Professor Fact Checks Ancient Greece Slop

There's an explosion.

[Professor laughing]

This is Ancient Greeks,

they did not have gunpowder.

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.

Let's fact check some AI slop.

[calm music]

[bells dinging]

I just arrived in Olympia.

Okay, people are looking at me weird again.

[buzzer thudding]

Yeah, people would look at you quite weird.

The Olympic games are held in Olympia,

which is a place

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,

did a lot of drinking,

watched some sports,

did some sacrifices to Zeus,

and ate a lot of barbecue.

Ancient sources tell us that married women

were not allowed to attend,

and you almost certainly did not

wanna bring your unmarried daughter to the scene.

Ancient Greek women were expected to dress

very modestly in public,

virtually all the time.

So first, a woman at Olympia?

Big problem to begin with,

and women in Olympia wearing modern athletic gear,

equally a problem.

They're training right now,

and, oh my God,

they're covered in oil.

But they would've been covered in oil.

Good for that.

On the other hand,

Greeks exercised in the nude.

The Greek word for gymnasium,

where we get our word gym from,

means nude.

The gymnasium is literally the nude place.

Running, throwing the javelin,

wrestling, boxing,

all done in the nude.

The only sport

that people were clothed for was horse racing,

where the jockeys

and the chariot drivers were clothed.

So showing Greek athletes exercising,

wearing a tunic,

kind of a problem.

Okay, let's take a look at the next video.

[bell dinging]

[Narrator] The year is 438 BC.

Okay, so we're doing pretty well here.

This is actually a very nice reconstruction

of the Acropolis about this time.

The Parthenon, that big building in the back right corner

was finished in the outside in 438,

so that's great.

The gateway, that wasn't started until the 437,

so it would've been a construction site,

but, let's take what we can get.

This gigantic bronze statue?

That's a actual statue.

There was a big statue on the Acropolis

made out of bronze,

called the Athena Promachos,

carrying weapons.

Stood about 30 feet tall.

The sun glinted off the bronze,

so people coming into the port of Athens

several miles away,

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,

politician, general,

and he was the leading figure in Athens between 460

and his death in 429.

The Athenians elected 10 generals every year

to run the army

and the Navy.

Pericles was repeatedly elected as general,

and used that as his sort of base

to exercise his control in Athens.

He was renowned for being

one of the world's most persuasive,

smoothest speakers.

There's a famous story that someone asked a wrestler,

Didn't you wrestle against Pericles?

Did you win or lose?

And he said,

It doesn't make any difference,

because afterwards he's just gonna stand up

and convince them that he won anyway,

even if he did lose.

There's a lot going on in this scene.

Let's see if we can take a look

at some things a little more closely.

So we have an owl

and three Greek letters here.

Athena's animal was an owl,

and owls lived on

and around the Acropolis in Athens,

so the owl was one of the basic symbols of Athens,

and it appeared on the coinage,

along with these three letters,

which are the first three letters

of the Greek word for Athens, Athenai.

Now let's take a look back here

on this triangular space on the roof called the Pediment.

The Parthenon was famous in the ancient Greek world

because the Athenian government

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.

So the Parthenon sculptures

like those pedimental sculptures,

those are actually mostly in London

in the British Museum now.

So if you go to a museum

and you see a white statue from Ancient Greece,

almost certainly it was painted originally.

Like for instance,

the skin, they wanted to have

a more natural looking skin tone,

and paint the colors of the eyes in,

and the clothing as well.

This particular statue is a different case.

It was bronze,

and Greeks did not paint bronze,

'cause they didn't want the color,

they wanted the bronze.

[Narrator] Women, though essential to family,

religion, and the continuity of the city,

have no political voice.

In this shot,

the AI is clearly animating

a 19th century painting.

Scenes of ancient Greek life

are very popular in European art in 18th/19th century.

There was a big craze in,

especially in Britain

and Germany in the 19th century,

for everything having to do with Ancient Greece.

[Narrator] Their world is the household,

where they manage property, raise children.

Let's talk a little bit more about

women in Ancient Greece.

Even in Athens,

which was a very democratic government,

women had no political rights.

They could not vote,

they could not hold office.

And they were expected to be at home as much as possible.

And the home was called an oikos,

probably familiar to you

from some yogurt experience of yours.

There was a strong division of space

and power in Ancient Greece,

which is to say that men ran the public life,

and women ran the private life in the household.

Okay, let's move on.

