Historian Answers Google’s Most Popular Questions About Life In Ancient Greece

Romans Egyptians Persians Babylonians potentially in the service of mercenaries Thracians alyans dardanians was a great list of scenes How often do you think about the Greek Empire? Let's not start this again. Hello, my name is Tristan Hughes, the host of the Ancients podcast and the history team have dragged me along. I walked into this little room today to answer on this laptop the

most

Googled

questions

about

ancient

Greece, oh my, so let's get started. Was

ancient

Greece before the Romans? Okay, it's good to start everything right at the same time, it's complicated if we think about the climax. of classical Greece, I mean, our mind might immediately think of classical Latin defeating the Persians, movies like 300, the Spartans with their red cloaks, the drama of the road, those ureides, Aristophanes, etc., if we are thinking about that kind of ancient Greek highlight. culture then yes, what ancient Greece was like before the Romans because, let's say, the climax of the Romans, we are thinking of buildings like the pantheon, the Virgil Coliseum, etc., and they are writing that those buildings are being built several hundred years later, but that is not the case.

Simple as that, we need to stop thinking about it as a linear line, al

most

like Greece. Yes, it may have its peak before the Romans had their peak with the conquest of the Mediterranean, but Greece is still important when it is ruled by the Romans, the Greeks and the Romans. they meet each other before Greece is conquered, they fight, they trade, the Greeks also influence the Romans, of course you look at the Roman gods, very similar to the Greek gods, the pantheon, I mean look at Hercules and Heracles , ath manura, Jupiter, Zeus, etc. and so on, the Greeks greatly influence the Romans.

Yeah, I guess when it comes to the zenith of their cultures, whether it's Alexander or the Athenian Empire, and then we're looking at the Roman Empire, then yes, of course, Greece comes before the Romans. but it's not as simple as if we go on from there, ancient Greece was one country, no, I would say the time when Greece was most unified was actually under the Romans, when the Romans created the province of AA, but even so before that you have

greece

was divided between several city states and also sometimes you have leagues like the aan league, the ionian league, you have alliances like the epot alliance, the thalian league, the kingdom of macedon, further north , was also part of the Greek world, although it was considered very much was on the periphery, but Greece was not a nation, it was divided between many different city-states of CI and many of these city-states absolutely hated each other Athens and the robbers Argos and Sparta um, the Aarans and the Ionians are fine, they're not city-states, but they There are still peoples who don't really like each other, so this idea that ancient Greece was one country was not not at all polytheistic of ancient Greece, so this is a question of religion and if you know your Greek mythology, your gods and goddesses, if you've been listening to the Ancients podcast. then you should know because we are doing a series on this right now the answer is yes, the Greeks had a huge pantheon of gods and goddesses, there were 12 or 13 great main gods and I say 12 or 13 because you understand that Hestia is one of the Goddesses Of the often forgotten but very important half, you have Zeus, King of the Gods at the top, then you have Poseidon, Hades, Athena, deita heus, etc., and then you have smaller gods too, not in the 12 or top 13, but still.

Really important and one that I will say right away is Helios, God of the Sun, but there are many others as well, so to answer your question, yes, the ancient Greeks were a polytheistic religion that was at the heart of ancient Greek culture, without matter where. you were in the ancient Greek world it was really hot ancient Greece well yeah it wasn't that different from Climate Day. I'm sure maybe it was a little different, but hot and dry. Summers with men who would like to be in the sun. as much as possible because their idea of ​​beauty would have very tanned bodies, but with women it was very different that in reality the Greeks saw beauty in a pale complexion, so women spent most of their time indoors.

What did the ancient Greeks eat? Well, this is fun. one, there's a lot you can talk about here, first let's talk about some of the St Staples, so let's talk about agriculture right at the heart of ancient Greek society, vital to

life

, these fertile river valleys that lie in various parts of In Greece, it is not surprising that close by you have some of the most important flourishing city-states of the ancient Greek world. The Uras Valley, the Uras River, you have the city-state of Sparta, right there, main Cals, you have wheat, but the main was actually barley because barley. they grew better in the soil of the old GRE things they didn't have they didn't have chilis they didn't have rice they didn't have potatoes but they did have beans they had garlic they had honey they had olives and of course another big thing they had olive oil, they had a lot of that as far as to meats, you could eat pork, if you are one of the elites, you could go hunting and then you could say you were in the Kingdom of Macedonia, for example, further north, you could be. hunt deer, so in Venice or potentially also wild boar fish, of course, you are never that far from the sea in Greece, except maybe if you are in the interior of Arcadia, right in the mountains of Arcadia, but that can also be a important point.

