I’m a wee bit of an ancient enthusiast. History, literature, technology, philosophy, society—the whole gamut of ancient events and ways of thinking fascinates me.

This includes the nutcases, too. After all, I’m primarily a fantasist—not a historian. Studying inaccurate (or even insane) speculation about the past is often excellent fiction fodder. The truth is indeed important; my perspective nonetheless seems fairly rare, in that I’m content to consume false information while still valuing truth from a fairly conventional perspective.

In other words, I don’t believe aliens built the Pyramids at Giza—but attempts to prove they did are fascinating.

While my “historian” hat is unfamiliar and a bit uncomfortable (too stiff), let’s try putting it on to discuss the inspiratory material of my creative work. Throughout reading and watching various historical materials, I’ve come to believe there’s two basic errors in how large numbers of people think about the ancient world:

1. The ancients were geniuses
2. The ancients were idiots

And occasionally, the two blend in some odd and interesting ways. (Looking at you, Ancient Aliens.) It’s easy to understand why people make these errors. I’m guilty of them myself! Whether exploring ideas about the ancients in my private writings or discussing them with other people, from time to time I fall into both camps. It’s easy to feel humbled, frustrated, and foolish when stumbling. That’s doubly true for people who—like myself—sort of skirt “proper” academia without directly participating.

Identifying fallacies, however, doesn’t mean that the stumbler is “wrong” in some sense as a person. Being comfortable with errors, recognizing them but not feeling ashamed of them, is how we grow.

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Ancient Geniuses

The ancients held secret wisdom, which if only we could reclaim, we could use to change the world. They were capable of impossible feats far beyond any modern “science.”

This fallacy views the past as intrinsically superior to the present—and the further back, the better! It tends to be somewhere between naive and hopeful. I’ve encountered it most often with persons also fixated on the supernatural, paranormal, and “metaphysics” outside of its standard philosophical sense.

The naive aspects of this fallacy are quite straightforward: taking ancient literary accounts at face value. Plato’s account of Atlantis in the Timaeus and the Critias, for example, is quite clearly not “secret Egyptian wisdom brought back to Egypt by Solon.” Taken in the perspective of Plato’s corpus, the tale of Atlantis fits in nicely with other elucidatory fictions like the Ring of Gyges or the Myth of Er. If argument fails to explain or convince, well, then a myth shall do.

We can observe this naivety in the ancients themselves, too. For example, in the Enneads Plotinus sometimes uses a sort of post-hoc exegesis to explain around thorny passages of Plato’s work. This process is somewhat analogous to modern Christians tip-toeing their way around the laws of the Old Testament or Paul’s bigotry. In both cases, the ancient “Master” cannot be false—we must simply understand the words correctly, in a modern and sophisticated manner which does not undermine their genius.

I quite admire the hopeful side, even if I do believe it to be an error. Often, people assume a sort of “specialness” to the past, in a magical sense which simply isn’t accurate. Thinkers of the past were better, they knew more, often because they’re seen as being “closer to the source.” An interesting historical example is the fiction of Hermes Trismegistus, devised as a source of wisdom by ancient thinkers because only that which came from the deep past could truly have spiritual merit.

Whether tales of magic or super-technology—levitation by sound waves seems to be a favorite—this mode elevates the ancient world above the truth. It seeks for the world to be more mysterious and more profound. I suspect there’s also a sense of “private truth” to it, that only the elect (who participate in the fallacy) can recognize. Internalized specialness derived from an external “secret truth” deceptively elevates the personal world of the believer.

This is also where I’d slot in the Ancient Aliens folks. Their attitude toward the achievements of past human societies tends to vary. As a general trend, they view the past as extraordinary—whether because humans harnessed alien technologies, or because aliens performed “miraculous” feats on their behalf—but dismiss the possibility that past humans were truly responsible for their accomplishments.

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Ancient Idiots

The ancients may have been capable, but only for their own time. We have far surpassed them in all regards. Honestly, it’s a little embarrassing to imagine we ever thought that way.

