A classicist writes about ancient Greek and Roman history, language, and culture, correcting popular myths.
Commenters cite it to debunk claims such as Roman soldiers being paid in salt, the needle's eye gate, and the solstice date.
> The esteemed philosopher was sentenced to death because he was deliberately annoying people
No. Socrates was executed because he was associated with the worst rulers that the city of Athens had ever known, all former students of his, who notably went on to kill thousands of Athenian citizens (not enemies, strangers, or slaves), following the defeat in the Peloponnesian War.
After the tyrants were killed and democracy was restored, general amnesty law was granted to anyone involved except the Thirty Tyrants themselves and their direct aides. However resentment, understandably, remained.
> There was a lot of bad blood between the people of Athens and Socrates’ followers. That wouldn’t have been enough by itself. But the murder of between 5% and 15% of the citizen population in 404 must have pushed things over the edge. Imagine if Osama bin Laden, Timothy McVeigh, and Saddam Hussein had all had the same person as their ethics teacher: would you be very surprised if that person got harsh treatment from a jury? And would you then call that person a martyr?
http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2016/04/socrates-1-did-socrates-die-for-this.html
This blog by a classicist claims that the word salary is indeed coming from the latin words salarium and sal, but that it is not clear what the connection is, that there is neither evidence for the explanation that Roman soldiers were paid in salt nor that it was an allowance for the specific purpose of buying salt:
http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2017/01/salt-and-salary.html
Regarding the latter he writes:
"As I said above, ‘salt allowance’ isn’t a terrible guess. But I strongly suspect it’s much more metaphorical than that. Compare how the Greek word for a salary was opsōnion, literally ‘(money) for buying opson’, where opson means ‘fish, relish, sauce’. That doesn’t mean Greek workers were given a ‘fish allowance’: it means that there was a generalised idea that wages went on traded goods like fish, and not on things like barley which land-owners would grow for themselves. Similarly, in Rome, grain allowances were a common thing; it could easily make sense to interpret salarium as ‘everything-else-money’."
> salt was not a rare resource in italy, the sea is everywhere
If I recall correctly, the book from the article mentions that the sea is an inefficient way to gather salt. The salinity is just much lower than what you can find in underground brine springs. It also goes into how Italian city-states went to war over control of saltworks, and how it hugely increased the wealth of whoever controlled it. So although it may not have been rare, I don't think it's accurate to paint it as an abundant resource, either.
Interesting about the misinformation around the etymology of "salary." Thanks for pointing out. Found an article [1] that goes into more depth about how there's no evidence for the explanation.
[1]: http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2017/01/salt-and-salary.html
The final point about positivism is important. Geeks love naturalistic explanations of mythological ideas, however far fetched. Trolls are really cultural memory of Neanderthals. Dragons are dinosaurs. The witch craze was due to ergot poisoning etc.
If anyone is interested in what actual historians think about such theories, read for example this: https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2018/06/delphic-oracle.html
Tl/dr: The oracle speaking cryptic prophetic verses from a trance is a literary construction. So the ethylene theory is a trying to provide a naturalistic explanation for a fiction.
>'"the wine-dark sea"...well it doesn't mean anything like you could imagine, for their whole model of colour utterly different from ours.'
Doesn't seem like everyone agrees with this speculation:
>"I'm even less impressed by Gordon's argument: it relies on oinops meaning 'wine-dark'. The trouble is, that's not a firm foundation. Strictly literally, the phrase straightforwardly means 'wine-faced sea', from οἶνος 'wine' + ὄψ 'face'."
http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2016/01/colours-in-homer-2-wine-dark-sea.html
> By the time of Julius Caesar, the solstices were on the 25th
That is false. See https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2022/05/julian-calendar.html , or "Digression #2: why do Roman writers report the date of the solstice as 25 December?" at https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2015/12/christmas-and-its-supposed-pagan-links.html .
Solstices were on the 25th a few hundred years before the time of Julius Caesar. He did not even attempt to put them back there; his calendar put the summer solstice on the 24th.