As part of the Greek diet, there are some interesting additions to the ancient Greek diet and two of my favorites are these condiments, one is called garam and there is still some debate about what exactly it is, but it appears to be some type of fish. that was considered a delicacy and the Romans also enjoyed it very much, but one of my personal favorites is something called syum and it is also very enigmatic, it comes from the city state of Sirenian Sera, which is now located in modern-day Libya in the north from Africa, and it was a very

popular

herb for cooking, um, but in Roman and imperial times, I think even in the time of Nero, syum became extinct.

There is also one thing that the sheep that lived around the mermaids had the best meat because they themselves ate the sfum and that made them have wagu beef, nowadays they were the best type of sheep meat if you had sheep from the area of sirene, what did the ancient greeks conquer the ancient greeks when they weren't fighting themselves? when you get to the time of Alexander the Great, of course you see them conquering the huge Persian Empire and Alexander the Great was Greek, he spoke Greek, following them you see the Hellenistic kingdoms of his successors extending to the Indus River Valley and Afghanistan and you can see elements of the Hellenic Greek culture in kingdoms as far away as what is basically the Middle East.

The Greeks, I don't really know if they conquered, but they were also excellent at creating these colonies in faraway places and that's why there are Greek city-states emerging in North Africa in places like Siren, but also in Crimea. In the north of the Black Sea, there is a powerful kingdom emerging there called The Bosan Kingdom. You have Greek city-states in Ukraine, on the Ukrainian seafront. a place called obia Marill, the oldest city in France, was originally a Greek colony and you also have some places in Spain, so what did the ancient Greeks conquer? Royal conquest through the figure of Alexander the Great, the Persian Empire and, indeed, beyond, but also through all these colonies many centuries before they colonized places in the Black Sea region and in the western Mediterranean.

What did the ancient Greeks discover? I'm going to look at this from two angles. I think I'll find out first like in Exploration because I want to talk. about the story of an amazing explorer named Pythas who came from the city state of Marse Masali that I mentioned earlier and embarked on a journey of exploration. We have fragments of his story that survived and that we can reconstruct. He explored the northern reaches of the known world and then circled the north of Britain, passing through the Orany Islands, we believe he reached the Shetland Islands, expanding the geographical knowledge that the ancient Greeks had of that northwestern part of Sea Europe.

North, today also has The Greeks exploring in the East there is a figure called a mastan who spends a lot of time at the court of a very powerful Moran Indian ruler named Chandra Gupta. We have parts of the story of him surviving. We also have Greek explorers going into what is probably around the Usbekistan area maybe even Kazakhstan today after the death of Alexander the Great, but if we also talk about discoveries regarding inventions, I could be here talking for hours, we could talk of philosophical advances, we could be talking about mechanical inventions, steam energy.

I love it. a story of a particular figure who lived in one of the city-states of western Greece who created this steam-powered bird, a man called Aritus but of course there are also things like drama, Greek drama, tragedies, comedies, rights works like EAS, Sophocles, Aristophanes, uidesign, rational medicine, Hippocrates, this person. who is known as the father of medicine like the Hippocratic Oath today, it's not clear if that was done by Hippocrates, but there is that oath that goes back to ancient times, that idea of ​​rational medicine, not throwing potions at people. things trying to figure out what works and what doesn't.

To cure certain ailments, one could talk about military inventions, the Toran catapult artillery has its origin in the ancient Greek world and helped Alexander the Great conquer the Persian Empire and others after him, particularly with the Romans, it has huge ships like the Syracuse, which is this huge Titanic ship created for a Greek tyrant in Sicily, in many ways the Greeks were incredibly open to change and innovation and invention, but let's move on, let's have what we have here, what the ancient Greeks were wearing now, it's okay I'm not the leading expert on this but I will say a few words that I know are like key pieces of clothing that you see over and over again with the ancient Greeks and I know you can see it on certain statues um like the Chorus statues and items of clothing like Himon's cloak over his shoulder. you have the ketone tunic, distinguished women as a key piece of clothing that you see, it was the peplos and there is a beautiful statue called the pep plora and I recommend you look at that and it really symbolizes this garment of Greek women I guess.