[bell dinging]

[Narrator] Many believed the Persians

would be victorious at Marathon.

A messenger named Pheidippides

was sent to run from Marathon to Athens.

This is a great story.

Unfortunately, this never happened.

What we see here is a reconstruction

of the Battle of Marathon,

which was fought a little bit northeast

of Athens in the 490 BCE.

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

until about 3 or 400 years later.

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,

and so decided they wanted a race

called the Marathon Race.

There was no such race in the ancient world.

Greeks did not run long distance races.

[Narrator] A fleet of triremes,

fast and deadly ships powered by the manpower

of thousands of rowers.

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,

just one bank of oars,

and the ship's moving remarkably fast

given that number of rowers.

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,

but Athens could afford one.

When it became apparent

that they were gonna have problems with the Persians,

the Athenians built a massive fleet of triremes,

about 200/250 ships.

[Narrator] In 371 BC,

it was the sacred band that played a decisive role

in shattering the Spartans.

The sacred band,

that actually did exist in thieves.

It was 150 pairs of men

who had a homoerotic relationship with each other.

Greeks were much more open

about male-male relationships

that had a physical element in it.

The idea was that those pairs

would be very tightly bonded

with the older male playing the role of mentor

to the younger male.

[Narrator] In 413 BC,

the Athenian fleet was destroyed.

We are so used to seeing

modern battlefields with explosions

because of the invention of gunpowder.

This is Ancient Greeks.

They did not have gunpowder.

You can see on the screen there's an explosion,

and ships are on fire everywhere.

There weren't explosions,

and there wasn't much in the way of fire in a naval battle.

Okay, next video.

[bell dinging]

[Narrator] When the doors closed in ancient Athens,

the wine came out.

Okay.

So the symposium was a big thing in ancient Greece,

and what it literally means in Greek,

symposium is to drink together.

And so they would have drinking parties.

The standard setup was they had built a special room

for it called an Andron,

they were typically designed to hold seven couches,

and two people on each couch.

So this room is too big.

If you take a look in the background,

there are paintings on the wall,

probably frescoes painted on plaster.

We know Greeks did a lot of very fancy wall painting,

very little of it survives.

[Narrator] The servants mixed wine

and water in a great crater.

You can see they're mixing the wine

and water in a big mixing bowl called a Krater.

That actually is correct.

Greeks stored their wine more like as a syrup.

To drink it undiluted was almost impossible.

It was almost like drinking Coca-Cola syrup.

You had to dilute it.

[Narrator] Music filled the room.

Philosophy turned into rivalry.

The other things that happened at the symposium

beyond drinking was a lot of talking.

There was a lot of singing,

composing a verse.

Another form of entertainment

was to have prostitutes come in.

They could play musical instruments

and sing, dance,

do acrobatic events.

And of course,

also were expected to have sex with the guests.

The Greeks had a very different attitude

towards sexuality than we do.

It was very common,

and perfectly socially acceptable

for an older male to have a teenage boyfriend,

regardless of not whether they were married.

And at symposia,

you would never bring your wife,

absolutely not a space

for respectable women to participate,

but you could quite frequently

show up with your boyfriend

who would share your couch with you.

[Narrator] Guests poured libations to the gods.

One of the things which is accurate here,

if you take a look,

there's a mosaic stone floor,

and that was very common in Androns.

Imagine you spent a whole night

with a room full of people drinking,

what the room would be like in the morning.

It needs to be cleaned,

and it's much easier to do that with a stone floor.

So let's move on.

[bell dinging]

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,

with mud brick walls,

sometimes plastered so they were white or a color,

but much less impressive physically

than what you would see here.

If you take a look in the back left corner,

this is clearly a modern cafe.

The only thing missing is a Cinzano umbrella.

What they've done is overlaid

ancient costumes on modern people,

but you see this guy?

He's still wearing his white t-shirt.

[bell dinging]

There are no bats in Athens that look like this.

They would've had some circular baths in public.

There was very little hot water,

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.

Greeks did play board games,

they had games called a Polis

where there were lines

and you had to move pieces around,

something like checkers or chess.

We have some actual physical stones

on which they were played.

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.

You got two ballots,

a yes

and a no, essentially.

One had a solid middle,

and one had a hollow middle,

and you held your hands over them,

and dropped one in one,

and one in the other.

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.

Socrates and other philosophers

would've worked mostly in gymnasia,

in a courtyard,

places that doubled as both exercise facilities,

and educational facilities.

