One of the earliest depictions of the human form, painted on the wall of a cave in the Iberian Peninsula, seems to show a man with his middle finger extended. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
One of the earliest depictions of the human form, painted on the wall of a cave in the Iberian Peninsula, seems to show a man with his middle finger extended. The gesture is probably not in this instance the near-universal sign of contempt it has become, but it may nevertheless serve as a reminder that the urge to make our feelings known has a long history. Today, that urge expresses itself most fully in our need to tell our leaders when we think they are wrong, a practice commonly known as “speaking truth to power.”
But getting up the courage to do so is only half the battle. As our recent election cycle has shown, getting power to listen is a whole other matter. Leaders across the political spectrum tend to surround themselves with people who share their views, and the resulting echo chamber simply drowns out other voices.
So how does one do it? The Bible has a couple of examples.
In Genesis, the patriarch Abraham gets God to think twice before wiping out Sodom, the original Sin City. He does it by haggling. “Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city,” he asks. When God agrees to spare the city if fifty righteous individuals can be found, Abraham cautiously but firmly starts bringing the number down. What about only 45, he asks. Or 30? How about 20? 10? Each time, God agrees to the new number, and we are left to believe not a single righteous person could be found in that moral cesspool.
A more earthly example comes from the Second book of Samuel, where the prophet Nathan publicly shamed King David for wrongfully arranging the death of Uriah the Hittite so that he could take the voluptuous Bathsheba as his wife. Ostensibly seeking the king’s justice, Nathan shared a story about a rich landowner who nevertheless seized his neighbor’s only ewe for a feast. When David predictably exploded over this rampant injustice, Nathan sprang his trap, telling the king that this was what he had done when he lusted for Bathsheba. Even though Nathan had tricked and humiliated David, the king responded, “I have sinned against the Lord.”
Abraham and Nathan were special cases. As patriarch and prophet, respectively, they had acquired the right to exercise what Greek and Roman scholars called parrhesia, literally, “frankness,” or “freedom of speech.”
More ordinary folks had a problem, as the Greek philosopher Plato discovered when he travelled all the way from Athens to teach the ruler of Syracuse in Sicily how to become a philosopher-king. When Plato said that being a king or slave made no difference to a true philosopher, that ruler decided to try out the idea by selling Plato into slavery. (Legend has it that Plato used the money raised to pay his ransom to found the Academy.)
Under the Romans, public speaking became a primary skill, especially when it came to getting a favorable response from the emperor. As a result, a fairly large number of speeches, and handbooks on how to deliver a successful one, survive. Here are some simple rules that can be distilled from these works.
Rule one: know thyself
This maxim, carved into the walls of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, serves as a reminder that demeanor is important. As Plato learned, speakers who talk down to their listeners are likely to be dismissed as holier-than-thou prigs. So, it’s more effective to offer one’s advice, like Abraham, with a dose of modesty.
Rule two: know thy audience
Better even then know thyself is know thy audience. If a given leader has a history of saber-rattling and plans to start a new arms race, this is probably not the best time to propose a National Endowment for the Arts.
In a democracy, We the People are the ultimate court of public opinion, and in this instance, emotion is often more effective than reason. Greed was all it took to get the ancient Athenians to launch their disastrous expedition against Syracuse, while Mark Antony, in his Funeral Oration for Julius Caesar, used anger to “let slip the dogs of war.” Fear works, too. Just ask the hordes of murderers, rapists, and pedophiles waiting to unleash Armageddon on our borders. Catchy, imperative phrases can be highly effective if they encapsulate a strong emotion. “Build the wall!” and “drain the swamp!” are good examples. “Build Back Better,” not so much.
Rule three: make it win-win
Terrible things happened to David after he was rebuked by Nathan, but in a strictly political sense his willingness to accept the charge (rather than, say, putting Nathan on an enemies list) established David as a legitimate ruler, and not a tyrant. Similarly, that saber-rattling ruler who would never hear of an endowment for the arts might actually listen to someone who pointed out that the pen can be mightier than the sword.
