedom to participate meant not just the sort of occasional saturnalia that we take to be the key mode of democracy for most of us – a temporary exchange of roles by political masters and slaves come general or local election (or referendum) time. But rather the freedom actually to share political power, to rule on an almost day-to-day basis.

In the fourth century BC(E), the Athenian democratic assembly of 6,000-plus adult male citizens met on average every nine days or so. It was government by mass meeting, but also the equivalent of holding a referendum on major issues every other week.

Equality then and now

Equality today is but a pipe dream at best, at least in socioeconomic terms, when the richest 1% of the world’s population owns as much as the remaining 99% put together. They managed these things a whole lot better in ancient Greece, and especially in the ancient Athenian democracy.

Statistical data are lacking – the ancients were notoriously unbureaucratic and they considered direct personal taxation to be a civic insult. But it’s plausibly been argued that “Classical” (5th-4th century BCE) Greece and especially Classical Athens were more populous and urbanised societies, with a higher proportion of their population living above the level of mere subsistence – and with a more equal distribution of property ownership – than has been the case in Greece at any time since, or indeed than in pretty much any other pre-modern society.

This does not mean that ancient Greece can supply us with a directly transferable example for democratic imitation – we tend to believe formally in the absolute equality of all citizens at any rate as adult voters, regardless of gender, and not to believe in the validity or utility of the legal enslavement of human beings as chattels.

Plutarch: preferred the notion of monarchy. Odysses, CC BY

However, there are a number of ancient democratic notions and techniques that do seem highly attractive: the use of sortition, for instance – a random method of polling by lottery that aimed to produce a representative sample of elected officials. Or the practice of ostracism – which allowed the population to nominate a candidate who had to go into exile for 10 years, thus ending their political career.

And comparison, or rather contrast, of our democracies with those of ancient Greece does serve to highlight what’s been called creeping crypto-oligarchy in our own very different (representative, not direct) democratic systems.

Worst of all possible systems

We are all democrats now, aren’t we? Or are we? Not if we consider the following five flaws variously embedded in all contemporary systems.

Most pertinently at the moment, it was possible for the US and the UK to go to war in Iraq in 2003, even though neither US president George W Bush nor the UK prime minister, Tony Blair, had at any point received the endorsement for that decision from the majority of their own citizens.

Churchill: the worst of all possible systems. Pygar1954, CC BY

Citizens in our “democracies” spend up to one-fifth of their lives governed by a party or candidate other than the party or candidate that most of them voted for at the last election. Moreover, elections are not in fact “free and fair”: they’re nearly invariably won by the side that spends the most money, and thus are more or less corrupted thereby.

When it comes to winning elections, no party has ever come to power without (blatantly self-interested) corporate backing in one shape or another. And, perhaps most damning of all, the vast majority of people are systematically excluded from public decision-making – thanks to vote-skewing, campaign financing and the right of elected representatives simply to ignore with impunity anything that happens in between (local or general) elections.

Democracy in short has changed its meaning from anything like the “people power” of ancient Greece and has seemingly lost its purpose as a reflection let alone realisation of the popular will.

One can well see why Winston Churchill was once moved to describe democracy as the worst of all systems of government – apart from all the rest. But that should be no good reason for us to continue ignoring the widely admitted democratic deficit. Back to the future – with the democrats of ancient Greece.

Paul Cartledge, A.G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow, Clare College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Paul Cartledge (Faculty of Classics) discusses what the ancient Greeks would think of our democracy.

Pablo Escudero

Pericles

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On the life (and deaths) of democracy

sjr81 — Thu, 26 May 2016 10:41:25 +0000

Following the history of democracy from its invention in 508 BCE to the 21st century, Democracy: A Life traces the development of political thinking over millennia. It also examines the many sustained attacks on the original notion of Athenian democracy across the intervening centuries which have left it degraded, deformed and largely unrecognisable from its original incarnation.

̽��ֱ��book, published by OUP, traces the grand sweep of democracy in around 500BCE down through the Classical era to its general demise in its original forms about 300BCE.

