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!’
No comments:
Post a Comment