Rule four: flattery is good, finesse is better
In the fourth century, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, author of an influential life of Constantine the Great, was present when a speaker dubbed the first Christian emperor a saint and told him he would surely continue to rule in the afterlife. Constantine, who cultivated a public image of prayer and humility, exploded, and that speaker was never heard from again. A speech of Eusebius’s own survives, and a modern reader might be forgiven for thinking the bishop was being just as flattering, but in fact he chose his words much more carefully. Taking note of Constantine’s well-known penchant for public applause, for instance, Eusebius claims, “The cheers of the crowds and the voices of flatterers he holds more a nuisance than a pleasure, because of his stern character and the upright rearing of his soul.”
Eusebius shows he had mastered the trick that the conspirator Decius centuries later would explain in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” as the ability to deliver such praise while seeming not to: “But when I tell him he hates flatterers, / He says he does, being most flatterèd.”
Do such rules matter in our postmodern age, when truth itself seems to be up for grabs? We are not as unique as we like to think. Two millennia ago, Pontius Pilate asked, “What is truth?” If a skilled speaker had been on hand, the subsequent course of history might have been very different indeed.
Featured image: ‘The School of Athens’ byRaffaello Sanzio, c.1509-1511, via Wikimedia Commons.
“You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now. With us, you start having cards,” snapped President Trump at Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, in a so-called negotiation at the Oval Office, broadcast globally on Friday, February 28, 2025. Vice-President JD Vance went on to demand that Zelenskyy say thank you and “offer some words of appreciation for the United States of America and [Trump] who is trying to save … [Ukraine].” Before the dialogue ended with President Trump asserting “This is going to be great television,” he turned to Zelenskyy and summed it all up: “…You are either going to make a deal or we’re out. And if we’re out, you’ll fight it out… But you don’t have the cards…Once we sign that deal [a ceasefire without any guarantees], you’re in a much better position, but you are not acting at all thankful. And that’s not a nice thing. I’ll be honest. That’s not a nice thing.”
Behind all these assertions by the U.S. president and vice president that Ukraine must follow directives—indeed, that Ukraine has no choice but to comply with whatever the U.S. dictates—lies the belief that might makes right. The ancient Athenians made similar arguments in a remarkably analogous dialogue recorded in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, specifically during the conflict between Athens, a state at the height of its power, and the small, weak island of Melos.
In 416 BCE, during a truce between Sparta, Athens, the two states embroiled in the Peloponnesian War (431–405 BCE), Athens, without any clear motive or moral justification, sent a large army to Melos, a neutral state during the war, demanding that Melos join the Athenian alliance. “Right,” they claimed, “is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” (Thuc. 5.89).
The Melians were fully aware that by deciding whether to join the Athenians, they were facing a choice between war (against Athens), should they choose to maintain their neutrality, and slavery (to Athens), if they did not. They contended that they ought to be permitted to remain neutral, but Athens responded to each of their arguments with refusal and points that highlighted their superior power. At the conclusion of this disheartening dialogue, the Athenians told the Melians:
“Your strongest arguments depend upon hope and the future, and your actual resources are too scanty, as compared with those arrayed against you, for you to come out victorious. You will therefore show great blindness of judgment, unless, after allowing us to retire, you can find some counsel more prudent than this … And it is certain that those who do not yield to their equals, who keep terms with their superiors, and are moderate towards their inferiors, on the whole succeed best. Think over the matter, therefore, after our withdrawal, and reflect once and again that it is for your country that you are consulting, that you have not more than one, and that upon this one deliberation depends its prosperity or ruin.” (Thuc. 5.111)
With us, they said, you will have cards. But you are not acting at all thankful to us, who can guarantee your security.
This notion that might is right is foundational for the realist school of International Relations, which argues that power, often enforced through violence or war, structures the relationships among sovereign nations. However, the apparent rationality of Trump and Vance’s arguments, as well as those of the ancient Athenians, is misleading.
