Up next in 10
When you think of the most famous ancient Greek sculptures in the world-The Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Venus de Milo, Hermes of Olympia-you immediately think of smooth, white stone. But ancient Greek statues were originally colorful. REALLY colorful.
In this episode of Misconceptions, host Justin Dodd breaks down some myths about Ancient Greece. Let's dive in.
Don't miss a video! Subscribe NOW: https://www.youtube.com/@MentalFloss?sub_confirmation=1
About Mental Floss:
Mental Floss is where curious people come for trivia-tastic information. Mental Floss produces lists of fun facts, debunks common misconceptions, and tells untold stories from history, science, culture and more.
Website: http://www.mentalfloss.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mental_floss
Facebook: https://facebook.com/mentalflossmagazine
Discord: https://discord.io/mentalfloss
Copyright Notice: This video and YouTube channel contain dialog, music, and images that are property of Mental Floss. You are authorized to share the video link and channel, and embed this video in your website or others as long as a link back to this YouTube Channel is provided.
2025 Mental Floss
Misconceptions About Ancient Greece | Mental Floss
https://www.youtube.com/@MentalFloss
Show More Show Less View Video Transcript
0:00
The winged victory of Samothrace, the Venus de Milo, Hermes of Olympia
0:05
When you think of the most famous ancient Greek sculptures in the world, you immediately think of smooth white stone carved to stunning realism
0:12
But the only reason these sculptures appear that way to us is because time has worn away
0:17
the brightly painted, some would even say garish, details that many of them once had
0:23
That's right, ancient Greek statues were originally colorful, and I mean really colorful
0:28
Hi, I'm Justin Dodd, welcome to Misconceptions. Today, we're going to break down some myths about ancient Greece
0:34
And don't worry, I still have plenty more to say about these absurd statues
0:38
Frankly, it's kept me up at night. They were painted colors? Okay, let's get started
0:51
We know about the colorful past of ancient Greek sculptures because archaeological digs
0:56
have revealed statues with remnants of pigment still clinging to them. But you don't have to be present at an excavation to see the evidence
1:03
According to classical archaeologist Vincennes Brinkmann, some paint is still visible to the naked eye if you pay close enough attention
1:10
especially in cracks and crevices. Surprisingly, we've been aware of the painted statues
1:15
originally called polychromy, for centuries. In 1890, American art critic Russell Sturgis wrote about his observations
1:22
as statues were unearthed at the Acropolis, saying, In all, 26 pieces of considerable importance as sculpture, all archaic in character, and all elaborately painted in bright colors, were found east of the Parthenon during the spring and summer of 1883
1:38
The color of all these soon began to fall and vanish. The beautiful statue first described lay on a table in the museum on the Acropolis in May 1883, and already some of its color had been shaken off
1:50
for as it lay, it was surrounded by a little deposit of green, red, and black powder which
1:56
had fallen from it. Sturgis commented that even if these marbles weren't being recklessly handled
2:01
20 years was enough for most pieces to lose all their color. But thankfully, we do have an idea of
2:06
how they looked when they came out of the ground because, soon after they were discovered
2:11
watercolor paintings were commissioned that showed the colors in their full glory
2:15
The Trojan Horse was a real event. It's the Greek myth so powerful that it's still referenced today
2:22
when we talk about deception from the inside. But did it really happen
2:26
First, a quick refresher. The Greek poet Homer first introduced us to the Trojan War in the Iliad
2:32
written sometime in the 7th or 8th century BCE The story goes that a few hundred years prior a war between the Greeks and the Trojans started when Helen Queen of Sparta left her husband for Paris the Prince of Troy You may have heard the
2:45
phrase, the face that launched a thousand ships. That's Helen, who later became better known as
2:50
Helen of Troy. The King of Sparta was not thrilled about this whole sordid affair and thus sent his
2:56
army and, thanks to an oath a bunch of people had made, the armies of Greece to avenge his ego
3:01
The whole affair finally ended when the Greeks built a massive wooden horse as a gift to the people of Troy
3:08
But as we know, it was not a present at all. The Greek warriors acted as if they had surrendered and returned home
3:15
but some of them actually crawled inside the oversized horse and waited for the residents of Troy
3:19
to wield the generous gift inside the gates of their walled city
3:23
When the city was asleep, the men crept out of the horse and opened the gate for the rest of the army
3:28
and the rest is, well, ancient history. Now, Troy is very real. Archaeologists believe they have excavated the ancient city in modern-day
3:36
Turkey, and it's possible that some version of the Trojan War is also real. But it probably didn't
3:41
last a decade, probably didn't involve gods and goddesses, and sadly there's no evidence that a
3:46
massive house-sized wooden horse carried a clutch of Greek warriors to victory. There is a but
3:53
Assuming that the war really happened, which is in no way a sure thing, some scholars have
3:57
speculated that Homer and other storytellers took a bit of creative license with the Trojan horse
4:02
tail, and the horse that allowed the Greeks to breach the walls was actually a battering ram
4:07
or a siege engine. So, breaking into the city? Definitely possible. Giant animal decoy? Yeah
4:14
maybe not. Greece was a democratic country. Greece created democracy, one of the first forms of
4:21
self-rule. That is basically true. But Greece itself was not a democracy, nor was it a country
4:27
at least not in the way we know Greece today. Ancient Greece was an entire civilization built
4:32
of many different city-states. Each city-state had its own government, and those included decidedly
4:37
non-democratic forms like tyranny and oligarchy. Take Sparta, arguably the most famous of the Greek
4:43
city-states. That's been described as a mix of kingship, oligarchy, and democracy, but mostly