And so they would sit in the shaded part of the courtyard,

and hang out,

and talk.

Once a year,

Athens had a big festival

in honor of the goddess Athena.

Athena was, among other things,

the goddess of weaving,

so they weaved a massive peplos,

a massive dress,

very highly embroidered,

and they marched it in a procession across town,

and up to the Acropolis,

and presented it to the goddess on the Acropolis.

The surroundings are too grand,

but there's an idea here.

On the Acropolis of Athens,

there were lots of statues of Athena,

but two famous ones.

One was a huge statue made out of gold

and ivory.

That was in the Parthenon itself,

the big temple on the Acropolis.

That one didn't get dressed,

because it had a beautiful ivory

and gold surface.

There was an older statue

in a smaller temple called the Erechtheion.

That statue was made out of wood,

and every year the Athenians put a fancy new robe on it,

which they wove very carefully,

and was very highly embroidered

and also wore very fancy jewelry.

So there's a huge problem here.

Let's take a little closer look at what's going on here.

Greek architects were fanatics about symmetry.

The Parthenon was famous

for having eight columns across the front.

One, two,

three, four on this side.

One, two,

three, four,

five on that side.

A Greek architect would've literally had a stroke

if they had built a building this way.

The sheep standing on the altar,

that's a little weird.

So, Greeks did make animal sacrifices,

and there were altars in front of temples,

but the animal was on the ground,

and then burnt it,

and cooked it on the altar.

The animal would not have stood on the altar.

[Professor laughing]

Pretty much everything is wrong here.

Greeks did use masks

when they were doing like tragedies.

When they're doing plays,

they would wear masks.

This evidently is supposed to be a religious scene.

The priest did not wear weird white masks like this.

Enough of that one.

Next video.

[bell dinging]

[Narrator] In the ancient world,

no war begun without first asking Delphi.

So Delphi, it's the sanctuary of Apollo.

It's built on the side of a mountain.

It was a major oracular site,

which meant that people came there to consult the Pythia,

the priestess,

and find out about the future.

[Narrator] The Pythia was always chosen

from the women of Delphi itself,

and in these early centuries,

a young, unmarried woman.

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.

[Narrator] On this seat,

history was spoken.

So she's sitting on a stone throne.

Apollo's symbol was the Tripod,

and we know from art,

that the priestess sat in a tripod

when she was giving prophecy.

So the stone throne,

that's a problem.

[Narrator] She breathes in.

The priests record every word,

and shape them into verse.

People came to Delphi

from all over the Greek world

to consult the oracle.

And the idea was that Apollo spoke through the Pythia,

the priestess,

and the priestess would say sometimes

nonsense words or chant,

and there would be people there,

priests who would write down what she said,

and interpret it for you,

make sense of it.

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,

what will happen?

And the reply was,

You will destroy a great kingdom.

But what he didn't understand

was he was gonna destroy his own kingdom.

[Narrator] Two fault lines crossed directly below,

releasing sweet-smelling gases from the rock.

We have some ancient sources

starting relatively late,

so starting around 100 BCE.

Those sources say that there was gas leaking up

through the floor of the temple

where the priestess sat,

and she breathed in the gas,

and went into this trance

that allowed her to commune with the God Apollo.

Modern scholars, for the most part,

have thought that's not true.

Some geologists took a look at the site of Delphi,

and say that there are faults running underneath,

and that ethylene gas

would've been leaking into the temple,

and the priestess could have been

breathing in the ethylene gas,

and achieving some sort of intoxicated state,

ongoing argument.

Now let's move on.

[bell dinging]

So we're doing sort of the greatest hits

of Greek civilization here.

One issue is we don't know when exactly

the Greeks got to Greece,

but probably around 2200 BCE.

So, Greece in 6,000 BCE,

there were no Greeks there.

What they started with is the Bronze Age,

and they've done a good job of identifying

the two big Bronze Age civilizations,

the Minoans, who were in Crete,

those were actually not Greeks,

they spoke some language we can't decipher.

And then, on the mainland,

there were the Mycenaeans,

so we see a Mycenaean warrior here.

The scholars have debated for a long time

whether the poems composed by Homer,

The Iliad

and The Odyssey described the Mycenaean period.

In recent decades,

the general view is that the Greeks

had some very vague memories of the distant past,

but for the most part,

poems composed by Homer

reflect the situation around 800 BCE in Greece

long after the Mycenaeans were gone.