Thucydides’ presentation of the Athenians in this dialogue is not positive. At the end of it, the Athenians besieged the Melians, who surrendered a few months later and faced the harsh penalty of having all the male citizens executed and all the women and children sold to slavery. These were reprehensible acts to Thucydides, most of the ancient Greeks, and probably many of the Athenians. A few months later, the Athenians made an arrogant and disastrous decision to invade the island of Sicily, where they suffered an utter defeat that marked the beginning of their loss to the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides, who was writing his history after Athens had been defeated in Sicily, offers the Melian dialogue as an example of how states should not behave toward one another. The events on Melos mark a turning point in Athens’ history, when its excessive use of force and abuse of power eventually came back to bite and destroy the Athenians. In 411 BCE, after the disaster on Sicily, Athens briefly abolished its democracy and instituted an oligarchy, followed just 7 years later by another oligarchic regime that ruled violently, disenfranchised most Athenian citizens, and killed foreigners and citizens alike to get rid of enemies. It took a civil war in Athens to restore democracy and return to a healthy civic community.
Athens’ behavior toward the Melians and the belief that power equates to justice led the Athenians directly into a civil war. As a professional historian, I do not think that history repeats itself. Instead, I believe not knowing history is like driving without rear-view mirrors. The televised negotiations in the Oval Office should make us all cautious about the future for the U.S. and the world. As we rush headlong into the future, we should slow down and consider whether there are alternative ways to structure international relations based not on fear and strength, but on positive values like community and peace. We must reflect on whether our states’ actions, or even our own, align with a good moral code and whether war is genuinely inevitable.
It is a real honour—and more than a little daunting—to take over from Tim Whitmarsh as Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Classical Dictionary. The first edition of the Dictionary appeared more than three quarters of a century ago, in 1949, offering “an authoritative one-volume guide to all aspects of the ancient world.” A great deal has changed since, including, of course, how we view “the ancient world.” After four editions of the print dictionaries, the shift to a fully digital OCD5, begun in 2015, offered huge opportunities for improving and extending our coverage and our readers’ experience in using the dictionary.
In March 2016, this digital OCD included all 6,400 entries of OCD4, and only c. 25 new articles; since then, we have continued to build upon this impressive legacy as we continue to commission both entirely new articles and revisions of previously existing articles. (At the time of writing, in April 2025, the total of new and revised entries has reached nearly 700). The digital format allows for a number of advantages: not only does moving beyond the constraints of the printed page allow for more substantial coverage, it also allows for the embedding of links to both ancient source material and other OCD articles, as well as encouraging the use of digital images.
The revision process has allowed for substantial expansion of our coverage of such important and well-known classical authors as Sappho and Martial, and subjects such as the epithalamium and Latin metre. Our coverage of ancient history continues to include key issues, such as class and class struggle and Greek colonization, plus updated articles on Greek and Roman enslavement. The ability to include images is of great benefit to readers, in particular when it comes to the area of classical art and archaeology—as with the new article on graffiti, and the newly revised articles on Roman portraiture and Greek painting.
An increase in our coverage of the ancient Near East reflects the growing understanding of Classicists of the interconnectedness of the ancient Mediterranean: readers can learn (for example) from a newly expanded articles on Akkadian and Sumerian and a brand-new article on Mesopotamian ghosts. Jewish studies, too, is well-represented, with revised articles on rabbis and on the Sadducees. The importance of late antique and Byzantine studies to the field is increasingly recognised—note, for instance, the expanded articles on the important scholars and authors Priscian and Michael Psellos. Later reception of the classical world continues to be a growing field and our coverage includes the reception of ancient architecture and other forms of visual and material culture (such as the afterlives of the Pantheon and of triumphal arches), as well as of literature.
While women were traditionally overlooked in classical scholarship, recent articles include a new entry on Iulia Balbilla, who travelled to Egypt with the emperor Hadrian and his wife Sabina and commemorated her visit by inscribing four poems on the left leg of the Memnon Colossus, as well as an expanded entry on women in philosophy. The experiences of a much wider range of women are commemorated in the article on the female life-course. Science, technology, and mathematics are indeed well represented, such as by new and revised articles on Egyptian mathematics and knowledge about animals.