However, one of my favorite pieces of clothing is this thing called the Linen Chest and I interviewed a professor a couple of years ago named Gregory Alrti. He rebuilt this linen armor made of fla and it was super effective against arrows. It was really impressive ancient technology. Unfortunately no armor has survived from ancient history because linen decomposes naturally, it is organic material, so if it survives it has to be in an unusual and very rare aerobic context, but we do have depictions that survived in certain frescoes and mentioned in the literature what he did. The ancient Greeks look good, all I'm going to say about this is that if you called a man from ancient Greece pale white I would see it as an insult because for the Greeks the ideal for a man was to have very tanned skin because it showed that you went out to work in the fields as often as you could you were out or maybe if you were a quiet man who didn't need to work it means you were in the gym you were exercising you weren't just huddled in a house all the time At that time, having tanned skin was something that you would see that many of the men had as a symbol of their well-being in many ways their masculinity because with women in their eyes this idea of ​​beauty was for them to have pale skin by staying within the Spartan women. perhaps less pale because they spent more time outside.

Did the ancient Greeks invent the Olympic Games? Well, the short answer is yes, they did, but when it comes to the origins of the Olympic Games, I mean, we don't really know much about the year 776 BC. and there are mythological stories aligned with the origins of these most important games held at Olympia, for example, the demigod Heracles during his 12 labors. I believe it was after he cleaned out the Oian stables that he supposedly founded the Olympic Games at Olympia, another close mythological story. Associated with the origins of the Olympic Games and the Olympic Games themselves is this mythical chariot race of the Greek hero Pelops and the local king Oos and there are different versions of how this race takes place, but in the end Pelops wins and wins the hand of Oas . daughter Hippodamia, although he doesn't win in the best of circumstances because he wins by cheating and you certainly didn't want to cheat in the ancient Olympic games, but regarding the real origins of the Olympic Games we don't know much, but we do know. that the Greeks invented them at the Ancient Greek Feast, well my mind would immediately go to the Ancient Greek Symposium, but you could only attend the Ancient Greek Suppositories if you were a man, unless you were a Trusco which was where women They could attend, but in other places and thetruskin were not greeks they had connections with the greeks but I wanted to point that out anyway a symbol of your greek if you want to show your greek you would hold a symposium and invite your other men it would be a test on at the same time try your test of

greece

, yes is worthy of attending this event and this event is quite iconic of ancient Greek culture, they would go to whoever is hosting the event house, they would have a particular room called the andron, they would recline. you have a free hand, you know, but they would be looking, they could talk to everyone else, like arranged in the room, you have these beautiful drinking glasses that survive from the time of ancient Greece, some of them more richly decorated than others, depending on how much symposiums the party keeper could spend at the Pottery on the wear and tear he was going to wear at this party showing off his Greek character, including a really strange glass called a kyx, which was very difficult to drink from if you only had one. free hand and a reclined seat.

I was talking to Professor Michael Scott about this and it was really very interesting, but that in itself. It was probably a test to make sure you didn't spit it out like The Barbarians, so yes, the ancient Greeks partied, but only if you were a man, if you were a woman, you expected to stay home, it was a very patriarchal society and that's the The sad reality of the ancient Greeks was that the ancient Greeks had orgies, something that has been universally associated with ancient Greek festivals and these banquets and would also be associated with ancient Roman banquets.

Two of the elites is that they would descend on Deery and absolute orgies and sex happens everywhere very publicly, in my opinion this is more of an erotic fantasy because one of the apes, the person in charge of these parties, would determine what how alcoholic the wine would be at first and also how much wine you would drink, what kind of night you would drink. Yes, there were probably dancers, there were musicians, they were probably prostitutes who attended these ancient Greek parties, but I don't get the idea that they just descended into something like Lawless, just sex everywhere, everyone going, that's very much it. the afterthought.

At creation and with the Romans as well, there's really no evidence that the Romans included these things in mass public sexual events and in fact that really comes up first with the writings of the early Christians and then becomes associated with certain rituals religious of the Greeks and Romans. I know the pagan predecessors and then that is associated with the elite dinners and the elite feasts of the Greeks and the Romans. The ancient Greeks also had aies. Hey, I'm sure maybe one or two happened. I'm not saying they never happened, but this as a pillar of an ancient Greek symposium did not exist at all Socrates Plato Aristotle actually existed well the short answer is yes, they absolutely existed Aristotle famously taught Alexander the Great Aristotle himself was taught by Plato and Plato himself was taught by Socrates, you can see see a line there yes, these figures were real, however, an interesting concept associated with Plato Atlantis is not real Atlantis is a fictional literary device created by Plato to help explain the creation of a ideal enemy for the ideal city-state in the Socratic dialogue Tas and the critias the city the power the kingdom the Empire to challenge Athens some 9,000 years before and for that scenario the ideal enemy is this power of Atlantis that supposedly lives in the Atlantic Ocean West of the Pillars of Hercules of the Strait of Jibola but Socrates Plato Aristotle yes, they really existed, how did ancient Greek democracy work well?

