Top all-time · #2859
Kiwi Hellenist
Personal blog · kiwihellenist.blogspot.comhistory
Kiwi Hellenist is a personal blog at kiwihellenist.blogspot.com about history. Since 2018, 27 different Hacker News readers have linked it 30 times, most often “Salt and salary: Were Roman soldiers paid in salt? (2017)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (18) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters cite this classics blog to correct popular claims about ancient history, such as Roman soldiers being paid in salt, the pagan origin of Christmas, and the camel through the needle's eye.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 18 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Many popular beliefs about ancient Greece and Rome are misconceptions. This blog digs into the evidence and looks for the reality behind the myth.
Most-linked posts?
- Salt and salary: Were Roman soldiers paid in salt? (2017)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-07-30
- /2023/11/camel.html2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-02-15
What Hacker News says?
> The esteemed philosopher was sentenced to death because he was deliberately annoying people No. Socrates was executed because he was associated with the worst rulers that the city of Athens had ever known, all former students of his, who notably went on to kill thousands of Athenian citizens (not enemies, strangers, or slaves), following the defeat in the Peloponnesian War. After the tyrants were killed and democr…
Comment linking /2016/04/socrates-1-did-socrates-die-for-this.html
on “Willingness to look stupid”Submitted Salt and salary: Were Roman soldiers paid in salt? (2017) as a story · 221 points
HN discussion> Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle There is controversy behind what was actually written. https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2023/11/camel.html Mostly quotes have modern contexts and the meaning is defined by your modern community - perhaps nothing to do with what was actually said. If we are allowed modern solutions then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38461089 Just old-schoo…
Comment linking /2023/11/camel.html
on “Bob Moore, who founded Bob's Red Mill, has died”Submitted Who preserved Greek literature? (2020) as a story · 78 points
HN discussion- wl · 2022-09-08
The pagan origin of Christmas is a myth. Something that specifically deals with alleged Northern European origins: http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2018/12/concerning-yule.ht...
Comment linking /2018/12/concerning-yule.html
on “Half of Japan's LDP lawmakers had ties with Unification Church” Submitted How to make sense of ancient Greek colours (2020) as a story · 46 points
HN discussionI don’t think it’s a mistranslation, the manuscripts themselves differ. Regardless of which is ‘correct,’ it’s likely an error in the retelling or copying. This person points out that either 616 or 666 could refer to Nero and some other possible evidence that was the case: http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-number-of-beas...
Comment linking /2018/06/the-number-of-beast.html?m=1
on “Tomorrow the Unix timestamp will get to 1,666,666,666”Submitted Colours in Homer #1: the bronze sky as a story · 13 points
HN discussionThis same site has an article on that very myth: http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2016/12/salting-earth.html... To summarize, salting an area was a real thing, but the evidence suggests that it was done to make the land more fertile and not less. The idea was to replace your enemy's city with weeds and greenery, as if it had never existed.
Comment linking /2016/12/salting-earth.html?m=1
on “Salt and salary: Were Roman soldiers paid in salt? (2017)”Submitted Why maps have north at the top as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> salt was not a rare resource in italy, the sea is everywhere If I recall correctly, the book from the article mentions that the sea is an inefficient way to gather salt. The salinity is just much lower than what you can find in underground brine springs. It also goes into how Italian city-states went to war over control of saltworks, and how it hugely increased the wealth of whoever controlled it. So although it m…
Comment linking /2017/01/salt-and-salary.html
on “Why Salt Was So Important Throughout History”Submitted Homeric details and other influences in Nolan's The Odyssey (2026) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe final point about positivism is important. Geeks love naturalistic explanations of mythological ideas, however far fetched. Trolls are really cultural memory of Neanderthals. Dragons are dinosaurs. The witch craze was due to ergot poisoning etc. If anyone is interested in what actual historians think about such theories, read for example this: https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2018/06/delphic-oracle.ht... Tl/dr…
Comment linking /2018/06/delphic-oracle.html
on “What caused the hallucinations of the Oracle of Delphi?”Submitted The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSo much so that there appears to be persistent belief that the word "salary" is derived from "sel" (salt): http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2017/01/salt-and-salary.ht... .