As with previous editions of the OCD, we commission state of the art articles on new and evolving areas of classical scholarship, showing the impact of modern approaches. This can be seen across the different fields covered by OCD5, but includes new articles on cognitive science and on pain. In the broad realm of science and technology, we are increasingly aware of the importance of issues relating to the climate, and you will also find a newly revised article on meteorology; meanwhile, the ways in which the boundaries between the human and non-human were also of concern in classical thought are explored in our new article on robots and cyborgs in antiquity.
The OCD is the product of longstanding international collaboration, and we continue to expand to include an increasingly diverse range of authors and editors. What we have in common is a commitment to the mission of Oxford Classical Dictionary to continue to provide a truly authoritative home for classical scholarship, even as definitions of the “classical” continue to evolve, and digital advances and other changes alike continue to transform the way both scholars and the wider public encounter the ancient world. Please do feel free to get in touch with your own suggestions for what continues to be an exciting and ongoing collaborative project.
In the mid-sixth century BCE, the Greek mystic Aristeas of Proconessus composed a hexameter poem recounting a journey deep into Eurasia. According to Herodotus, Aristeas set off from his island home in the Sea of Marmara to visit the “one-eyed Arimaspians, and beyond them the griffins which guard the gold, and beyond the griffins the Hyperboreans, whose land comes down to the sea.” Very little is known about Aristeas’ poem, which was already considered obscure in Herodotus’ time. At one time, some critics thought that Aristeas must have been initiated into a shamanic cult. At the very least, we can say that Aristeas’ poem was suffuse with insights about nomadism on the steppe.
One haunting fragment appears to report the first time a steppe nomad laid eyes on a Greek ship:
Now this is a great wonder in our hearts. Men dwell in the water, away from land, in the sea; they are wretched, for they have harsh toils; eyes on the stars, they have a heart in the sea. Often stretching their hands up to the gods, they pray for their turbulent hearts.
Around 700 BCE, Greek speakers fanned out across the Mediterranean in search of work, new land, and trade. In the densely settled eastern Mediterranean, Greek speakers slotted themselves into preexisting political and economic structures, as they would in Late Period Egypt. Greeks practically introduced the art of navigation into the Black Sea, instigating a long period of social upheaval as indigenous populations vied for the opportunity of trade.
Through a wide range of encounters—some exploitative, and others not—Greek newcomers transmitted a disorganized catalog of observations and reflections on foreign peoples into what I call a “racial imaginary.” Up until around 500 BCE, this imaginary was basically unstructured. But in the wake of Persia’s fifth century interventions in the Aegean, the “racial imaginary” would coalesce into the menacing barbarian “Other”—a culturalconstruct that would be mobilized to endorse conquest, enslavement, and unequal treatment all over Greece. It is in this sense that the otherwise-neutral physiognomic descriptions found in a sixth century author like Xenophanes, who speaks of “dark-skinned Ethiopians and gray-eyed Thracians” would later be repurposed into the buffoonish stereotype of enslaved Thracians that people Attic comedy.
Ceramic comic mask representing an enslaved Thracian, Hellenistic Period. [Image courtesy of the Princeton University Art Museum, y1950-69. Public domain.]
“Race” is a controversial word in the study of premodernity. For most of the last eighty years, premodernists avoided it. The decades prior to World War II represented the highwater mark of racialism, a historiographic school that interpreted the competition between races as the main act of world history. (Aside from a general sense that northern Europeans were innately superior, there was substantial disagreement as to how these races should be defined). During the war, a generation of anti-racist historians including Eric Williams (1911-81) and Frank M. Snowden, Jr. (1911-2007) debunked the racialist thesis by turning to the social sciences, where revulsion towards Nazi atrocities had discredited previously-ascendent racial theories. According to these scholars, racism (which they tended to assimilate into anti-Blackness) is a discrete, historical development linked to efforts to legitimate the transatlantic slave trade using the language of human biology. To argue that it existed prior to the eighteenth century would be anachronistic.
