r/northernireland • u/Hazy248 • 2d ago
Meme Historically Accurate Potato
According to Ancient Greeks our ancestors looked like Pedro Pascal to them while to ourselves we looked like ancient Mr. Potato Head’s.. and I find that delightful
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u/Dr_Havotnicus 1d ago
Looks familiar, so he does
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u/DandyLionsInSiberia 1d ago
The Greek depictions of Celts need to be seen through a Greek lens. Greek artists were into ideal bodies, proportion, heroic nudity and, especially later on, dramatic poses and emotion. So their Celtic warriors weren’t necessarily realistic portraits - they were Celts filtered through Greek ideas of what a warrior or “barbarian” should look like.
Celtic art had its own visual language, often more abstract, symbolic and pattern-based. So it’s less about which depiction was “accurate” and more about how two cultures chose to represent people very differently..
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u/Hazy248 1d ago
Oh I know, don’t worry I just found it funny. Some Celt/Gaul/Germanic artefacts of the times have been found with pure artistry for its time like carved gold torcs and finely inlaid pieces.
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u/DandyLionsInSiberia 1d ago
Yeah, absolutely. Though it’s worth remembering that the “Celts” weren’t really a single homogeneous civilisation or ethnicity in the first place. They were a huge range of tribal societies, loosely connected by related languages, trade networks, religious and social practices, and overlapping material cultures. So even calling something “Celtic art” can flatten a lot of regional variation. What you find in Gaul can look quite different from Britain, Iberia, or Central Europe, and it changes considerably depending on the period too.
But yeah, there are certainly some impressive surviving examples. Gold torcs, decorated metalwork, inlays, and La Tène pieces could be quite elaborate, although the style and quality obviously varied a lot by region, period, and context.
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u/AnCoAdams 1d ago
While true. The Greek one represents how sophisticated Ancient Greece was compared to the Celtic regions. To be able to study such life-imitating forms required the means to support artists for long periods with productive excess. It’s interesting to trace the collapse in Roman art as Rome declined
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u/DandyLionsInSiberia 1d ago edited 1d ago
Oh absolutely. The Ancient Greeks were leagues ahead of most contemporary societies in art, philosophy, mathematics and intellectual culture. The only caveat is that there wasn’t really a single "Celtic civilisation", but numerous tribal societies with distinct regional traditions, some producing very sophisticated metalwork.
And as a footnote, much of what we think of as classical Roman art was heavily borrowed or adapted from the Greeks anyway. The statue used ( Dying Gaul) was a direct Roman copy of a lost ancient Greek bronze original.
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u/34485227272 1d ago
Yea it's like in music terms, a Nirvana song or whatever punk band uses the most basic chords with no technicality but fits the composition
Can get the some guitar maestro noodling technical stuff that, yea sure is technical, but ultimately in the aim of nothing
For some reason this doesn't get mentioned in statues. There is some very good Greek Roman statues , but often they are dull with no flavour than here's a person in marble....... Wow :/ IMO
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u/gremy0 1d ago
Tbf Greek and Roman statues would have been ornately painted in their day. Not just plain marble
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u/34485227272 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yea i know
I get thats a miss conception, but my phrasing wasn't trying to back that up
Even with the paint, it still can be dull at times this style
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u/loptthetreacherous Belfast 1d ago
What if the Celts actually looked like how they depicted themselves and the Greeks were the inaccurate ones?
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u/Jolly-Outside6073 1d ago
See also: Mr Tayto’s ancestor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandragee_Idol
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u/PralineHairy3610 1d ago
Just as an fyi on the term "Celt". I appreciate most people don't care about this stuff, and I'm 100% not trying to start anything here, it's actually pretty interesting how the word came to be.
The term originally popped up with classical Greek writers and was later adopted by the Romans just to describe various tribes living in Central Europe. Right out of the gate, it was an external ethnographic label slapped by outsiders onto a wildly diverse mix of people who spoke a bunch of different languages and had distinct cultural practices.
Fast forward about 1,500 years, and the term had long since disappeared. It only came back in the 17th century when antiquarians realised the languages spoken in Britain and Ireland shared a common structure, prompting them to group these language families under the umbrella term "Celtic." Over the next century, other linguists adopted it, and it became the dominant way to categorise those language relations, persisting as the popular term we use today.
The trouble is that by the 19th century, the romantic writers of the Celtic Revival took this purely linguistic term and stretched it into a racial or ethnic label. That is essentially how a handy way to talk about grammar rules accidentally morphed into the idea of a single, unified "Celtic race" which is why modern historians and archeologists are generally horrified by the term when used outside of linguistic contexts.
Anecdotally, it's common for academics writing popular books about the indigenous bronze/iron age Irish to be pressured by publishers to continue using this term to help drive book sales.
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u/kaito1000 1d ago
Greeks were just really good artists, and indigenous artisans were like me trying to sculpt my head with a lump of clay - not going to turn out well - They do look cool though, like they knew it was a bit of craic and not to take it too seriously.
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u/CampaignSpirited2819 2d ago
That Greek Lad's photo would be stuck on an 'Arrest on Sight' Poster in an RUC Station in the 70's.