I'm a bad influence on people.
The excellent and previously innocent ancient history author Vicky Alvear Shecter, inspired by my last post, has collected some lovely pictures of drunk, vomiting Greeks on ancient pottery.
So in the last week we've had slavery from Geoff. Pederasty from me. And excessive partying from Vicky. I shudder to think what next. Between us we've pretty much proven that the ancients could hang out like any modern Hollywood star.
4 comments:
So, did the ancient Greeks have paparazzi, too?
Thanks for the shout-out, Gary. And you're right--I can't WAIT to see what you come up with next!
RE: Sarah W's question--don't know about paparazzi, but they did have their own publicity people. Alexander the Great traveled with a guy named Callisthenes whose job was to make Alex look good to the Macedonians and other Greeks back home. And when poor Cal stopped spinning the PR in a way that Alex liked, he paid for it--with his life. And they say PR work is lightweight! ;-)
Thank you!
I'll bet Samuel Johnson would have loved to have been allowed to do the same to Boswell, though for different reasons.
Hi Ladies,
In order to have paparazzi, one must first have paper. They imported papyrus from Egypt but it was expensive stuff so I doubt anything like a newspaper existed.
The Romans did though! They had a rag (if you can call something chiseled in stone a rag) called the Acta Diurna. Which would translate colloquially as The Daily News. For all I know, Acta Diurna might count as the world's first newspaper.
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