A Greek architect would've literally had a stroke
if they had built a building this way.
I'm a professor of Ancient Greek history.
Okay, people are looking at me weird again.
Yeah, people would look at you quite weird.
The Olympic games are held in Olympia,
in kind of in the middle of nowhere in ancient Greece.
40 or 50,000 men came from all over the Greek world,
camped out in the countryside for about a week,
Ancient sources tell us that married women
wanna bring your unmarried daughter to the scene.
Ancient Greek women were expected to dress
and women in Olympia wearing modern athletic gear,
But they would've been covered in oil.
The gymnasium is literally the nude place.
that people were clothed for was horse racing,
and the chariot drivers were clothed.
So showing Greek athletes exercising,
Okay, let's take a look at the next video.
Okay, so we're doing pretty well here.
This is actually a very nice reconstruction
The Parthenon, that big building in the back right corner
was finished in the outside in 438,
The gateway, that wasn't started until the 437,
so it would've been a construction site,
There was a big statue on the Acropolis
so people coming into the port of Athens
could actually see the sun gleaming off the statue.
[Narrator] Under the leadership of Pericles,
Athens has reached the height of its power.
Pericles was a very famous Athenian statesman,
and he was the leading figure in Athens between 460
The Athenians elected 10 generals every year
Pericles was repeatedly elected as general,
one of the world's most persuasive,
There's a famous story that someone asked a wrestler,
Didn't you wrestle against Pericles?
because afterwards he's just gonna stand up
and convince them that he won anyway,
There's a lot going on in this scene.
at some things a little more closely.
and around the Acropolis in Athens,
so the owl was one of the basic symbols of Athens,
of the Greek word for Athens, Athenai.
on this triangular space on the roof called the Pediment.
The Parthenon was famous in the ancient Greek world
basically gave the architects a blank check.
And so, one of the things they did with that money,
was to put sculpture all over the building,
including massive statues in the pediment
that shows famous scenes from Athenian myths.
those are actually mostly in London
and you see a white statue from Ancient Greece,
almost certainly it was painted originally.
and paint the colors of the eyes in,
This particular statue is a different case.
[Narrator] Women, though essential to family,
religion, and the continuity of the city,
are very popular in European art in 18th/19th century.
for everything having to do with Ancient Greece.
[Narrator] Their world is the household,
where they manage property, raise children.
which was a very democratic government,
And they were expected to be at home as much as possible.
from some yogurt experience of yours.
There was a strong division of space
which is to say that men ran the public life,
and women ran the private life in the household.
[Narrator] Many believed the Persians
was sent to run from Marathon to Athens.
Unfortunately, this never happened.
What we see here is a reconstruction
which was fought a little bit northeast
And Battle of Marathon was incredibly famous.
Lots of people wrote about it right away.
We don't get any mention of Pheidippides
running from Marathon back to Athens
Clearly a story someone made up at some point,
proven to be very popular up until the present day.
When the modern Olympics were being constructed,
the people who put together the Olympics
were very attuned to Ancient Greek history,
There was no such race in the ancient world.
Greeks did not run long distance races.
fast and deadly ships powered by the manpower
Trireme, the reason why the Greeks called it a trireme,
tri is coming from Greek word for three,
is that there were three vertically stacked layers of oars.
And you can see here in our reconstruction,
and the ship's moving remarkably fast
Athens was unusual in that it had big silver mines
that produced fairly large revenues for the state.
Most Greek communities did not build big navies,
'cause they were very expensive to maintain,
that they were gonna have problems with the Persians,
the Athenians built a massive fleet of triremes,
it was the sacred band that played a decisive role
that actually did exist in thieves.
who had a homoerotic relationship with each other.
with the older male playing the role of mentor
modern battlefields with explosions
because of the invention of gunpowder.
You can see on the screen there's an explosion,
and there wasn't much in the way of fire in a naval battle.
[Narrator] When the doors closed in ancient Athens,
So the symposium was a big thing in ancient Greece,
and what it literally means in Greek,
And so they would have drinking parties.