Comment linking /2017/01/salt-and-salary.html
on “Spices Have Made, and Unmade, Empires”Submitted Salt and salary: were Roman soldiers paid in salt? as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> '"the wine-dark sea"...well it doesn't mean anything like you could imagine, for their whole model of colour utterly different from ours.' Doesn't seem like everyone agrees with this speculation: > "I'm even less impressed by Gordon's argument: it relies on oinops meaning 'wine-dark'. The trouble is, that's not a firm foundation. Strictly literally, the phrase straightforwardly means 'wine-faced sea', from οἶνος '…
Comment linking /2016/01/colours-in-homer-2-wine-dark-sea.html
on “Aztec Political Thought (2013)”Submitted Aristotle's Errors as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Caviar was served as a free bar snack, in the hope that as with peanuts, the saltiness would encourage drinking. So it isn't just the cheap stuff. I do have a note about the source, though: > Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky This book vectors the myth that Romans were paid in salt. This is not true: http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2017/01/salt-and-salary.ht... (Wikipedia has, of course, been fixed. The pr…
Comment linking /2017/01/salt-and-salary.html
on “Caviar was a free bar snack”Submitted The library of Alexandria and its reputation as a story · 1 points
HN discussionFor the other side there's A. K. Gavrilov's "Techniques of reading in classical antiquity", not (legally) freely available but quoted in various places such as https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2016/02/reading-silently-... The argument for the Ambrose case is that the surprise isn't him reading silently, it's him reading silently while he has guests . (and elsewhere in the text Augustine mentions himself reading si…
Comment linking /2016/02/reading-silently-and-reading-out-loud.html
on “Was silent reading unusual during Augustine's time?”Submitted The Archimedes Palimpsest as a story · 1 points
HN discussionOn a slightly different topic, I was reading about other greek epics beyond Homer, and I knew there were things like the Theban Cycle and a broader Trojan War cycle, and it turns out that some of them may have never existed, they almost certainly weren't any kind of "cycle", the ones that did exist weren't very good, and that they may never have been written down at all outside of summaries. https://kiwihellenist.bl…
Comment linking /2020/02/epic-cycle.html
on “Ossian, the ‘Homer of the North’, the greatest literary hoax (2016)”> Actually the solstice occurred on the 25th during the years immediately after the calendar reform of Julius Caesar. So? I took my information from https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2015/12/christmas-and-its... : > Around the time of Jesus' birth, the solstice was on 23 December; by the time of the Chronography of 354, it was 20 December. Are you saying the right date to determine the solstice for purposes of assi…
Comment linking /2015/12/christmas-and-its-supposed-pagan-links.html
on “An astronomical view of Ancient Egyptian star clocks (2021)”This blog by a classicist claims that the word salary is indeed coming from the latin words salarium and sal, but that it is not clear what the connection is, that there is neither evidence for the explanation that Roman soldiers were paid in salt nor that it was an allowance for the specific purpose of buying salt: http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2017/01/salt-and-salary.ht... Regarding the latter he writes: "As I…
Comment linking /2017/01/salt-and-salary.html
on “The Knights Templar started London's first bank (2017)”Here's a detailed discussion on the history starting with "There’s no good evidence that kamilos — supposedly meaning ‘rope’ — was ever even a real word in ancient Greek.": https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2023/11/camel.html And of course if you are wealthy then putting a camel through the eye of a needle isn't hard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38461089
Comment linking /2023/11/camel.html
on “A Camel Through the Eye of a Needle, and Other Wild Tales of Translation (2018)”> By the time of Julius Caesar, the solstices were on the 25th That is false. See https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2022/05/julian-calendar.h... , or "Digression #2: why do Roman writers report the date of the solstice as 25 December?" at https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2015/12/christmas-and-its... . Solstices were on the 25th a few hundred years before the time of Julius Caesar. He did not even attempt to put t…
Comment linking /2015/12/christmas-and-its-supposed-pagan-links.html
on “No leap second will be introduced at the end of June 2026”Here's a detailed analysis with reference to primary sources: https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2017/01/salt-and-salary.h... tl;dr: There is a genuine linguistic connection between "salt" and "salary", but there is no evidence soldiers were ever paid in salt, or given an allowance specifically for buying salt. Possibly "salary" meant "money for salt" with "salt" used metonymically to mean any trade goods, similar t…
Comment linking /2017/01/salt-and-salary.html
on “When did people stop being drunk all the time?”> "eye of the needle" refers to a small gate or passage in ancient city walls, There's a lot of discussion on this verse. Apparently, the gate interpretation didn't exist until the 11 century. It was rethought to be Rope for a while but this blog post discredits that. https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2023/11/camel.html
Comment linking /2023/11/camel.html
on a deleted thread