4:49
oligarchy. When people talk about ancient Greek democracy, they almost exclusively mean the
4:53
political situation in Athens between around 508 to 322 BCE. And boy, did they take it seriously
5:01
Every year, the names of 500 citizens were chosen at vaguely random, 50 from each of 10 tribes
5:06
sort of like a less deadly Hunger Games. Those 500 people had to spend a year making new laws
5:11
and being an active part of the political process If they refused they were marked with red paint and had to pay a fine not really the definition of a democracy or the premise of a best young adult series Even then democracy didn reign supreme across Greece
5:26
After the Peloponnesian War, around 404 BCE, the Spartans installed dictators in Athens
5:32
a regime known as Thirty Tyrants. Roughly 1,500 Athenians were killed while the Thirty Tyrants were in power
5:38
but luckily they were only in power for about a year before they were overthrown
5:42
and democracy came back in a modified form. Historians disagree when ancient Athens finally
5:48
gave up democracy, with the killer blow being given by some combination of the Macedonians in
5:54
the 300s BCE and the Romans around 31 BCE alongside other developments. Guys, there's a lot of history
6:01
in history. Pandora had a box. Pandora, of course, is a myth, and not in the myths-facts way we've
6:09
been talking so far, but in the ancient storytelling way that explains the ways of the world and passes
6:14
life lessons down from generation to generation. But Pandora's box is also a myth in the sense that
6:20
what most of us believe about it is incorrect. As the story was originally told by Greek poet
6:25
Hesiod around 700 BCE, Pandora, the first human woman, was created to marry a guy named Epimetheus
6:33
Epimetheus happened to be the twin brother of the titan Prometheus, whom Zeus was quite angry with
6:39
because he gave fire to humans. And consequently, humans invented Burning Man
6:43
I digress. When Zeus commissioned Pandora's creation, he also gave her a quaint little vessel
6:48
containing all of the evil and misery in the world. After she married Epimetheus
6:52
Pandora opened this horrifying container and released it onto the Earth, which is why we all have pain and suffering
7:00
You know this fun little gift as Pandora's box. Pretty much everyone knows it as Pandora's box
7:05
But in Hesiod's original telling, it wasn't a box, it was a jar. As far as anyone can tell, it became a box in the early 16th century when the scholar Erasmus
7:14
misidentified it, probably after conflating it with a vaguely similar Roman story. But honestly
7:19
does Pandora's jar really have the same ring to it? Greek temples were all marble
7:25
Another myth that exists due to the passage of time. Although the Greek structures that survived
7:31
long enough for us to see them are made of stone, often marble, that doesn't mean they were the only
7:36
temples and buildings of the era. Some of the earliest Greek structures we know about
7:41
the ones constructed prior to the 7th century BCE, were made of mud, brick, and timber
7:46
The stone structures didn't show up until sometime during the 7th or 6th century BCE
7:51
So why the change Travel Around 650 BCE Greeks had started visiting Egypt regularly and observed the strength and beauty of the stone structures there At first they just replaced all of the wooden columns with marble
8:05
but by the 5th century BCE, they had switched almost entirely to some form of stone
8:10
Let's talk about the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. To finish, I'm going to give probably the most widespread myth of this video. If you watch any
8:19
game show or read any list, they will give you the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World as
8:23
the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Lighthouse of Alexandria
8:27
the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Temple of Artemis, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia
8:32
and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, usually with some claim that this was an ancient Greek list
8:37
of things to see. Except there's a major problem with that list. The Lighthouse of Alexandria is
8:43
never, not once, mentioned in our ancient sources as a wonder of the world. Possibly the earliest
8:49
surviving, at least earliest surviving complete list, is from the ancient Greek poet Antipater
8:54
of Sidon, circa the 2nd century BCE, who gives six of the canonical wonders, but instead of the
9:00
lighthouse, gives the walls of Babylon. And that's hardly a firm list, even at the time. A few decades
9:06
later, one writer mentions an obelisk in Babylon as one of the seven. In 80 CE, Marshall gives a
9:11
list of six wonders, basically to say how much better the Colosseum is than any of them. According
9:16
According to one paper, eight distinct lists of wonders existed in antiquity, but only
9:21
the Colossus of Rhodes was listed in all of them. The Egyptian pyramids in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon both scored seven out of eight
9:28
followed by the mausoleum in Halicarnassus with six out of eight, and the Olympian Zeus
9:33
which was listed five times. So what about the lighthouse? The first writer we know to have included the lighthouse is usually listed as Gregory
9:41
of Tours in the 6th century CE, well after the classical era
9:45
a lot of his list is hardly familiar territory. It includes Noah's Ark and the Temple of Solomon
9:51
alongside classics like the Colossus and the Mausoleum. So when did we get our canonical list
9:56
of seven? Probably around the 16th century, maybe thanks to artists making depictions using some
10:02
random lists that was floating around at the time. But even then, as late as the end of the 19th
10:07
century, many lists included the walls and hanging gardens of Babylon as a single item. It's not
10:12
until the early 20th century that the walls of Babylon are decisively dropped and we get the seven
10:17
that everyone imagines is some anciently pedigreed list. As for what made the walls worthy of such
10:23
praise, that's a story for another video. Thanks for watching this episode of Misconceptions
10:29
What topic should we cover next? Leave a suggestion in the comments and we will turn that whole
10:34
subject inside out trying to find any myths and misconceptions we can. I'll see you next time
#education