Greece
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The Secret Life of Druids August 25, 2023
Gaius Verius Sedatus was a respectable citizen of the community of Chartres in the early 2nd century CE. He was a member of his local town council (a sort of mini-senate), where he and his colleagues presided over its laws and management, under the a...
The Five Best Books on Great Inventions August 22, 2023
1. We do not know who first invented the clock. Of course, the same goes for many other venerable inventions—the originators of writing, paper, movable type and cast iron are similarly obscure—but the humble clock is so familiar that it is shocking t...
Persian, Greek and Hellenistic Luxuries May 22, 2023
This British Museum exhibition is about ancient luxury, but its content shows a commendable frugality. Almost all of what is on show in Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece, in the three white-draped rooms of the Joseph Hotung Great Court Gallery, can ...
Frieze Frame: Part I May 09, 2023
Shadows and Magnitude. It is easy to forget that, when John Keats (1795–1821) wrote his often-anthologized sonnet “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” in 1817, the eponymous Marbles were relatively new immigrants to England. They retained a frisson of recen...
The Stigma of Stigmata: Tattoos in the Ancient World March 24, 2023
If someone mentions ancient Greek vases, the first thing that probably comes to mind is lithe, muscular figures, their proportions ideal and their skin devoid of each and every blemish. That image, however, is inaccurate. Many Greek works of art, jus...
Leonard Cohen’s Hydra March 20, 2023
Leonard Cohen’s house is not easy to find. But nothing on Hydra is.Street names are difficult to locate, and the houses don’t have numbers. The Greek island juts upwards, roads and alleyways wind around steep stone steps without railings. There are n...
Drinking from the Original Fountain March 14, 2023
UNTIL THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, The Iliad had only been translated into European languages. By 1914, however, the situation had changed. Suleiman Al-Bustani’s 1904 Arabic version was just one among many translations into non-European languages—Armenian...
Fall of the Sultans January 03, 2023
By the end of 1918, after four increasingly grim years of warfare, revolution was in the air across Europe. Thrones wobbled; rulers abdicated. In the space of months, the great, centuries-old dynasties of the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns wer...
Wartime Hallelujah September 01, 2022
In 1973, Leonard Cohen was on the Greek island of Hydra with his partner, Suzanne Elrod, and their newborn son. The poet and novelist had found fame as a singer-songwriter in the late 1960s, casting a brooding shadow over the Summer of Love. By now, ...
British Museum Proposes ‘Parthenon Partnership’ August 08, 2022
After years of rebutting the Greek government, the British Museum is now striking a conciliatory tone over the Parthenon Marbles, as Jonathan Williams, the museum’s deputy director, suggests that a new “cultural exchange” arrangement with Greece coul...
Cracking the Cretan Code June 27, 2022
At the end of the 19th century, when Arthur Evans was the keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford, he became fascinated with a tiny carved agate gemstone. It was donated to the museum by a Reverend Greville John Chester, in 1886, w...
The Greek Myths Are Always With Us March 21, 2022
Once upon a time there was a collection of stories that everybody loved. They involved brave heroes such as Perseus and Theseus defeating fearful monsters like Medusa and the Minotaur. Sometimes they used ingenious gadgets to achieve their goals, a b...
A Masterfully Woven History of the Battle of Actium March 15, 2022
Cornell University classicist Barry Strauss is an accomplished author of several scholarly books and articles on ancient Greek military, social, and economic problems. Starting about 20 years ago, Strauss increasingly turned his expertise and attenti...
Freedom or Death! December 30, 2021
The year 2021 was meant to be special for Greece: an opportunity to celebrate the bicentenary of the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821, which led to the birth of modern Greece. It was also supposed to be an occasion to mark the countr...
Laughter on the Acropolis February 19, 2021
The study of the languages and literature of ancient Greece and Rome—a discipline once considered so foundational it was simply known as “the classics”—has been under siege for decades. University enrollments in all humanities programs have declined;...
The Moronic Social Justice War on Classics February 16, 2021
It was only a matter of time before Cicero got canceled. The New York Times the other day profiled Princeton classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who wants to destroy the study of classics as a blow for racial justice. The critique of classics as stult...
Suicide of the Humanities February 16, 2021
This NYT profile of Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a radical Princeton Classics scholar, epitomizes what is wrong with the academic humanities in this radical era, and how dangerous the radicalization is to all of us.Dan-el Padilla Peralta is a black Domini...
The Man Who Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness February 16, 2021
In the world of classics, the exchange between Dan-el Padilla Peralta and Mary Frances Williams has become known simply as “the incident.” Their back-and-forth took place at a Society of Classical Studies conference in January 2019 — the sort of acad...
If Classics Doesn't Change, Let It Burn February 16, 2021
Ilead a local library group that is reading Herodotus’s Histories, an ancient Greek account of the Greco-Persian Wars. Last week, one of the members emailed me after he saw the New York Times Magazine profile of the Princeton classicist Dan-el Padill...
What if Persia Had Defeated the Greeks May 29, 2020
Of all the many counterfactuals, those “what-ifs” posed by history, perhaps the most arresting, if only because the most sweeping, asks: what if the Persians had defeated the Greeks in the Greco-Persian War of 490–479 B.C.? Had this happened, there m...
Who Are the Greeks? July 12, 2019
The Greek revolt against the Ottomans was supposed to start on March 25, 1821, but the Maniots had different ideas.The Mani is the middle finger of land that extends out from the southern Peloponnese, terminating at Cape Tainaron, the southernmost po...
