What happens when an army's instinct to survive conflicts with the need to hold the line? In the brutal theater of ancient warfare, commanding officers constantly wrestled with this psychological dilemma. By 331 BC, Alexander the Great had led...
In the Republic, Plato scrutinizes Homer’s epics with a severity that often goes unrecognized.
He argued that many celebrated epic stories portray gods and heroes in ways that are unsuitable for shaping the moral imagination of younger generations. Therefore, poets...
A University of Oxford mathematician has challenged the long-held theory that ancient Greek builders designed the Parthenon’s subtle curves to compensate for optical illusions. Alain Goriely argues that the widely repeated explanation is likely a myth.
Goriely laid out his...
Homer’s The Iliad, which recounts the fabled story of the Trojan War, is perhaps the most famous of ancient Greek literary works. Its subject matter is rousing and electrifying yet also profoundly human. It is a tale of war...
Sparta's reputation rests primarily on its military discipline and its rejection of luxury, but the state's most far-reaching form of control was economic rather than martial. According to tradition, the lawgiver Lycurgus prohibited the use of gold and silver...
Magic in the ancient Greek world appears predominantly in its mythology in relation to certain gods and demigods, namely Orpheus, Hecate, Circe, and Hermes, who had magical powers.
The demigod Orpheus, the brilliant musician and poet, was the son of...
Most people in ancient Greece’s illustrious city of Athens understood that women were expected to spend most of their time at home, attending to their husbands and children, as well as their household affairs. However, there was a woman...
A recent study explains how ancient Greeks picked their names and why their name patterns differ from modern ones. Laurent Gauthier, a researcher at Paris Nanterre University, used a mathematical model to test how "conformism" shaped naming choices in...
Aristoxenus of Tarentum is a relatively unknown Greek peripatetic philosopher who made groundbreaking contributions to the fields of music theory and rhythm, shaping ancient Greek music profoundly.
Even though he is considered to be the first musicologist in the Western...
Graffiti is something we are very familiar with, but how many of us knew that this form of art was common in ancient Greece?
It may sound bizarre, but in the countless ruins of ancient cities across the Greek world,...
