Ancient Greece seems like it was a pretty great place. It was the birthplace of democracy,
it had a flourishing arts scene, a vibrant mythology, and spectacular architecture. Prominent
intellectuals like Aristotle and Plato made huge leaps in scientific and philosophical reasoning.
The land was fertile, and the wine flowed like water. It was a veritable utopia of free thought
and civilizational achievement. Or was it? Welcome back to Nutty History. Today, we’re looking at
the dark, dirty secrets of ancient Greece, from zombie apocalypses to questionable beauty trends.
If you lived in Athens in the seventh century BC, then you could have faced death for stealing
a cabbage. Around 621 BC, Athens instituted its first written constitution. Before then, the legal
system was based on a system of oral law. There was no neat set of defined laws and penalties
for crimes, and usually it was the victims’ responsibility to seek justice for some crime
committed against them. This could lead to blood feuds that lasted for generations. What’s more,
the aristocracy would often manipulate these laws to benefit themselves as they saw fit, which led
to a vastly unequal society. So, it was eventually agreed that reform was needed. The reform, though,
ended up being a very harsh system, where death or enslavement was handed out for even minor crimes.
These first written laws were called the Draconian Constitution. Penned by a little-known aristocrat
named Draco, they failed to end the inequality between the aristocracy and common people. For
one thing, it set up the debt enslavement system we mentioned earlier, where wealthy landowners
could enslave their tenants if they didn’t pay their debts. For another, only those who carried
weapons or owned a certain amount of land had any political rights. Also, many of the punishments
didn’t seem to fit the crimes. You could serve death for stealing, but if you accidentally
dispatched someone and then apologized to the person’s family, you’d be off the hook. Draco’s
laws were eventually deemed too…well, draconian. In 594 BC, just a few decades after they were
enacted, they were repealed by the lawmaker Solon and replaced with a more lenient set of laws.
Our modern culture is obsessed with zombies – from the Walking Dead to I Am Legend to seas of
kids dressed up as undead for Halloween. Zombies and the zombie apocalypse have
become part of movie coverage. And it turns out that the Greeks were pretty into zombies too.
Despite developing philosophies that revolved around logic, rational thought, and discourse,
the ancient Greeks also seemed to fear the undead emerging from their graves and stalking
the streets, roaming around, and attacking people as a way of getting revenge for their own deaths.
Archaeologists have found graves where the deceased have been weighed down with rocks or
large fragments of pottery so they were unable to rise up and stumble freely around biting
people. Old writing from the time also mentions zombies, calling them revenants. Often people
with mysterious illnesses or deformities would be most suspected of becoming zombies after they were
put in the ground, and grave sites uncovered in various sites within the ancient Greek
territory seem to confirm this. Carrie Weaver, a prominent Greek archaeologist, has written that:
“It is clear that many members of [Greek] society thought that the dead could roam the earth…they
imagined scenarios in which reanimated corpses rose from their graves, prowled the streets,
and stalked unsuspecting victims, often to exact retribution denied to them in life.” The
Greeks also had a famous zombie-type of legend. Vrykolakas was an undead creature, kind of in
between a zombie and a vampire, that would eat whoever was unlucky enough to cross its path.
If you were a woman living in Ancient Greece, and wanted to put on some makeup, it was very likely
you were applying lead to your face. Lead was a common ingredient in ancient Greek cosmetics. The
word itself comes from the Greek “kosmetica”, and the act of beautifying one’s face was to
“kommotikon”. Although Greek writers, who were mostly men, typically frowned upon “kommotikon”,
saying it was mostly used by women of the night and other lower-class women, it’s now widely
accepted that pretty much all classes of women – and even many men – used makeup to highlight
their features and brighten their skin. But the lead paste they used often led to horrible
disfigurement and scarring, eating away at the skin and causing disease. In a vicious cycle,
it would be applied in thicker and thicker amounts to cover up the damage it was already causing.
Kommotikon fell under a more general word for beauty in ancient Greece, which was known as
“kallos” Kallos wasn’t just external beauty. The Greeks believed that outward beauty was also a
sign of someone’s internal beauty. If you were beautiful, then you were a morally good person,
and vice versa. It was around this time that the Greek mathematician, Pythagoras, discovered the
Golden Ratio. Balance and symmetry became linked to beauty of all kinds – in nature and in humans.
Symmetrical faces were thus considered the most beautiful faces. It went so far in ancient Greece
that unibrows became all the rage. Unibrows – a feared facial feature now which many people try
to hide through plucking or shaving – were considered more beautiful because they were
more symmetrical. Many people would go so far as to use kohl – an Egyptian type of mascara made
with more lead-based ingredients – to paint on a unibrow if they were unlucky enough not to have
been blessed by the gods with a lusciously joined brow. The things we do for beauty.
Medicine in Ancient Greece was definitely a step up from what it was before. But it was still
ancient in a lot of ways. For one thing, before the 5th century BC, illness was considered divine
punishment exacted by the gods. If you died, the gods were to blame, and if you got better, it
was because the gods gave you a gift. By 500 BC, things were starting to get a bit more refined,
but the distinction between science and religion was often quite blurry. The Greek god Ascelpius,
for example, was both a divine healer and a highly-skilled doctor. However,
there were no professional qualifications for being a doctor. Anyone could roam around Ancient
Greece saying they were doctors, practicing the “tekhne” or mysterious art of medicine. Had some
kind of malady? Oftentimes bloodletting would be prescribed. The ancient Greeks were big fans of
it. Bloodletting was connected to a medicinal system called Humorism, though there wasn’t
much that was funny about it. In Humorism, the human body is split into four humors:
blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. In a healthy person, these four components
were in proper balance. But pain or illness would pop up if they became out of whack.
A lot of the time, temperature was directly connected to the humors. For example,
hot foods were thought to produce yellow bile, while cold foods produced phlegm. Cities exposed
to cold winds were associated with lung disease and hot winds with digestive problems. Humorism
was practiced long after Ancient Greece. It wasn’t until the 1850s and the advent of Germ Theory that
it fell out of favor among physicians around the world. If you were living in Athens around 430 BC,
there was a one-in-three chance you would’ve died. During the Spartan siege of Athens during the
Peloponnesian war, a mysterious outbreak killed more than a third of the population. No one really
knows what the culprit was. Some think it was typhus, others influenza or measles, some say
Ebola. According to the historian Thucydides, the plague may have originated somewhere in Africa,
spreading through the Persian Empire and finally making its way into Athens. Symptoms included
fever, followed by inflamed eyes and bleeding from the mouth and respiratory failure. The
outbreak led to chaos within Athens, where nearly 100,000 people died, a tragedy compounded by the
Spartan siege. The whole situation left Athens in tatters, and ultimately signaled the end of
its Golden Age. Athens would be absorbed by Sparta about 25 years later. So there you
have it. For all of Ancient Greece’s incredible achievements, life for most of us during this
great civilization would have probably been pretty gross, pretty brutish and pretty short.