In contrast, another common mistake is assuming people in the past were idiots. At face value, this perspective exaggerates the gap in scientific understanding and the technological ability to manipulate the physical world between then and now. To be clear, we absolutely do know more about the material world than pretty much any time in the past. The fallacy lies not in making that factual statement, but in extending it to assume the ancients were idiots in general.

Bear with me if I reference the Enneads again, as it’s my current reading material. Plotinus’s subject is largely philosophical and/or religious. As a systematic thinker, however, he does address questions and concerns about the phenomenal world—the world of sense we experience within Time. Some answers are interesting but inaccurate, while others verge on puzzling, even taken in context of his own Platonic metaphysics.

For example, Enneads II.8 is titled “Why Distant Objects Appear Small,” and provides a somewhat peculiar explanation of blurry images because it is “the bare form that reaches us, stripped, so to speak, of magnitude as of all other quality” (Plotinus 1992, page 148). Quality being, of course, in the Platonic sense of abstract “whiteness” or “magnitude-ness.” We moderns have the tools to explore and understand the physical world in ways impossible to ancient thinkers, such as being able to understand the inner functioning of an eye, how the lens focuses light onto our retina, and so on. Without judging him for his epoch’s lack of technology, it’s still reasonable to be bemused by Plotinus’s explanation of vision given its appeal to metaphysics to explain a very physical phenomenon.

The error comes when we encounter a circumstance like this, and therefore write off all of a thinker’s work—or worse yet, the work of an entire culture. It is no contradiction that I abhor Aztec religious practices, but find the extant fragments of their poetry beautiful and moving.

What does your mind seek?
Where is your heart?
If you give your heart to each and every thing,
you lead it nowhere: you destroy your heart.
Can anything be found on earth?

—Nezahualcóyotl (Leon-Portilla 1963, page 4)

It’s easy to write off the Aztecs for their barbarity, the Greeks for their animism, or the Chinese for their indifference to novelty. (Is there a single adjective for that?) Doing so is an error which severs us from understanding—whether in horror or in admiration—additional ways of being human.

Ancient science is quite flawed. We, as humans, have changed very little since then. Our hopes and fears, loves and hates, all remain similar to those recorded in ancient history and literature. Homer’s Iliad resonates over 2,500 years after its composition because the sorrow and rage of Akhilleus is so similar to what we experience and admire here, now, today. And—I must point it out—it ends with plaintive sorrow of the Trojans, rendered with compassion for the Greeks’ enemy, as the city mourns the slain Hector.

Or go back further, to Gilgamesh, who so mourned his best friend that in his grief he traveled to the end of the world and back. Even into prehistory we can find these human touches, expressions of sentiment, longing, fear, and anguish, throughout the statuary of Gobekli Tepe or the painted caves of Lascaux.

The ancients were indeed flawed. They were human, all too human.

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A Virtuous Middle Ground

Despite labeling them as fallacies, I’m not wholly convinced either of these perspectives are fundamentally wrong. The walls of the Incan capital, Cuzco, are one of ancient man’s greatest engineering feats, worthy of wonder and praise. The scientific claims of Aristotle, frankly, do deserve laughter. That laughter need not degrade him as the father of European and Arabic science. What, then, is the best perspective when reading and exploring ancient works?

Somewhere in between seems about right. As Aristotle taught in the Nicomachean Ethics, virtue seems to stand as the middle ground between two vices. Veering into the extremities of adoration or condescension positions us poorly. Respect, humility—and yes, a little laughter, too—allows us to avoid growing too proud or too naive.

And it seems quite right to paraphrase Aristotle here, considering the extent to which his work conditions the way we think about the world. There’s an enormous amount of Aristotelian concepts organizing our modern, secular, and oh-so sophisticated minds. Striving to think this middle path not only helps us fruitfully study the past.

I believe it also helps us better understand the causal chain which ends with our selves.

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References

Leon-Portilla, Miguel (1963). Aztec Thought & Culture (J.E. Davis, Trans.). University of Oklahoma Press. (Original work published 1956.)

Plotinus (1992). The Enneads (S. MacKenna, & B.S. Page, Trans.). Larson Publications. (Original work published ca. 270 CE.)

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