[bell dinging]

Okay, so we have the Battle of Marathon here.

This was a big event in Greek history.

So the Greeks

and the Persians butted heads for a long time.

490 BCE, the Battle of Marathon

was the first time the Persian army

invaded the Greek mainland.

The Athenians were outnumbered

and famously attacked,

and crushed the Persian Army.

Anytime you would talk to someone

who had been at Marathon,

the first thing they would say was,

Do you know,

I was at Marathon.

And the very famous Athenian poet/playwright Aeschylus,

who was the most famous writer in the Greek world,

when he died,

had on his gravestone,

I fought at Marathon.

Okay, so we have Socrates.

He was a very famous Athenian philosopher.

Anytime you would encounter him,

he would ask you a question,

and you would respond,

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

that he was put on trial,

very complicated trial.

But to a certain extent,

he was blamed for the bad behavior of his relatives

and students,

but also, he was just spectacularly annoying.

The way Athenian trials worked,

first you were found innocent or guilty,

and then there was a penalty phase

where both the accuser

and the defendant proposed a penalty.

And Socrates stood up

and said, I think you should punish me

by giving me free meals for the rest of my life.

Clearly designed to annoy the jury

into giving him death as his penalty.

But Socrates was executed

by being made to drink poison,

hemlock, and this is a very famous scene

painted by neoclassical painters

of Socrates in prison talking to his students

right before he died,

or drinking the hemlock.

Okay, next video.

[bell dinging]

We have a video here about the Minoans.

They're on the island of Crete,

say roughly 1800 BCE,

so this would be the Bronze Age.

These are not Greeks.

We have their written records,

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,

which was famously big

and elaborate.

It's been excavated.

You can go visit.

And certainly it's giving you a reasonably good sense

of how large

and fancy this building was.

Frescoes in deep reds

and blues cover the walls.

[Professor] This is drawing from Minoan art.

Minoans were very fond of painting frescoes on walls,

and we have some pieces of those.

[Narrator] Women held power

that wouldn't be seen again in Europe

until the modern era.

In most times

and places in the ancient world,

when we look at political art,

or we have political documents,

it's all men.

The Minoan situation is different,

because women feature very prominently.

One common theory is that it was a theocracy

and a matriarchy,

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.

[Narrator] In the central court,

bull leaping ceremonies unfolded.

The palace has been excavated

and to a certain extent reconstructed,

and was full of images of bulls.

We know from Minoan art

that one of the things they did,

was they had people run at,

and jump over bulls as a spectacle.

[Narrator] Grabbing charging bulls by the horns

and vaulting over their backs.

And you can see that here,

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,

and floating out in space,

but you know,

they got the general idea, right?

Okay, let's move on.

[bell dinging]

No Greek architect could've built this structure.

Greeks, the way they built

and the materials they had,

couldn't span a space of more than about 20 feet

without a column,

and this is an enormous open space.

It's a beautiful building,

looks maybe like an imaginary Roman Senate.

Greeks did have democracy.

Athens put together the first

really formally structured

democratic government in 508 BCE.

In the United States,

we have representative democracy.

You vote for someone who then goes to DC,

and makes decisions for you.

In ancient Greece,

it was almost always direct.

You showed up

and voted on everything yourself.

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,

because Greeks could not build

a structure large enough to hold that many people.

He looks like he is someone

from a 1960s Hollywood movie.

In the 1950s,

'60s, '70s,

they made these huge epics about ancient Greece

and Rome,

called sword & sandal movies,

as opposed to a Western, for example.

Some costume designer

and screenwriter sitting in Hollywood in the 1950s

came up with an idea of what an ancient Roman

or Greek would've looked like,

put it on film,

and now it's being reproduced

by a computer model in the 21st century.

This may be my personal favorite.

So of course we all know the story

of the Trojan Horse, right?

The Greek soldiers pop out

and gain control of the city.

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.

The Greeks call that site Ilian,

and there is a site that many scholars

believe corresponds roughly to that place

has been excavated for a long period of time

since the 19th century.

So, the Greeks believed it happened,

and they told stories about it,

they were sure it did.

My personally, very skeptical

that the Trojan War ever happened.

Leaving aside the issue that the Trojan Horse

is a mythical story,

what we have here is a Greek city

that looks like from the architecture

around 400 BCE, maybe?

And the Trojan Horse,

if it ever took place,

if it ever happened,

would've been like 800 years earlier.

