andquitefrankly asked: 13. TRIVIA. GIVE ME ALL THE TRIVIA. please. :)
Ooh! Let’s see, here are some of my favourite bits of classical trivia (I know no other trivia). I should warn you that my idea of amusing trivia is quite… esoteric :’) (A couple of these are a little gruesome)
- Ancient Greek had a pitch accent (i.e. the pitch of the syllable went up or down depending on the accent). This mattered, because once during a performance of a tragedy, an actor got the pitch accent wrong and said ‘weasel’ instead of ‘calm sea’ and we are still laughing about it 2000 years later.
- Once during a battle between Argos and Sparta, the Argive generals told their troops to do whatever the Spartan herald shouted. The Spartan generals figured this out and ordered their troops to attack when the herald shouted ‘have breakfast’
- The tyrant Polycrates of Samos was so lucky in everything that he did that his friend Amasis, king of Egypt, advised him to get rid of the thing he valued the most. This was a golden and emerald ring (?????). Polycrates threw it into the sea. Soon afterwards, it turned up in the belly of a fish that a fisherman had caught and presented to Polycrates. Amasis said, ‘That’s it, you’re too lucky, I’m cutting off our friendship before the gods screw you over.’
- The tyrant Peisistratos of Athens married an aristocratic girl in order to form an alliance with her family, but he thought the family was cursed, so he would only have sex with her ‘not in the customary way’ and I still do not know what this means because my Greek history tutor was the most awkward person ever and would not tell me
- An Ancient Greek word for ‘extravagant dandy’ was ‘someone who is obsessed with fish’
- The Greeks described the sea as ‘wine-dark’
- Socrates didn’t wash
- Hippocleides doesn’t care
- The great Greek general Pericles was mocked because he allegedly allowed his mistress to boss him around in bed
- It is 100% true that Plato published a serious piece of work criticising Aeschylus for making Achilles top and Patroclus bottom
- This is the what the Greeks came up with to explain intersex people: Hermaphroditus, son of Hermes & Aphrodite, was born a boy but attracted the attentions of a rather obsessive girl who tried to force herself on him. Fortunately for her, they were in a magic spring and she prayed to be joined to him always, so they were joined together in one body that was part male and part female
- In Cyprus, the goddess Aphrodite was represented with both male and female sex organs
- Alexander the Great used to get foreign kings to line up their favourite prostitutes and then he would make a big show of walking along the line and acting disinterested
- Allegedly, Alexander met the cynic philosopher Diogenes and asked if there was anything he could do for him. Diogenes said, ‘Get out of my sunlight.’ Alexander said, ‘If I were not Alexander, I would wish to be Diogenes,’ and Diogenes replied, ‘If I were not Diogenes, I would also wish to be Diogenes.’
- The Roman playwright Terence, considered by later writers to be the best example of ‘pure literary Latin’, might have been an African immigrant and is widely thought to have been a slave
- Julius Caesar annoyed the populace of Rome because he used to answer his mail during the races
- Cicero was told to change his name because it meant ‘chickpea’ and he responded that he would make it the most glorious name in Rome
- It is 99.9% likely that it is actually the case that Cicero was not let in on the assassination of Caesar because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut
- Caesar once said, ‘I know I am the most hated man in Rome, because Cicero hates me, and God knows Cicero is easy to please’
- Cicero and his brother Quintus seemingly spent an alarming amount of time chasing Cicero’s secretary around, asking for kisses
- The poet Vergil (Vergilius), for sadly modern-esque reasons, was nicknamed ‘Parthenias’ (which renders itself quite nicely as something like ‘Virginia’)
- Augustus nagged all his poet friends to write an epic about him, and when Vergil said he would do it, Propertius published a poem saying ‘THANK THE GODS: someone else is doing it - and it’s pretty good btw you should read it when it comes out’
- The poet Ovid was exiled for a ‘poem and a mistake’ and we STILL DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT IS
- The emperor Augustus was teetotal and lame in one leg
- As part of his propaganda against Augustus, Mark Antony claimed that Augustus singed off his leg hair
- Augustus responded that Mark Antony was a drunken hooligan. Antony wrote a pamphlet defending himself, entitled ‘On the subject of my drunkenness’. To me this is one of the greatest losses of antiquity
- The emperor Tiberius was obsessed with pears and cucumbers
- The emperor Claudius allegedly ordered for his third wife to be executed, then got so drunk that he had to ask why she was not at dinner
- Claudius had a son who died when he threw a pear core in the air, tried to catch it in his mouth and choked
- Augustus complained that Tiberius used words in their strict etymological sense (or used literal equivalents of phrases that were used in a non-etymological sense), and the emperor Hadrian, when reading about this, commented, ‘It sounds like Augustus was not very well educated if he chose his words according to their usage and not their etymology.’
- The emperor Galba is the only Roman male who is explicitly said to have had a sexual preference for adult males (i.e. of his own age) and not boys
- Hadrian and his wife went travelling with Hadrian’s lover Antinous and an aristocratic woman named Julia Balbilla. At a tourist site in Egypt, Julia Balbilla carved a poem in the style of Sappho on a famous statue. One of my history professors said that this suggests Hadrian’s wife was a lesbian and they covered for each other
- The historian Tacitus was a keen hunter. His friend Pliny went hunting one day and sent him a letter, ‘You won’t believe it, Tacitus, I went hunting, and I enjoyed it! I took all my books and I sat in the shade by the nets and it was so peaceful, I got so much done. You should try it!’