20 Ancient Greek Traditions That Still Show Up In Everyday Life

The symbol for Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine, was a single snake wrapped around an unadorned staff. Temples on the Greek island of Kos dedicated to him housed live snakes that were harmless; they symbolized regeneration because of the snakes’ shedding of their old skin. So far, very appropriate for a god of healing. In contrast, the double-snake and winged staff called the caduceus was originally the symbol of Hermes, the god of business, thieves, and liars. The US Army Medical Corps adopted the caduceus as its emblem in 1902. Medicine accidentally ending up with the symbol of the god of thieves is a historical mix-up I couldn’t make up if I tried.

During the 490 BCE Battle of Marathon between Athens and Persia, the messenger Pheidippides ran, yes, but not the run we know. The contemporary historian Herodotus says Pheidippides ran 140 miles from Athens to Sparta prior to the battle. The 25-mile dash from Marathon to Athens, where he shouted “We have won!” and died, was added only in later centuries by Greek writers Plutarch and Lucian. Somehow, the shorter run became the famous one. The 1896 Olympics took up this story and made it part of history.

At Greek drinking parties, hosts began by pouring some wine out to the gods, and then everyone drank a round to the health of each other. Hosts were also expected to be the first to drink from the mixing bowl, or krater, to demonstrate that the wine was safe to drink. (This is the real origin of the toast, not the silly story about clinking glasses to spill any poison into the opponent’s cup, and this tale has no ancient source.) The gathering was already called a symposion, and Plato borrowed that name for his dialogue Symposium, which is how the word eventually came to mean an academic conference.

In ancient Greece, the evil eye (baskania), according to Greek writer Plutarch, was the idea that envy had the power to travel from one person’s eyes to another and bring actual misfortune. The Greeks painted protective eyes on the prows of ships (the front parts of the vessels) and on their wine cups as a defense against baskania. The blue glass eye amulets we see for sale today are not Greek in origin, but were created out of shared glassmaking traditions in the Mediterranean and Near East, though the belief itself is indeed Greek.

The ancient Greeks already had an open-hand curse gesture thrown at enemies. But the modern Greek version, the moutza, which is directed at an enemy’s face, is a relatively recent invention. During the Byzantine era, convicted criminals would be forced to walk through the city streets while the public used open hands to smear their faces with ash. Talk about making an insult very literal. The insult people still use combines an ancient hand-curse with a medieval street-level punishment, spanning more than 1,000 years between the two halves.

The ancient Greeks took round, moon-shaped honey cakes adorned with burning candles to the temple of Artemis, the goddess of the moon. The idea was that the rising smoke would carry their prayers to her. Birthday celebrations with cake and candles had not yet been invented; they emerged in Germany’s 18th-century Kinderfest birthday celebrations for children. Greece gave us the imagery, and Germany, the tradition.

In Greek mythology, the olive tree was thought to have been given to Athens by the goddess Athena, as a representation of peace and prosperity. On the battlefield, heralds sent to seek a truce carried wool-wrapped olive branches called hiketeria. This combination of mythology and reality helped cement the olive branch as one of the earliest symbols of a desire to end hostilities.

The sound you make today when you do ftou ftou ftou to ward off the evil eye has a long history: in ancient Greco-Roman culture, it was called ptyon, a form of “spitting magic.” In the third century BCE, the Greek poet Theocritus describes people spitting on their chest to protect themselves from harmful energies, because saliva was believed to have protective, purifying properties. Thankfully, the modern version generally stops at making the sound.

Even though officials didn’t hand out gold medals at the Pythian Games at Delphi (a festival of athletic competitions and poetry, in honor of Apollo), they did place a wreath of bay laurel on the head of every winner. The prize may have changed considerably, but the language stuck around. Which is why the titles of Nobel Laureate and Poet Laureate are what we call these winners today.

Athens in the 6th century BCE hosted festivals dedicated to Dionysus, the god of wine and festivity. Out of those festivals emerged the masks of comedy and tragedy, the commenting chorus, the scripted dialogue, and the outdoor amphitheaters built for perfect acoustics. The Dionysia festivals featured playwriting competitions, including plays by comic playwright Aristophanes. Modern theater still runs on structures built by ancient Athens to honor a party god.