Okay, next video.

[bell dinging]

This has a million views, huh?

[Crew] It had three-million.

Three-million views? Wow.

I have no doubt

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

without any attempt

to actually ground it in historical reality.

Yeah, they did have produce like that.

Greeks ate a lot of fruits

and vegetables.

Meat was a specialty,

pretty rare to eat a lot of meat.

One thing I like about this scene

is if you look on the temple in the background,

there's a gigantic statue

sitting on the roof of the temple,

that just absolutely not possible.

I'm done with this one. Next.

[bell dinging]

I'm currently worshiping Dionysus very thoroughly.

Greeks took Dionysus very seriously,

and Dionysus was the god of wine.

In Athens, for example,

there was a big Dionysus festival every spring,

a lot of drinking,

raunchy behavior,

carrying big phallus' around in processions,

a lot of dirty talk.

So big parties with people doing a lot of drinking,

associated with Dionysus? Absolutely.

But on the other hand,

the guy they're interviewing

looks much more like a modern fraternity boy

than he does in Ancient Greek.

What's the secret to a good harvest?

Talk to your trees.

So you can see in the background,

he's got an olive tree,

which is great,

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?

You'll eat lunch,

then trip on a goat.

I don't know what to say about that one.

She's wearing this weird white makeup.

Greek women wore makeup,

and they would whiten their face,

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.

Definitely not accurate.

Okay, next video.

[bell dinging]

So we have a lot of statues from Ancient Greece.

The statue showing figures from say before 450

or 500 BCE,

almost certainly just imaginary.

The later ones,

like Socrates

and Plato, those might be actual portraits.

Okay, there's Aristotle,

he was actually from Northern Greece in ancient times,

modern times called Macedonia.

Came to Athens to study with Plato,

spent a long time there.

When Plato died,

he was expecting to be put in charge

of Plato's school,

didn't get the job,

left in a huff,

and ended up working as the tutor

for Alexander the Great for a while.

Okay, next video.

[bell dinging]

[mystifying music]

Alexander actually would've really liked this.

He was very conscious of his public image.

So, he had a sculptor,

an authorized court sculptor

who made authorized images of him,

and always wanted himself to be looking up

and to the left,

so he had sort of an ethereal look to him.

The idea of a carefully crafted vision

of the warrior king,

the beautiful young leader,

would've appealed to him.

He would've liked this thing.

Okay, so Alexander is described as King of Kings here.

So, what happened?

So Alexander is King of Macedonia,

a small kingdom in Northern Greece.

He goes east,

and he conquers the Persian Empire.

And the Persian King,

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,

and one of his solutions

was basically to present himself to the Persians

and their subjects as a Persian king,

and therefore took on the title King of Kings.

Okay, let's move on.

[bell dinging]

[Narrator] Zeus summoned the gods for final judgment.

I don't know about that one.

Final judgment?

Greeks didn't believe in final judgment.

They just thought life went on.

The gods lived forever.

They were immortal.

By definition, things didn't change,

so no final judgment in the Greek world.

Before Olympus fades,

you will speak.

So the Greeks did believe in gods.

They believed in 12 gods

who lived on Mount Olympus,

which was a big mountain.

The most powerful god in Greek belief was Zeus,

and he's got a glowing scepter

with a lightning bolt on it.

Zeus' symbol was really the eagle,

so he would've had a scepter with an eagle on it.

[Narrator] First, Poseidon rose,

and the hall bowed to the sea.

So Zeus looks like he's 70/80, maybe?

And Poseidon, his brother,

looks like Jason Momoa,

who looks like he's in his 20s or 30s.

Very fit.

[Narrator] Hades followed,

and silence ruled the room.

Okay, so Zeus was in charge of the sky.

Poseidon's in charge of the ocean,

and Hades is in charge of the underworld.

Hades appears with a burst of flame,

that's a very Christian idea,

the underworld is where people go

to be punished in flames.

In Greek art

and literature, what makes the underworld different

is that there's no sun,

and it's dark,

and gray,

and cold all the time.

So the idea of fire in the underworld,

not really a Greek thing.

[Narrator] Hermes appeared in a breath.

[Professor laughing]

Okay.

Hermes is the messenger god in the Greek religion,

and he's supposed to be able to zip

to one place to another,

but in Greek art,

he's shown with wings on his feet,

not big, gigantic angel wings.