This is a bit complicated because democracies were not all the same in different parts of the ancient Greek world, so a democracy on the island of Roads, city state of Roads. It was differentiated from the Athenian democracy of Athens and then there is the democracy of Syracuse, etc., let's focus on the Athenian democracy as an example, the most emblematic form of democracy. It's interesting that you have these different groups, official bodies that help in the original type of creation democracy supposedly founded by Kenes at the beginning, well in the late 6th century, early 5th century BC.

C. and you have the ateka region around Athens divided into several things called deemes. Almost 140 of these and these deems were divided. into 10 tribes and 50 people from each of these tribes would be selected to form a body of 500 called abula. Now this Council, this Central Council, would deliberate on the matter and decide if something should be voted on and, if they decided, they would approve it. then to the next body, which is a body called the ecclesia, the assembly, and it would be in the Ecclesia where they would vote whether to accept or reject a proposal and first they had to go through the Boule, the council and then they would go to the Ecclesia.

So, if a proposal was approved in the assembly, it goes through the Central Council, now it goes through the assembly. One of the best things about Athenian democracy is that they then inscribed these motions and then placed them in the agura, either inscribed or in bronze. and so we have a rich record of surviving decrees, the person who proposed the decree so you can see that there are certain figures more active in a democracy at certain times than others. One last point about democracy that I will mention here and this is the idea. of oyster kismos which also occurs in ancient Athenian democracy where every year Athenians are asked if they have the option of having an oyster kismos and this is where they vote if they want to exclude a certain person, supposedly if they are concerned that that person is becoming too powerful to become a new tyrant because democracy arises in Athens after tyranny and therefore sometimes there are some very prominent figures in democracy who have gained a lot of influence and who have been there for many years.

It's time to be ostracized because a lot of people are worried about what their ultimate goals are, but I think they need to get about 4,000 or 6,000 votes for a person to be successfully ostracized, the same way if someone became a citizen Athenian and foreigner. You needed about 6,000 Athenian supporters to vote for you, so it's a great ask, this democracy is active and works very differently than the democracy we have today, but it's right at the cornerstone of places like Athens, particularly Athens, for much of its existence. How did the ancient Greeks go to the bathroom? Well this is interesting, it really depends on where you live and your status.

Certain Greek houses would have had toilets. One fact I love is that the oldest known flushing toilet comes from the Minoan palace. in hoary on the island of Credo and that's the Bronze Age and of course there are systems, there are sewer networks and systems in many of these great ancient Greek city-states, you can see places archaeologically surviving architecturally like Ephesus, there are lines of baths than they were Public baths still exist and you can go see them today. They are absolutely brilliant, but of course there were other ancient Greek houses in cities that wouldn't have had a bathroom and we know that chamber pots were very

popular

, so if in the middle of the night, a whole family might have a urinal and then have to empty it the next day.

I don't know of any direct evidence for this, but you can imagine you know groups of these people who didn't do it. They have a toilet and they have a poop chamber, they actually just throw the waste into the nearby street, get rid of it and then you know someone else has to deal with it, so that's the smelliest part of certain streets in the ancient Greek cities, no doubt how. Did ancient Greek texts survive? One answer is that the Romans preserved a lot of ancient Greek writings and you know, I looked at those texts to see if they were philosophical texts, etc., and so on.

You also have libraries throughout the Greek world. The most famous is in the Great Library of Alexandria, when Tommy I first orders a guy named Demetrius of Feran to start getting a copy of all the texts in the world so he can have a copy in the Great Library there, but Of course, that library eventually burned down. below, but still those texts would certainly have been copied and then sometimes, it's just luck, some fragments from certain sources that don't survive, we only know the names of certain writers because they have been preserved in the writings of others and are A Sometimes labeled as fragments, we have epitomes of earlier writers written by people perhaps as far back as the Byzantine period, so I am very interested in the aftermath of the death of Alexander the Great.

A key source for that was Arianus, who wrote to Alexander the Great. Great's

life

also covered the years immediately after his death and, unfortunately, we are only left with small fragments of that enormous work, partially written from an epitome written more than a thousand years later, in Byzantine times, how they worshiped well The ancient Greeks? There were sanctuaries, there were temples. You would also have the gods of your home. You would make offerings before a sea voyage in so many different contexts. You would have the Oracle of Delia, the Oracle of Dona, the sacred sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia as well, so there are many different ways you could worship.