This perspective on race and racism has dominated the premodern humanities ever since. Open any book and learn that ancient slavery was colorblind; even scholars who recognized the ubiquity of ancestry-based discrimination in Greece or Rome shied away from the language of race and racism, for instance offering circumlocutions like “proto-racism” when pressed. In the 2000-10s, pioneering scholars including Denise McCoskey, Susan Lape, and Geraldine Heng gravitated toward a school of American legal thought known as Critical Race Theory (CRT) in an effort to identify race as a social phenomenon across premodernity. The midcentury anti-racists had approached race from the perspective of science: the concept of race could not exist in societies that lacked a science of biology. But CRT defines race as a practice: to be a racist is to (in Heng’s words) enact “a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment,” regardless whether one has a coherent ideology to justify such treatment or not. Simply put, the practice of racecraft long preceded the emergence of racial pseudo-science in late eighteenth century Europe. In any period of history, people who mistreated other classes of people based on perceived notions of ancestry, physiognomy, or both—even deeply confused ones—can be called racists.
When Aristeas arrived in what is now Ukraine or Russia in the early sixth century BCE, he did not bring the baggage of racism with him. People in Archaic Greece had a fluid vision of humanity, believing in hybridized beasts, gods in human form, and heroes among one’s ancestors. Some Greeks even believed they descended from Egyptian pharaohs. As Aristeas and his comrades unleashed forces of social transformation on the steppe, they brought with them a jumble of new visions of the human body. In the very first generation of Greek colonization, settlers were depositing Egyptian-style faience seals molded into the shape of human heads into graves. Greeks were learning to catalog, inspect, and curate images of the human body long before human diversity became an index of oppression. (FIGURE)
Seal in the form of a head of an African head. From sixth century BCE burial in Olbia, Ukraine. Excavated by B. Pharmakowski in 1908. After B. Toueaïeff, “Objets égyptiens et égyptisants trouvés dans la Russie méridionale.” Revue Archéologique 18 (1911): 20-35. [Public domain.]
And an index of oppression it would become. When Classical Athenians imagined the snowy lands to the north of the Black Sea, they saw a forbidding territory inhabited by wild ‘Scythians’ and ‘Thracians,’ names insisted upon despite the region’s multiplicity of cultures. To Athenians, the people of the north were archetypical slaves: light-skinned, prone to flush, dim-witted, and sexually available: evidence for their lives can be found everywhere from the literary sphere to auction records to the funerary markers inscribed not with names, but an expression like “Useful Scythian.” They were subject to ethnographic and medical speculation; they were subject to Athenian laws, but rarely protected by them. Rendered commodities by the slave trade, they were racialized in their everyday experience of Athenian life.
In the Quechua-speaking highlands where the Incas built their empire more than 500 years ago, farmers and herders used the concept of pacha—movement across space and time—to shape local identities. They believed that their ancestors emerged onto wild landscapes in the South American Andes when the universe was created, and that they wandered until they found places they could transform for human habitation and subsistence. The first Cañaris descended from a sacred mountain in the Ecuadorean highlands; the ancestral Chancas of southern Peru followed the water flowing out of a high mountain lake. Daily tasks drew people from the here-and-now of their villages, into an ancestral tableau in which noteworthy landscape features recalled those original migrations.
The Inca nobility traced its origins to a cave located to the south of Cuzco, the imperial capital. During the mid-sixteenth century, Inca men told Spaniards of an ancient journey in which their powerful male ancestors turned to stone to establish Inca dominion over their city and its valley. Their female ancestors conquered and displaced local populations and helped to build the Coricancha, the temple-palace where the last surviving male ancestor founded his imperial house. Most Spaniards considered these dynastic stories to be factual, because Inca nobles used knotted-cord devices, painted boards, praise songs, and other memory aids to preserve oral histories.