Thereafter, though the word democracy persisted, it continued only in degraded versions from the Hellenistic era, through late Republican and early Imperial Rome, down to early Byzantium in the sixth century CE. For many centuries after that, from late Antiquity, through the Middle Ages, to the Renaissance, democracy was effectively eclipsed by other forms of government – before enjoying a revival in 17th century England and further renewals in late 18th century North America and France.

“We owe to the ancient Greeks much, if not most, of our own currently political vocabulary – from the words anarchy and democracy to politics itself,” said Cartledge. “But their politics and ours are very different beasts. To an ancient Greek democrat (of any stripe), all our modern democratic systems would count as oligarchy: rule for and by the few.

“Politics is the art of the possible and the art of persuasion – and nowhere was this more evident than in ancient Athens where all but 20 of 700 offices of the Assembly were filled by lottery every year.”

̽��ֱ��Assembly was government by mass meeting, every nine days or so. On the agenda of every principal Assembly meeting were such fundamental issues as relations with the gods, state security and the overseas supply of wheat.

However, the 6,000 or so ordinary members of the Assembly who were able and willing to turn up in central Athens could not decide such profound matters by themselves. At the meeting, they listened in the open air to the arguments and counter arguments of prominent and well-known speakers before a mass vote was taken on a show of hands.

Even with such mass participation, there was still the chance for further scrutiny if sufficient numbers felt an error or crime had been committed in and by the Assembly. People’s jury courts could stymie demagogic self-promotion and offer the chance of delivering a considered second opinion on a measure.

Above all, there was also the ‘Boule’ or Council of 500 – the Assembly’s steering committee and chief administrative body of the state. This annually recruited body, like the annual panel of the 6,000 jurors in the People’s courts, was filled by the use of lottery, not by election. ̽��ֱ��lot was, democrats believed, the democratic way to fill public offices. It was random, gave all qualified male adult citizens an equal chance of selection, and so encouraged them to throw their hats into the ring, to step up to the plate and do their public civic duty.

In essence, Cartledge argues that this truly represented government of the people by the people for the people.

“Ancient Athenians did not have political parties, they thought elections were undemocratic,” he added. “Any male who wished to attend the Assembly could do so, and anyone who wished to have his say could call out and make his voice heard. It was the equivalent of holding a referendum on major issues every other week.”

Cartledge argues that the notion of such equality today is but a pipe dream at best, at least in socioeconomic terms, when the richest 1pc of a country’s population can own more than the remaining 99pc put together.

“Today, our MPs get elected and feel they have to toe the party line. And they are in turn protected by the party system and infrequent elections. There is no way to be held to account after an election – and this is a modern phenomenon. ̽��ֱ��word ostracise comes from ancient Greece where politicians could be physically cast out for ten years if they were felt to be abusing office. If a week is a long time in politics today, you can imagine what a decade in the wilderness would mean.”

While few in number, Cartledge does highlight two modern democratic system where echoes of the Athenian concept of demokratia (demos meaning people and kratos meaning power) can be found.

In Switzerland, at the federal level, changes to the constitution can be proposed by citizens and can only be completed by referendum; and the Swiss populace votes regularly on issues at all levels of the political scale – from the building of a new street to the foreign policy of the country.

Meanwhile, following the 2008 financial crash in Iceland, referenda, assemblies, and a people’s parliament were formed as citizens of the country campaigned to make their voices and views heard by means of mass participation in the country’s new politics.

̽��ֱ��notion of government by referendum is particularly apposite to the United Kingdom of 2016 as the battle lines are drawn, often with crude, crass and alarmist hyperbole from both the Leave and Remain camps, for the EU referendum on June 23.

“ ̽��ֱ��EU referendum will give us an all too brief taste of what it was like in ancient Athens,” added Cartledge. “If it’s a majority of one, then that will be the decision. This system is so rarely used, and so risky, but it’s the nearest thing to trusting the people. It’s an extraordinary thing to trust people who are not experts – but this system existed and lasted for 200 years, and has flourished on and off since.

“Government by referendum suited the Ancient Athenians. Whether it’s a useful add-on to, or a flagrant contradiction of, our democracy – that’s a matter on which we the electorate should have been asked to give our decisive view. But our democracy, being as it is, merely representative – would look like a creeping, crypto-oligarchy to the ancient Greeks – and many today may be coming to a similar conclusion.”