The standard setup was they had built a special room
they were typically designed to hold seven couches,
If you take a look in the background,
probably frescoes painted on plaster.
We know Greeks did a lot of very fancy wall painting,
You can see they're mixing the wine
and water in a big mixing bowl called a Krater.
Greeks stored their wine more like as a syrup.
To drink it undiluted was almost impossible.
It was almost like drinking Coca-Cola syrup.
The other things that happened at the symposium
beyond drinking was a lot of talking.
They could play musical instruments
also were expected to have sex with the guests.
The Greeks had a very different attitude
for an older male to have a teenage boyfriend,
regardless of not whether they were married.
for respectable women to participate,
who would share your couch with you.
[Narrator] Guests poured libations to the gods.
One of the things which is accurate here,
and that was very common in Androns.
with a room full of people drinking,
what the room would be like in the morning.
and it's much easier to do that with a stone floor.
We have this idea in our heads sometimes
that ancient cities were mostly built of stone,
certainly not the case in Athens in 430 BCE.
Stone was incredibly expensive to quarry.
Most of the city would've been dirt,
sometimes plastered so they were white or a color,
but much less impressive physically
If you take a look in the back left corner,
The only thing missing is a Cinzano umbrella.
He's still wearing his white t-shirt.
There are no bats in Athens that look like this.
They would've had some circular baths in public.
and certainly not in the kind of quantities you see here.
And the walls look like they have Roman wall painting on it,
so they're sort of imagining a Roman bath
shrunk down to tiny residential size.
And so they're playing some sort of board game.
We have some actual physical stones
I honestly have no idea what this is supposed to be.
It could be that they're supposed to be voting,
but that's not actually how Athenians voted.
The Athenians had different kinds of ballots.
So I don't know what they're doing here.
Greeks did not build massive dome buildings like this.
They simply didn't have the technology.
Philosophers in these big huge dome structures
delivering dramatic lectures just didn't happen.
would've worked mostly in gymnasia,
places that doubled as both exercise facilities,
And so they would sit in the shaded part of the courtyard,
and they marched it in a procession across town,
and presented it to the goddess on the Acropolis.
there were lots of statues of Athena,
One was a huge statue made out of gold
in a smaller temple called the Erechtheion.
and every year the Athenians put a fancy new robe on it,
Let's take a little closer look at what's going on here.
Greek architects were fanatics about symmetry.
for having eight columns across the front.
A Greek architect would've literally had a stroke
if they had built a building this way.
So, Greeks did make animal sacrifices,
and there were altars in front of temples,
The animal would not have stood on the altar.
Pretty much everything is wrong here.
when they were doing like tragedies.
This evidently is supposed to be a religious scene.
The priest did not wear weird white masks like this.
no war begun without first asking Delphi.
So Delphi, it's the sanctuary of Apollo.
It's built on the side of a mountain.
which meant that people came there to consult the Pythia,
[Narrator] The Pythia was always chosen
The Pythia at this time they're talking about
in 500 BCE was an unmarried female.
The issue here is that in Ancient Greece,
most women would've been married at the age of 14,
but it looks like she's considerably older than 14.
So she's sitting on a stone throne.
And the idea was that Apollo spoke through the Pythia,
and the priestess would say sometimes
priests who would write down what she said,
The Pythia was famous for saying things
which were a little difficult to understand, or riddles.
The most famous one is a king asked,
If I launch an attack on the neighboring kingdom,
was he was gonna destroy his own kingdom.
[Narrator] Two fault lines crossed directly below,
releasing sweet-smelling gases from the rock.
Those sources say that there was gas leaking up
that allowed her to commune with the God Apollo.
Modern scholars, for the most part,
Some geologists took a look at the site of Delphi,
and say that there are faults running underneath,
would've been leaking into the temple,
and achieving some sort of intoxicated state,
So we're doing sort of the greatest hits
One issue is we don't know when exactly
What they started with is the Bronze Age,
and they've done a good job of identifying
the two big Bronze Age civilizations,
they spoke some language we can't decipher.
so we see a Mycenaean warrior here.
