Legends, Lies & Cherished Myths of World History

Richard Shenkman

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780062098863
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

"Was there really a valiant little Dutch boy, a protesting Lady Godiva, a fiddling Nero, or a prudish Queen Victoria? No, says Shenkman ….No person, event, or thing is safe from Shenkman's corrections."
— Booklist

Founder of George Mason University's History News Network and bestselling author of Presidential Ambition and One Night Stands with American History, Rick Shenkman is an historian, a rebel, and a myth debunker par excellence. In Legends, Lies & Cherished Myths of World History, he explodes some of the most honored and long-held misconceptions about kings and despots, wars and empires, religions, inventions, from the glory days of the Roman Empire to the dark days of World War Two. Fascinating, edifying, and irreverent, here is the real world history you were never taught in school—for history buffs and confirmed trivia fanatics everywhere!

PART 1

WAY BACK WHEN

TROJAN WAR

SOCRATES

ALEXANDER THE GREAT

HERODOTUS

CAESAR

CLEOPATRA

CALIGULA

NERO

THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

THE BARBARIANS

TROJAN WAR

The myth about the Trojan War is that there was one. There wasn’t. At least there wasn’t one that we know of. In the thousands of years that have elapsed since Homer’s epic appeared, nobody has ever produced any evidence that the war he described took place. All the faithful have going for them is hope. (We don’t even know if Homer was real. See below.)

That Troy once existed is true. Indeed, from archaeological evidence unearthed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there would appear to have been at least nine Troys piled one atop the other (located in what is now Turkey). But there is no proof there was ever a war between Greece and Troy involving a beautiful queen named Helen, a big wooden horse, or a hero weakened by an Achilles’ heel.

Presumably Greeks and Trojans fought each other at one time or another. After all, they were human. And there must have been some reason the Trojans built the huge walls surrounding their city. But there’s no archaeological evidence that an army ever planted itself outside the walls of Troy, let alone a huge Greek army that is supposed to have numbered 110,000 soldiers.

Much of the story, at any rate, is patently implausible. That the war lasted ten years is inconceivable; army discipline never could have been maintained that long (no other war at the time is known to have lasted more than a few months). And nobody believes that the Greek soldiers camped out on the beach all those years, their Greek kings right along with them. The business about Helen—that she’d supposedly eloped with a Trojan prince and that the Greeks went to war to get her back—is attractive but unsubstantiated. Besides, it’s unlikely she ever would have eloped. FitzRoy Raglan, an expert in world history, reported that he could find “no instance” in history “in which a queen has eloped with a foreign prince, or anybody else.”

Anyway, nobody knows if Helen ever even lived. To be sure, tradition has it that the beauty whose face “launched a thousand ships” actually lived and actually served as queen. But tradition also has it that she was the daughter of Zeus and that she was “hatched from a swan’s egg.”

As for the story of the Trojan Horse, nothing substantiates it. Out of the thousands of objects that have turned up in repeated excavations of Troy, not one lends any credence to the existence of a big wooden horse.

Those who claim the story of Troy is true insist it doesn’t matter if some of the details are implausible or unsupported. What counts are the plausible details. But by this method any poem could be found to be historically sound. Just because a poem includes a real person or two doesn’t mean the poem is about a real event. Yet this is the kind of argument apologists for the Homeric epic have advanced.

Thucydides believed that the story of Troy was true. But Thucydides lived more than eight hundred years after the war supposedly occurred and was in no better position than we are to vouch for its accuracy. Probably he just wanted to believe it was true.

Homer has long been credited with the story but nobody knows who he was, where he lived, whether he really existed, or how he possibly could have come by reliable information about Troy’s early history. If he lived it was in the eighth or ninth century B.C., some four centuries after the war he described was fought. Chances are we know more today about the real Troy than Homer would have.

It’s possible, of course, that the story was handed down over the centuries largely intact. In the old days of oral tradition people had better memories than they do today. But why would the Greeks have bothered to celebrate a war with Troy when they neglected to recall so much else that happened in their past of far greater consequence?

What we are left with then is a poem written by a man who may not have lived concerning a war that probably never took place.¹

SOCRATES

How did Socrates die? From the familiar depictions of the event it always looks as if he passed away peacefully. How did he actually die? He died a nasty, terrible, horrible death. After drinking his cup of hemlock, he went into convulsions, got nauseated, vomited, and then became paralyzed.

It was the great Plato who led people to think Socrates died in quiet dignity, but Plato, we now know, lied.

How do we know this? Because, after twenty-five centuries of research into every facet of Socrates’ life, somebody one day finally thought to ask how it was that Socrates died a quiet death when everybody else who ever ingested a fatal dose of hemlock died in agonizing pain.

Speaking of Plato, how is it he was the one who chronicled the story of Socrates’ death? Plato didn’t even attend Socrates’ death. Fourteen other disciples found the time to attend, but not dear old Plato.

Plato’s excuse was that he was sick. But nobody believes him. You don’t hear much about this, but historians think he stayed away from the death scene to deliberately distance himself from Socrates, who wasn’t too popular a figure with the authorities in town just then.²

ALEXANDER THE GREAT

Alexander the Great was the first person in history to prove that killing lots of people is easy if you put your mind to it.