Democracy: A Life is out now.

̽��ֱ��‘life’ of democracy – from its roots in ancient Athens to today’s perverted and ‘creeping, crypto-oligarchies’ – is the subject of a newly-published book by eminent Cambridge classicist Paul Cartledge.

Our democracy would look like a creeping, crypto-oligarchy to the ancient Greeks – and many today may be coming to a similar conclusion.

Paul Cartledge

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Disbelieve it or not, ancient history suggests that atheism is as natural to humans as religion

tdk25 — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 08:24:45 +0000

Despite being written out of large parts of history, atheists thrived in the polytheistic societies of the ancient world – raising considerable doubts about whether humans really are 'wired' for religion – a study suggests.

̽��ֱ��claim is the central proposition of a new book by Tim Whitmarsh, Professor of Greek Culture and a Fellow of St John’s College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. In it, he suggests that atheism – which is typically seen as a modern phenomenon – was not just common in ancient Greece and pre-Christian Rome, but probably flourished more in those societies than in most civilisations since.

As a result, the study challenges two assumptions that prop up current debates between atheists and believers: Firstly, the idea that atheism is a modern point of view, and second, the idea of 'religious universalism' – that humans are naturally predisposed, or 'wired', to believe in gods.

̽��ֱ��book, entitled Battling ̽��ֱ��Gods, was launched in Cambridge on Tuesday 16 February 2016.

“We tend to see atheism as an idea that has only recently emerged in secular Western societies,” Whitmarsh said. “ ̽��ֱ��rhetoric used to describe it is hyper-modern. In fact, early societies were far more capable than many since of containing atheism within the spectrum of what they considered normal.”

“Rather than making judgements based on scientific reason, these early atheists were making what seem to be universal objections about the paradoxical nature of religion – the fact that it asks you to accept things that aren’t intuitively there in your world. ̽��ֱ��fact that this was happening thousands of years ago suggests that forms of disbelief can exist in all cultures, and probably always have.”

̽��ֱ��book argues that disbelief is actually “as old as the hills”. Early examples, such as the atheistic writings of Xenophanes of Colophon (c.570-475 BCE) are contemporary with Second Temple-era Judaism, and significantly predate Christianity and Islam. Even Plato, writing in the 4th Century BCE, said that contemporary non-believers were “not the first to have had this view about the gods.”

Because atheism’s ancient history has largely gone unwritten, however, Whitmarsh suggests that it is also absent from both sides of the current monotheist/atheist debate. While atheists depict religion as something from an earlier, more primitive stage of human development, the idea of religious universalism is also built partly on the notion that early societies were religious by nature because to believe in god is an inherent, “default setting” for humans.

Neither perspective is true, Whitmarsh suggests: “Believers talk about atheism as if it’s a pathology of a particularly odd phase of modern Western culture that will pass, but if you ask someone to think hard, clearly people also thought this way in antiquity.”

His book surveys one thousand years of ancient history to prove the point, teasing out the various forms of disbelief expressed by philosophical movements, writers and public figures.

These were made possible in particular by the fundamental diversity of polytheistic Greek societies. Between 650 and 323 BCE, Greece had an estimated 1,200 separate city states, each with its own customs, traditions and governance. Religion expressed this variety, as a matter of private cults, village rituals and city festivals dedicated to numerous divine entities.

This meant that there was no such thing as religious orthodoxy. ̽��ֱ��closest the Greeks got to a unifying sacred text were Homer’s epics, which offered no coherent moral vision of the gods, and indeed often portrayed them as immoral. Similarly, there was no specialised clergy telling people how to live: “ ̽��ֱ��idea of a priest telling you what to do was alien to the Greek world,” Whitmarsh said.

As a result, while some people viewed atheism as mistaken, it was rarely seen as morally wrong. In fact, it was usually tolerated as one of a number of viewpoints that people could adopt on the subject of the gods. Only occasionally was it actively legislated against, such as in Athens during the 5th Century BCE, when Socrates was executed for “not recognising the gods of the city.”

While atheism came in various shapes and sizes, Whitmarsh also argues that there were strong continuities across the generations. Ancient atheists struggled with fundamentals that many people still question today – such as how to deal with the problem of evil, and how to explain aspects of religion which seem implausible.