The scholars have debated for a long time
whether the poems composed by Homer,
and The Odyssey described the Mycenaean period.
the general view is that the Greeks
had some very vague memories of the distant past,
reflect the situation around 800 BCE in Greece
long after the Mycenaeans were gone.
Okay, so we have the Battle of Marathon here.
This was a big event in Greek history.
and the Persians butted heads for a long time.
was the first time the Persian army
the first thing they would say was,
And the very famous Athenian poet/playwright Aeschylus,
who was the most famous writer in the Greek world,
He was a very famous Athenian philosopher.
and then he would ask you another question,
and this could go on for a very long period of time.
This is where we get the idea about the Socratic method.
Eventually, he annoyed enough people
he was blamed for the bad behavior of his relatives
but also, he was just spectacularly annoying.
first you were found innocent or guilty,
and the defendant proposed a penalty.
and said, I think you should punish me
by giving me free meals for the rest of my life.
into giving him death as his penalty.
hemlock, and this is a very famous scene
of Socrates in prison talking to his students
We have a video here about the Minoans.
but it's not any language we recognize.
[Narrator] Nassos sprawls across 20,000 square meters.
This is the palace at a place called Nassos,
And certainly it's giving you a reasonably good sense
[Professor] This is drawing from Minoan art.
Minoans were very fond of painting frescoes on walls,
that wouldn't be seen again in Europe
because women feature very prominently.
One common theory is that it was a theocracy
which is to say the political system
was run by women who were priestesses,
in part because we see lots of women in art
performing what seemed to be religious rituals.
There are figurines from Minoan period showing women,
presumably priestesses with snakes on their arms,
probably doing some sort of snake handling,
and the video's trying to get at that.
and to a certain extent reconstructed,
and jump over bulls as a spectacle.
[Narrator] Grabbing charging bulls by the horns
although the AI is having some trouble,
you're supposed to vault over the bull,
and she's sort of vaulting sideways from the bull,
No Greek architect could've built this structure.
couldn't span a space of more than about 20 feet
and this is an enormous open space.
looks maybe like an imaginary Roman Senate.
You vote for someone who then goes to DC,
That meant there were these huge meetings in Athens,
6/8/10,000 people would show up for an assembly meeting.
Those meetings were always held outdoors,
a structure large enough to hold that many people.
they made these huge epics about ancient Greece
as opposed to a Western, for example.
and screenwriter sitting in Hollywood in the 1950s
came up with an idea of what an ancient Roman
by a computer model in the 21st century.
Interestingly, very unclear if the Trojan War ever happened.
So the Trojan War in the Homeric Poems
is set in what's now Northwestern Turkey.
and there is a site that many scholars
believe corresponds roughly to that place
has been excavated for a long period of time
So, the Greeks believed it happened,
Leaving aside the issue that the Trojan Horse
that looks like from the architecture
would've been like 800 years earlier.
this is supposed to be the Acropolis in Athens,
and that's supposed to be the Propylaea, the gateway.
The gateway didn't look anything like that,
and the staircase didn't look anything like that.
What we have here is sort of generic imagination
of what Ancient Greece might've looked like
to actually ground it in historical reality.
Yeah, they did have produce like that.
is if you look on the temple in the background,
I'm currently worshiping Dionysus very thoroughly.
Greeks took Dionysus very seriously,
there was a big Dionysus festival every spring,
carrying big phallus' around in processions,
So big parties with people doing a lot of drinking,
associated with Dionysus? Absolutely.
looks much more like a modern fraternity boy
What's the secret to a good harvest?
and they took their olive trees extremely seriously,
'cause they were a huge source of important calories.
[Interviewer] What do you see in my future?
I don't know what to say about that one.
She's wearing this weird white makeup.
they actually used like a lead paste for that.
If you take a look though underneath her eyes,
she's got sort of black mascara coming down her eyes,
looks like a sort of 1970s rock look.
So we have a lot of statues from Ancient Greece.