Gods, how did the ancient Greek athletes train well? So, as the Olympics go on and on, it's professional coaches, you know, the professionals that participate in the Olympics because there's no prize for second place that you want to win. Winning is everything and there are even stories. Certain people who didn't win left and then lived in absolute shame, but there is a type of iconic building associated with the ancient Greeks called a gymnasium and you would find them in almost every ancient Greek city. Usually there were running tracks, but there were also places where you could fight and you could practice various different disciplines that would have happened in the ancient Greek Olympic Games and, like those who participated in, let's say, the Olympic Games, they became increasingly more professional and had to dedicate more. and more of their time to hone their particular skill, whether it be running in armor or wrestling, pancr or discus throwing etc., with that comes the rise of ancient personal trainers who would train with the person perhaps in the gym or in another place. to prepare them for the event and that results in time with these professional athletes, some of the best became celebrities of their time.

There is a famous figure from an Italian Greek city called croon Milo from croon uh and he was recognized as one of the best athletes of all time, but you also hear about particular personal trainers who gained a great reputation because of how good trainers they were. They were for these leading athletes in the Greek world with whom ancient Greece fought. Well, there's a long list of Romans, Egyptians, Persians, Babylonians potentially. in mercenary service Thracians Allians Dardanians Carthaginians Samnites Lucanians Apulians Nason in North Africa Cyans in the northern Black Sea Indians various different Indian peoples, so we are talking about Alexander the Great in his last campaigns um um in the Indian subcontinent by the river Indus Valley goals for the Mallots who lived in Masalia Iberians for those who lived in northeastern Spain perhaps even at times in Truskin the Battle of Allelia the Greeks fought against so many different peoples sometimes the Greeks fought in each other's armies the Classic example, for example, is the Persians.

There are many Greeks who fought against Alexander the Great and the Macedonians because they saw Alexander as a tyrant and a greater threat to them than the Persians. Many Athenians, many people who lived in the area of ​​the robbers and Ateka instead of Alexander's side. The Great Ones joined dasas and served as mercenaries. There were also times with the Persian Wars. It is not Persia against the Greeks. There are many Greeks fighting in the Persian army of Duras and Xerxes as well, so if the Greeks weren't fighting different peoples and civilizations. They were fighting against themselves, what did ancient Greek music sound like?

Music was incredibly popular in ancient Greece. Go to the theater like athletes. You know, if you are a really good music player, you could become a celebrity of your time. There were several different instruments from the ancient one. For the Greeks, perhaps the most iconic is the operating system, which was two individual readings played together. Certain Greek city states didn't like OS like Athens and supposedly the goddess Athena didn't like owos, but Sparta loved owos. There is even a tradition that the Spartans marched. to battle they marched on campaign with the song of the owos of an OS player, thieves and another enemy of the Athenians, they were great in the OS and supposedly the best readings for this instrument came from Lake Kayas, which was in the region of bisha, near thieves and one last thing in the OTS is that they also found examples of this in places as far away as in the Kingdom of Kush, the Nal River in M-day, in southern Egypt, in northern Sudan, in the city of meoi,which is really very interesting, there are other instruments too.

Of course, you have the lying Orus, one of the most famous figures in Greek mythology, and a host of other instruments as well. I think there was a water organ, there were drums, pan flutes, etc. and of course there were the choirs of people singing, but music is a big part of ancient Greek culture in a time that you know, before Spotify, you would go to the theater and see these Great Performances competitions, musical competition regarding what they sounded like, not only can we get an idea of ​​that through archaeology. reconstructions of, say, the operating system, aloy that have survived James Lloyd has some brilliant reconstructions of those, but we have also survived musical notation.

There is an amazing object called a Seos Stell and on it is the notation of an ancient Greek song and having had a look at that notation, people today have been able to recreate what that song sounded like and there are some beautiful interpretations of the one that survives, it's as if they were green sleeves. A quirky little fact that I love is that the music for the Greeks in the game's civilization is a performance. from the Seulo Stell song, so yes, you even have musical notation surviving from ancient Greece. How often do you think about the Greek Empire?

Let's not start this again. I hope you enjoy answering the most Googled

questions

about the old degree, don't worry. There will be more on the way in due time if you want to find out more if you want to check out the history take a look at our YouTube channel please subscribe we have lots on offer stretching from ancient history to Napoleon and the modern. day and also if you want to stay in the ancient world, check out my podcastthe ancients