Killing ran in the family. His father, Philip II, demonstrated a talent for killing Greeks. His mother, Olympias, who worshiped snakes, had the young children of one of her husband’s other wives roasted live over an open fire. (Alexander, it’s said, was very mad at her for the roasting. But he got over it. He loved her.)

Whether Alexander was a born killer I couldn’t tell you. But he seems to have shown he was his parents’ child early on. Before he was into his teens he is said, by some accounts, to have murdered his astronomy tutor. Later, he murdered rivals to the throne he inherited from his father. By the time he himself died he is thought to have killed more people than anybody else in history ever had up to that time.

In one battle alone, says Plutarch, Alexander’s army killed 110,000 Persians. Plutarch leaves the impression this was a considerable achievement. Whether the Persians felt the same way he doesn’t say.

Plutarch, incidentally, probably exaggerated the death toll. One expert estimates that in this battle Alexander probably killed only fifteen thousand Persians. In the old days writers tended to inflate the casualty figures.

Whether he enjoyed killing is unknown. But he seems to have had a pretty high tolerance of it. Supporters point out, though, that he always killed people in the open. Alexander was like that. There wasn’t a sneaky bone in his body. If he wanted you dead, he came right out with it. Nobody he killed ever died wondering who’d done it.^*

When he killed the wrong person, he was always very sorry. Plutarch says when Alexander killed his best friend during an argument he deeply mourned the loss, crying his heart out for two whole days.

Plutarch says Alexander slaughtered people to show them who was boss. His apologists, however, claim he was a good man all in all. Biographer Sir William Tarn explained that Alexander was driven in his conquests by the mission “to do something to outlaw war.” Another scholar, W. A. Wright, has said of Alexander: “He boldly proclaimed the brotherhood of man.”

Did he cut the Gordian knot? Most people don’t know what the Gordian knot was, but they know he cut it.^* Scholarly opinion is divided on the matter. Some say he untied the knot. Others say he cut it with his sword. And some claim the whole story’s nonsense, that there was no Gordian knot and that Alexander didn’t untie it or cut it.

He finally stopped conquering people after nine years in the field. It came about one day as he was preparing to cross the Beas, a river in India. Alexander shouted, “Let’s go.” And his men shouted back, “Forget it.” And that about ended it, as Alexander wasn’t much of a conqueror without an army.

Why did his men refuse to go further? It may be they were simply homesick. Or they may have been tired of the rain. But biographer Peter Green is of the opinion that they’d finally figured out that Alexander’s aim was to conquer the whole world. And they didn’t want to.

Alexander died when he was thirty-two. It was probably just as well. With his army unexcited about new conquests, there just wasn’t much to live for. Nobody, incidentally, knows how he died. He may have been poisoned. Or he may have partied too much. He died after a two-day feast.³

HERODOTUS

What of Herodotus, the Father of History?

Herodotus’s method in writing his books was to include: (1) every story he ever heard, whether it was true or not (like the story about ants as big as foxes), (2) made-up Persian speeches, (3) plagiarized texts, and (4) out-and-out lies. And people decided to call him the Father of History. Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?⁴

CAESAR

First off, nobody ever called him Julius Caesar. They just called him Caesar. They didn’t use first names back then unless a man had male siblings from whom he had to be distinguished.

That the cesarean section is named after Caesar is inaccurate. The name comes from the Latin word caedere, meaning “to cut.”

Whether he himself was born through a cesarean section is probably nobody’s business. Anyway, the experts can’t seem to agree whether he was or he wasn’t. They don’t even agree on whether the operation was performed at the time.⁵

Almost everybody is aware that he was an emperor—or thinks he was. But he wasn’t. Roman leaders weren’t called emperors for another generation, even though Rome had already conquered half of Europe. In Caesar’s day Rome was still formally a republic, though Caesar himself helped bring about the fall of the republic by inserting the army directly into politics.

So what was Caesar? He was dictator for life. His apologists like to point out that unlike modern dictators, who usually appoint themselves to the position, Caesar was appointed dictator by the senate, as provided for under existing Roman law. But while it was all just about legal, the senate would seem to have been influenced a little bit by the fact that he had the army behind him.

A lot is usually made of his decision to cross the Rubicon, as well it should. His decision ended, in effect, five hundred years of republican rule. Afterwards, the army dominated Rome. But it’s interesting that for all the talk about the Rubicon, nobody knows where it was. All we know is that it was one of the streams marking the border between Italy and Gaul near the Adriatic coast.

Caesar is credited with the phrase “The die is cast,” which he is supposed to have remarked as he prepared to cross the Rubicon. But Caesar did not coin the phrase. Plutarch says it was common even in Caesar’s day.

Caesar deserves to be remembered as the bragging author of the line, “I came, I saw, I conquered,” which he wrote in a letter quoted by Suetonius.

But when he died he did not say, “Et tu, Brute?” What he said—Shakespeare notwithstanding—was: “And thou, Brutus, my child!” (Caesar believed that Brutus was his son. He had an affair with Brutus’s mother lasting some twenty years.)

That he died on the Ides of March is true. But the movies are wrong in suggesting he ignored the warning to stay away from the senate. Actually, upon being warned he immediately decided to postpone his appearance. But Brutus subsequently persuaded him to go.

What I find most interesting about Caesar is not what’s said about him, but what’s not sa...