The statue showing figures from say before 450
and Plato, those might be actual portraits.
he was actually from Northern Greece in ancient times,
Came to Athens to study with Plato,
he was expecting to be put in charge
for Alexander the Great for a while.
Alexander actually would've really liked this.
He was very conscious of his public image.
and always wanted himself to be looking up
so he had sort of an ethereal look to him.
The idea of a carefully crafted vision
Okay, so Alexander is described as King of Kings here.
a small kingdom in Northern Greece.
and he conquers the Persian Empire.
one of his titles was frequently The King of Kings.
When Alexander took over the Persian Empire,
he had to figure out how to govern it,
was basically to present himself to the Persians
and their subjects as a Persian king,
and therefore took on the title King of Kings.
[Narrator] Zeus summoned the gods for final judgment.
Greeks didn't believe in final judgment.
By definition, things didn't change,
so no final judgment in the Greek world.
The most powerful god in Greek belief was Zeus,
so he would've had a scepter with an eagle on it.
So Zeus looks like he's 70/80, maybe?
who looks like he's in his 20s or 30s.
Okay, so Zeus was in charge of the sky.
and Hades is in charge of the underworld.
Hades appears with a burst of flame,
and literature, what makes the underworld different
So the idea of fire in the underworld,
[Narrator] Hermes appeared in a breath.
Hermes is the messenger god in the Greek religion,
and he's supposed to be able to zip
they believed in literally tens of thousands
the reason they did that in front of temples,
was that in the temple was a statue of the god,
and watch you making the sacrifice.
They believe that the gods are much closer
to human life on an everyday basis.
Let's watch this next video about Sparta.
for being very heavily militarized.
but training all day long to be soldiers,
This is where we get the word Spartan from,
We know from the materials that we found in Sparta,
that they lived a pretty good life.
There was a huge population of enslaved laborers,
They produced the food that the Spartans ate,
and the Spartans never went to work.
So if you were talking to an Ancient Greek,
the person you're talking to probably said,
they're living the most luxurious lifestyle imaginable.
Things are pretty good for these guys.
That said, all this was made possible
because of this huge enslaved labor force called Helots
Did they spend a lot of time for military training? Yes.
because they were not working to support themselves,
considered walls a symbol of weakness.
Okay. So they in fact did not have a wall
Most Greek cities were pretty unimpressive,
So Sparta wasn't all that unusual in that sense.
[Narrator] Athena of the bronze house,
walls lined with intricately worked bronze plates.
called Athena Halkioikos on the Acropolis of Sparta,
and it did have some sort of bronze reliefs.
The Spartans, for reasons known only to themselves,
decided to not build temples with columns around it.
Spartans did not build those temples.
One way to spiff up that kind of building,
showing scenes of Greek myth for example,
The actual bronze nails that they used
to hammer the bronze sheets into the walls.
[Narrator] Around the agora stood the tombs
of Spartan heroes buried within the city.
Now, most Greek cities after say 700 BCE,
they did not want you burying your dead inside the city.
at least some people to bury their dead in the city,
that definitely was highly unusual,
One thing which is not accurate here,
you see there are tombstones in the video there?
You were not allowed to mark the tomb.
[Narrator] Spartan women were free.
Okay, so there is some truth in this.
Spartan women enjoyed a lot more freedom to move around,
than women in most other communities.
One of the things that really set them apart
There's no other place in the Greek world
where women are regularly playing sports.
is that when they were playing sports,
They wore an outfit that left one breast bare,
and it was cut off at roughly mid-thigh.
One Greek poet called Spartan women thigh flashers,
and you spent time walking around town,
like her dress always went down to her ankles.
were expected to be dressed very modestly.
So the idea that there are women out in public
wearing an outfit where you could see their legs
If you were a woman in any other Greek city,
You had an enormous amount of work to do.
Spartan women didn't do all of those things.
because they didn't need the children
because the enslaved labor did that for them.
They had enslaved labor to do all the cooking,
So instead of carrying this enormous labor burden
that women elsewhere in Greece did,
Spartan women had relatively little to do,
and so they had a lot more free time
to go do other things outside the household.
Think that's enough slop for today.
