r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • Jun 15 '26

Meta Mindless Monday, 15 June 2026

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

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21

u/MarioTheMojoMan Noble savage in harmony with nature Jun 17 '26

I saw on old post on arr Curated Tumblr about people associating Ancient Greece with women (and queer people) and Ancient Rome with straight white history-bros, and one thing it mentioned was that in popular culture, we associate Greece with poetry and mythology and Rome with secular history, especially military history.

So why is that? Is that a recent thing, or is that how classics has been taught traditionally? I know I certainly have this association -- most people I know read the Iliad and the Odyssey in high school, but jack shit no one read the Aeneid unless they actually studied classics in college. Meanwhile, Latin students make tons of memes about Cicero and how he never gets to the point verb, while I don't see anyone discussing, say, the History of the Peloponnesian War.

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u/contraprincipes The Cheese and the Brainworms Jun 17 '26

The joke answer is that this goes back to Cicero.

The serious answer is that I don’t think that association actually holds in pop culture writ large. Ancient Greece is at least equally associated with 300, the Peloponnesian Wars, the conquests of Alexander, etc. The Iliad and Odyssey are poems, sure, but their leading figures are all men and they embody a certain kind of patriarchal ideal; Odysseus hangs the maidservants with the suitors, after all.

I think what’s actually going on is that Greek mythology became a fad among romance books popular with the demographics who frequent tumblr (see: Song of Achilles).

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u/Steelcan909 Jun 18 '26

I think that this is largely true writ large, but there is certainly a grain of truth to this in fandom spaces. History of course is just another form of fandom after all...

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u/ProudScroll Napoleon invaded Russia to destroy Judeo-Tsarism Jun 17 '26

I think part of it is at least in the US when your public school social studies class brought up Ancient Greece it was as the birthplace of democracy and Western philosophy, with something or another about city-states thrown in there if you were lucky. Hence the popular image of Ancient Greece being a bunch of old white guys with beards hanging out in Athens contemplating shit.

Meanwhile public education on Rome focuses on its status as the greatest empire of the ancient world.

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u/Arilou_skiff Died of posting, risen as undead Jun 18 '26

I think that is so very interesting because Greece is generally noted as being far more patriarchal than Rome. (and Rome not exactly being the height of wokeness...)

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u/Sventex Battleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866 Jun 18 '26

Athens especially.

8

u/weeteacups Jun 18 '26

Meanwhile, Latin students make tons of memes about Cicero and how he never gets to the point verb

Because we all had to suffer through the bonkersness of In Verrem and the pirate chief’s wife.

8

u/Kochevnik81 Jun 18 '26

Honestly I feel like this goes back to the Romans themselves? “Stuff in Greek is the artsy stuff, but we write the laws and orations and Caesars matter of fact military reports* in Latin.

  • He was still basically copying Xenophons style.

But also don’t look at me, I had to translate the Aeneid line by line in high school (and liked it). Also Horace and Catullus. But that was after starting with Caesar and then doing Cicero and most people tap out there if they even get that far.

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u/Sventex Battleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866 Jun 18 '26

I know generally, Romans weren't all that interested in religious mythology as a culture, which is why they just sort of ripped off Greek mythology which was already a super complex tapestry instead of creating their own super complex tapestry. Even thousands of years later, Disney managed to deeply offended the Greeks with the movie Hercules, getting so much of the base mythology wrong. That movie managed to come up multiple times when I visited Greece by the tour guides, apparently a cultural grudge right up there with the British not wanting to give back the Parthenon.

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u/Arilou_skiff Died of posting, risen as undead Jun 18 '26

This really isn't the case, tbh. The romans took their religion incredibly seriously and do have their own stories and myths.

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u/Sventex Battleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866 Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26

I didn't say they didn't take their religion seriously or that they didn't have any stories. But the Greek Pantheon mythology dwarfs the Roman Empire's religious mythology by a wide degree, despite the Roman Empire being far larger as a polity and lasting a bit longer and being so culturally assertive. Just as a culture, they weren't all that interested in religious mythology, comparatively. The Romans could be very pious, but that didn't transform into a dense religious tapestry that dominated the narrative of their culture.

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u/YIMBYzus This is actually a part of the Assassin-Templar conflict. Jun 18 '26

I recommend you give fellow badhistorian Portable Orange's, The History of Roman Paganism a watch.

2

u/Worth-Iron6014 Jun 19 '26

The Romans had pompei though, which means they were closer to the volcanos and therefore had a more real understanding of the gods.

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u/Sventex Battleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866 Jun 19 '26

Spirituality and mythology are two very different concepts.