In the Odyssey, the Greek hero Odysseus entrusts his son Telemachus to a man called Mentor (sometimes the goddess Athena takes on his appearance). Mentor was a specific character, not a Greek word for advisor. His popularity was cemented when the 1699 French novel Les Aventures de Télémaque by François Fénelon, in which Mentor guides Telemachus’s exploits, was rapidly translated throughout Europe, helping “mentor” enter everyday language as a word for a trusted advisor.

In 5th-century BCE Athens, trials were not conducted by 12 individuals. Panels of dikastai, ordinary citizens serving as jurors, might be between 201 and 501 (and at times up to 1,501), deliberately large enough that no one could bribe or threaten enough individuals to control the result. Bribing one juror was one thing; bribing 501 presented a considerably bigger problem. Only free adult male citizens could be selected for service; women and slaves could not. Modern courts did not replicate the numbers, only the idea.

Jurors cast their votes using bronze discs called psephoi. They were given two of them, one with a solid center to vote for acquittal, another with a hollow center to vote for conviction, both held between their thumb and forefinger so that no one could see which type of disc they held. When voting, each juror placed the disc representing their choice into the bronze urn — the official vote — and the other, unused disc into a wooden urn for discard. Low-tech, perhaps, but still an ingenious method for achieving a secret ballot.

The Hippocratic Oath was written on the island of Kos in the 5th century BCE, and it contains a list of ethics for medical students. These include keeping patient confidentiality and the rule to do no harm. It’s named after the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, although many scholars believe that the oath was actually written by several different people at the Hippocratic school. Today, all over the world, new medical graduates swear on versions of the Oath.

The ancient Greeks put a small silver coin in the mouth or hand of a deceased relative as payment for Charon, the mythical boatman who ferried souls across the River Styx to the underworld. This is documented in the ancient Greek comic playwright Aristophanes’ play Frogs. Some modern burial customs involve placing coins on or with the corpse, which might be an echo of the same concept. It’s an interesting connection, but far from a direct link.

The ancient Greeks would make libations, ritual offerings made by pouring wine, milk, or honey straight onto the earth. These were called choai, and they were offered to the gods of the underworld and to the deceased ancestors. That underworld-facing ritual structure lines up closely with today’s custom of pouring a drink onto the ground for the departed. It sounds like a trivial gesture, but it isn’t.

At Greek Orthodox weddings today, a priest puts two crowns (called stefana) on the bride and groom at their wedding. The crowns are held together by a ribbon. Like the olive wreath, the crown has been worn by Greek brides and grooms since ancient times, when couples wore wreaths of olive, laurel, or myrtle to invoke Aphrodite’s favor and mark a new household. That’s one impressively long-running wedding accessory.

In the Greek Orthodox Church, families give kollyva, sweetened boiled wheat, at funerals to keep the tradition of the ancient Greek festival of Anthesteria and its grain offering alive to Hermes and the souls of the dead. Kollybos, incidentally, in classical Greek meant a tiny coin or small unit of weight. The name only came to be used for grain cakes centuries later, during late antiquity, when the word had already lost its original coin meaning.

The ancient eiresione was a branch of olive or laurel wrapped with wool and spring flowers, which would be hung above the doors of houses as part of harvest festivities to bring fertility and protection to the home. Today, a similar ritual can be seen in Greece’s Protomagia, the May Day celebration, where people hang floral wreaths above their doors on May 1st. No need to resurrect the custom; it just came back each spring.

Dexiosis, the “giving of the right hand,” involved extending an open, unarmed hand, indicating peace, trust, and equality. The gesture appears on Attic (Athenian) grave monuments and treaty inscriptions from the 5th century BCE, and was used to seal marriage and alliance agreements and partings. But the gesture dates back to earlier handshakes depicted on 9th-century BCE Assyrian reliefs, suggesting that the Greeks did not invent the custom, but rather made it a matter of everyday civic practice. So even the Greeks inherited this one from somebody else. And the practice has continued uninterrupted.

This content was created with the help of AI.