These themes extend from the work of early thinkers – like Anaximander and Anaximenes, who tried to explain why phenomena such as thunder and earthquakes actually had nothing to do with the gods – through to famous writers like Euripides, whose plays openly criticised divine causality. Perhaps the most famous group of atheists in the ancient world, the Epicureans, argued that there was no such thing as predestination and rejected the idea that the gods had any control over human life.

̽��ֱ��age of ancient atheism ended, Whitmarsh suggests, because the polytheistic societies that generally tolerated it were replaced by monotheistic imperial forces that demanded an acceptance of one, “true” God. Rome’s adoption of Christianity in the 4th Century CE was, he says, “seismic”, because it used religious absolutism to hold the Empire together.

Most of the later Roman Empire’s ideological energy was expended fighting supposedly heretical beliefs – often other forms of Christianity. In a decree of 380, Emperor Theodosius I even drew a distinction between Catholics, and everyone else – whom he classed as dementes vesanosque (“demented lunatics”). Such rulings left no room for disbelief.

Whitmarsh stresses that his study is not designed to prove, or disprove, the truth of atheism itself. On the book’s first page, however, he adds: “I do, however, have a strong conviction – that has hardened in the course of researching and writing this book – that cultural and religious pluralism, and free debate, are indispensable to the good life.”

About the book and the author

Battling ̽��ֱ��Gods is published by Faber and Faber. Tim Whitmarsh is A G Leventis Professor of Greek Culture and a Fellow of St John’s College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

People in the ancient world did not always believe in the gods, a new study suggests – casting doubt on the idea that religious belief is a 'default setting' for humans.

Early societies were far more capable than many since of containing atheism within the spectrum of what they considered normal

Tim Whitmarsh

Wikimedia Commons

̽��ֱ��Chariot of Zeus, from Stories from the Greek Tragedians by Alfred Church. ̽��ֱ��study suggests that not all Greeks recognised the gods, and that atheism was fairly acceptable in ancient polytheistic societies.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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What is a unicorn’s horn made of?

amb206 — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 13:05:35 +0000

Scroll to the end of the article to listen to the podcast.

At first glance, it might be a horse with wavy mane and swishing tail – but then you notice the long, twisted horn protruding from its forehead. Looking at this magnificent animal more closely, you see that its feet are most unlike horses’ hooves, cloven into digits almost like human feet.

No-one knows exactly what a unicorn looks like but the artist who decorated this maiolica plate (in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum: acc. no. C.86-1927) imagined a creature on a grand scale. ̽��ֱ��youthful rider, who sits astride a richly embroidered cloth, is dwarfed by the impressive size of his prancing steed.

̽��ֱ��plate was originally part of a series, made in Italy in the early 16th century, depicting Caesar’s triumphal entry into Rome after the end of the second Punic War. ̽��ֱ��scene is taken from a set of woodcuts and the letter H marks its place in the narrative. ̽��ֱ��plates are thought to have been produced by a workshop in Cafaggiolo, not far from Florence.

̽��ֱ��bold design is proof that unicorns have not always been the shy and gentle creatures that medieval bestiaries and 20^th-century children’s literature would have us believe. In fact, they were a ferocious addition to the ranks of mythical beasts in classical texts. Pliny the Elder described the unicorn thus:

“… a very fierce animal called the monoceros which has the head of the stag, the feet of the elephant, and the tail of the boar, while the rest of the body is like that of the horse; it makes a deep lowing noise, and has a single black horn, which projects from the middle of its forehead.”

From these chimerical beginnings, the unicorn took a variety of directions in terms of both appearance and symbolism. It became an emblem for Christ in the Middle Ages and was often used in heraldry from the 15th century onwards. ̽��ֱ��lion and the unicorn are the symbols of the UK with the lion representing England and the unicorn Scotland.

̽��ֱ��Fitzwilliam Museum collection abounds with unicorns. Some of the most beguiling appear in ‘books of hours’ and ‘bestiaries’. Freelance researcher, Robert Lloyd Parry, investigated just a few of them in the course of researching an exploration of signs and symbols in art for the Fitzwilliam’s website.