Spaniards expressed a very different attitude when it came to the stories of universal creation that set ancestral Andean migrations in motion—they described them as fables or superstitions that were at best laughably misguided, and at worst constituted demonic misinformation that blinded Andean peoples to their true origins. Any account of universal creation that diverged from the stories found in Genesis posed a challenge to Spanish efforts to convert and colonize Andean peoples. Some of the anxiety over repeating Indigenous creation stories came from the lack of clarity regarding the origin of the peoples that Spaniards had come to call “Indians.” European Christians used biblical accounts of the Deluge and the Tower of Babel to help explain the diversity of cultures and languages that they lumped under that racialized rubric, but a fundamental question nagged at them: how did these people get to the Americas before we did?
To displace Andean creation stories and fit Native peoples into their own apocalyptic project of transatlantic colonization, Spanish writers concocted an array of apocryphal speculations. Some said that the first Indians were Phoenician or Carthaginian voyagers, while others claimed that they descended from a lost tribe of Israel or somehow originated in the mysterious lands of the Tatars or the Poles. The royal cosmographer Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa wrote in 1572 that the first Indians descended from Noah’s grandson Tubal, who settled in Spain and whose offspring peopled the island of Atlantis before moving into the Americas. In effect, that account leveraged Plato’s philosophical writings to render Native Americans as long-lost Spaniards. (Not to be outdone, the English explorer Walter Raleigh justified his search for El Dorado on the basis that the Incas—or “Ingas” as he called them—came from “Inglatierra” and were thus his own erstwhile countrymen.)
Amidst this cacophony of unfounded speculation, the Jesuit Bernabé Cobo hit much closer to the mark in 1653, arguing that “Indians” first crossed into the Americas via a yet-undiscovered land bridge from Asia. Although this speculation has proved prescient, it was built on a racialized argument that no archaeologist today would accept. Cobo devoted several chapters to reducing the vast human diversity native to the Americas into a few general “Indian” features—reddish skin, dark eyes, straight black hair, and pronounced phlegmatic and sanguine humors—that he considered similar to populations in east Asia. Cobo did more than describe phenotypic similarities, however: he claimed that both populations possessed similarly undesirable personalities, being cowardly, unreliable, and easily led astray.
Cobo’s natural history remained unpublished until the late 1800s, but a similar mix of physical stereotyping, medieval humoralism, and ethnocentrism resurfaced in the eighteenth century in the work of Carolus Linnaeus, the father of binomial taxonomy. In his Systema Naturae, Linnaeus distinguished the supposed red skin of Homo americanus rubescens (Indians) from the brownish tone of Homo asiaticus fuscus (Asians), noting supposed differences in their humoral imbalances, which made them choleric and phlegmatic, respectively. Linnaeus characterized the Indian race as governed by “custom,” and Asians as governed by “opinion.” This pseudoscientific classification helped to inspire later writers, such as the German physiologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and the American physician Samuel Morton, to collect human skulls and measure human bodies to demonstrate racial differences. In the Andes, skull collection and other racialized metrics were entangled with the earliest archaeological research—for example, when Hiram Bingham mounted his second Peruvian expedition to return to the ruins of Machu Picchu in 1912, he brought along an anatomist to measure the bodies of living Quechua people, to determine whence they had originated, and how long their ancestors had lived in Peru.
Archaeologists today reject the racial judgments that run through such work, but they continue to collect evidence about ancient migrations. Researchers now use a battery of geochemical methods to identify the origins of different kinds of pottery and stone tools, and new studies of stable isotopes and DNA from ancient human remains are adding unprecedented new data about the ways that people moved throughout and settled in the Andes. As scientific methods have improved, research practices have become more sensitive to the rights and interests of descendant populations, who continue to make ancestral claims to their local landscapes as a way to maintain identity and defend what is theirs. The increasing commitment to community engagement in Andean archaeology reminds scholars of the enduring power of narratives of origin and migration, whether they come from an oral tradition or laboratory science.
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