I love history. I love hearing a good story and the best kind of story is the sort that is true. Reading history is good, but I especially love an oral telling, the kind of account you get in a classroom or in a documentary. Lately, I’ve enjoyed listening to history in podcast form, as told by Dan Carlin in his Hardcore History podcast. He has an auxiliary podcast feed called Hardcore History – Addendum in which he recently published a feature entitled “Glimpses of Olympias.” This episode tells the story of Alexander the Great’s mother, relating her cunning and malevolent ways. As he tells Olympias’ story, Carlin relates the depraved practices typically embraced during those pagan times – cultic orgies, rampant homosexual trysts, and brutal sexual violence. As I listened to Carlin depict the context in which Alexander lived, I was struck by how alien their standards were to the traditional moral values passed down to us in modern Western society. It becomes all the more striking when one remembers that Greek culture figures large in forming the bedrock of Western civilization. Clearly, Christian moral tradition that was later introduced led the West to dump the social acceptance of these practices.
And yet, what first struck me as alien, became disturbingly familiar as I recently searched for a show to watch one Sunday night.
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