A Flemish Book of Hours, dating from 1526, shows the Annunciation. Mary sits in a walled garden (symbolic of her virginity) and a white unicorn rests its horn in her lap. God the Father peeps out of a burning bush behind her and, beyond the garden, Gabriel blows a hunting horn.

A 15th-century illuminated manuscript – a French translation of a 13th-century encyclopaedia – depicts a unicorn in the Garden of Eden before the Fall of Man. Lloyd Parry writes: “God the Father holds the right hands of Adam and Eve with angels and animals looking on. A stream emerges from the ground at God’s feet. ̽��ֱ��unicorn’s horn points towards its clear waters – a reference perhaps to its legendary abilities to purify water.“

A magical creature is likely to have magical powers: unicorn horn is associated with purity. Natalie Lawrence, a PhD candidate in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge, is researching early encounters with exotic creatures – including the opportunities they presented for traders and apothecaries.

Lawrence’s work offers fresh insights into how protective and curative powers were attributed to natural substances, at a time when there was widespread fear of poisoning. ̽��ֱ��17th-century recipe for one anti-poison, ‘Banister’s Powder’, called for unicorn horn, ‘east bezoars’ and stags heart ‘bones’. Members of the nobility purchased tableware and cups with ‘unicorn horn’ bases to avoid being poisoned, and the Throne Chair of Denmark (constructed 1662-1671) is even made of ‘unicorn horn’.

Powdered medicinal ‘unicorn horn’ was usually walrus ivory, rhinoceros horn or narwhal tusk, sometimes called ‘sea unicorn’. ̽��ֱ��problem of distinguishing ‘true horn’ was commented on by the French doctor, Pierre Martin La Martinière (1634-1690), who described the difficulty of knowing ‘what Creature the right Unicorn… there being several Animals the Greeks call Monoceros, and the Latines Uni-Cornis’, from a variety of terrestrial quadrupeds and ‘serpents’, to the ‘sea-elephant’ (walrus).

Materials such as walrus ivory, when identified as such, could possess similar qualities to unicorn’s horn. One apothecary, a ‘Mr Alexander Woodson of Bristoll’, ‘a skilful Phisition’, had ‘one of these beasts teeth, which ‘he had made tryall of’ by ‘ministering medicine to his patients, and had found it as soveraigne against poyson as any Unicornes horne’.

̽��ֱ��implicit links between unicorns and these other beasts did not diminish horns’ perceived medical powers. ̽��ֱ��Danish scholar Ole Worm (1588-1655) debunked the existence of the terrestrial unicorn in a public lecture using the skull of a narwhal, but he still attested to the horn's medical potency. Worm described experiments where poisoned animals had been revived by administration of powdered ‘sea unicorn’ horn.

By the early 18th century, ‘unicorn horns’ were much less prized in collections, losing some of their status as ‘rarities’, as high-volume importation into Europe flooded the market. But the appeal of the unicorn itself, especially incarnations such as the fleet-of-foot and mercurial creature of CS Lewis’s Narnia books, has never waned.

Perhaps this is because, most famously, they have always been extremely hard to catch.

Next in the Cambridge Animal Alphabet: V is for an animal that is responsible for up to 94,000 deaths a year, but is also being used to help develop treatments for diseases such as haemophilia, deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, heart attack and stroke.

Have you missed the series so far? Catch up on Medium here.

Inset images: Detail from Salutations of the Virgin, from the Carew-Poyntz Book of Hours (Fitzwilliam Museum); Detail from Virgin reading in enclosed garden, Book of Hours, by Geert Grote (Fitzwilliam Museum); Unicorns from early modern natural histories by Topsell and Johnstone; Illustration of a narwhal skull from Ole Worm's book.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Animal Alphabet series celebrates Cambridge’s connections with animals through literature, art, science and society. Here, U is for Unicorn. Despite being notoriously difficult to catch, they feature on maiolica plates, in 15th century heraldry, and in early recipes for anti-poison.

̽��ֱ��17th-century recipe for one anti-poison, ‘Banister’s Powder’, called for unicorn horn, ‘east bezoars’ and stags heart ‘bones’

Fitzwilliam Museum

Caesar's Horse from a Triumph of Caesar, 1514. Maiolica dish after Jacopo di Stefano Schiavone

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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