For the Greeks,

they believed in literally tens of thousands

of supernatural beings,

and they were much more intermixed

with everyday life.

So for example,

when Greeks sacrificed on altars,

the reason they did that in front of temples,

was that in the temple was a statue of the god,

and the idea was this god

could see through the statue,

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.

[bell dinging]

[Narrator] Every male citizen

existed for one purpose alone,

to be a soldier.

So Sparta, a really complicated,

interesting place.

In the ancient world,

the Spartans had a reputation

for being very heavily militarized.

The whole city being an armed camp

with the men doing nothing

but training all day long to be soldiers,

and living this very austere life.

This is where we get the word Spartan from,

like Spartan accommodations,

Spartan lifestyle.

That's the idea.

[Narrator] No private wealth,

no luxury, no walls.

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,

which the Spartans kept oppressed

and repressed.

They produced the food that the Spartans ate,

and the Spartans never went to work.

So if you were talking to an Ancient Greek,

and asked them about the Spartans,

the person you're talking to probably said,

Well, listen,

they're living the most luxurious lifestyle imaginable.

They don't go to work.

They have more than enough to eat.

They hang around all day.

Things are pretty good for these guys.

That said, all this was made possible

because of this huge enslaved labor force called Helots

that the Spartans had conquered,

and made work for them.

Did they spend a lot of time for military training? Yes.

But they could do that

because they were not working to support themselves,

or their families.

[Narrator] No city wall,

because Spartan ideology

considered walls a symbol of weakness.

Okay. So they in fact did not have a wall

until relatively late,

because Sparta was a very big,

powerful state with a large army,

and didn't really need to defend

the main urban center.

Most Greek cities were pretty unimpressive,

dirt streets, mud brick houses.

So Sparta wasn't all that unusual in that sense.

[Narrator] Athena of the bronze house,

walls lined with intricately worked bronze plates.

There was actually a temple

called Athena Halkioikos on the Acropolis of Sparta,

and it did have some sort of bronze reliefs.

Now, their reconstruction,

they just showed you,

that's a problem.

The Spartans, for reasons known only to themselves,

decided to not build temples with columns around it.

Lots of Greeks did that.

We call that a peripheral temple.

Spartans did not build those temples.

One way to spiff up that kind of building,

without the columns

and without the fancy marble,

was to take bronze sheets,

and to hammer figures into them,

so that they were decorated

showing scenes of Greek myth for example,

and then literally nail them

to the walls of the temple.

Now, interestingly,

the British excavated this temple.

The bronze reliefs are all gone,

except maybe ones

and fragments,

but we have lots of nails.

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.

In the city of Sparta itself,

there were tombs,

lots and lots of tombs,

about 150 known tombs.

Now, most Greek cities after say 700 BCE,

they did not want you burying your dead inside the city.

You had to go to a cemetery

at the edge of town for that.

Spartans always allowed people,

at least some people to bury their dead in the city,

that definitely was highly unusual,

so when you walked around Sparta,

you walked past a lot of graves.

One thing which is not accurate here,

you see there are tombstones in the video there?

Looks like a modern tombstone,

this very sort of 19th century

New England sort of thing?

Very much not a Spartan thing.

You were not allowed to mark the tomb.

[Narrator] Spartan women were free.

Free in a way that Athenian women

could scarcely imagine.

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

was that they played sports.

Their big thing was running,

and wrestling,

and that's extremely unusual.

There's no other place in the Greek world

where women are regularly playing sports.

Another thing which set them apart

is that when they were playing sports,

they wore very little.

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,

because if you were a Greek,

and you spent time walking around town,

you never saw a woman's legs,

like her dress always went down to her ankles.

Most Greek women,

throughout their lives

when they were out in public

were expected to be dressed very modestly.

And we know for instance,

that in a lot of instances,

Greek women covered their hair,

and sometimes wore veils.

So the idea that there are women out in public

wearing an outfit where you could see their legs

was absolutely shocking.

Question of why Spartan women

enjoyed relative freedom

is a more complicated one.

If you were a woman in any other Greek city,

the husband was out of the house,

but you were home,

raising kids, making clothes,

grinding grain, cooking,

cleaning the house.

You had an enormous amount of work to do.

Spartan women didn't do all of those things.

They had very few children,

because they didn't need the children

to support them in their old age,

because the enslaved labor did that for them.

They had enslaved labor to do all the cooking,

cleaning, making clothes.

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.

Thanks for watching.

[calm music]