Ancient history is hilarious because those fuckers were lying their asses off and now we’re just like “well we will never know for sure so let’s just accept the lies as mostly close enough to the truth.”
No, that one we have pretty solid firsthand sources.
Like, the Thracian Band plus also Alexander and Hephaestion are pretty well cited. We might even have Ptolemy I writing about the latter after he ditched out with Alexander’s heir after Alex died?
The rest sure, but those two plus like Plato and shiz believed it was like and wrote about it.
Plus Alcibiades really was *that* in love with Socrates, maybe
Xenephon was probably het, tho.
It comes up when he and Plato disagreed about Socrates’s legacy (although that being a way to discount Xenephon also reinforces the idea in a way I find hilarious)
Have you ever heard a dude tell a story about a fish he caught?
Imagine if he told/wrote about it centuries ago.
And then it got faithfully retold and translated.
There is still pressure on Macedonia from Greece to stop claiming Alexander as their own, when they were part of Ex Yugoslavia that wasn't big deal but according to my friends it's big deal
There’s a whole period around the Holy Roman Empire where noble families ‘discovered’ paperwork that said they were descendants of various Apostles/Moses/pick a good Roman Emperor. The Habsburgs told everyone they were descendants of Julius Caesar and Noah, among others. Sure, Jan.
That Habsburg who was just doing the rounds to promo his weird Catholic book (ALSO wild) is still talking them up! My guy, y’all told people you were descended from Noah and Ham via OSIRIS AND JUPITER. Time to let it go.
I'm pretty sure I'm remembering this comparison correctly, but one of my history teachers pointed out that at the height of the Greek empire, the entire population of Greece itself was less than Cleveland's.
It really put the scale of things into perspective.
The weirdest one to me, besides Herodotus, is that there’s no evidence (yet) of a large army, including elephants, which would require a ton of food and gear, and leave a lot of trash and 💩, crossing the Alps.
So it’s tough. It’s probably exaggerating the situation a bit since we do have situations with competing sources to put a better picture together. But in some cases yeah, it’s straight lies. Ramses put up steles documenting his victories in places he straight up was not at.
In fact Ramses was such a prolific builder of tributes to himself it’s fairly clear he was trying to take credit for a whole portion of Egyptian history that should have been attributed to others, probably to validate beyond doubt his divinity claims.
