Investigations have been carried out at the wreck site of the RMS Titanic’s sister-ship, which was sunk during the First World War. HMHS Britannic was the last of three ‘Olympic-class’ ocean liners built for the White Star Line at Harland…
A Second World War bomber which lay at the bottom of the Aegean Sea for more than 80 years has been rediscovered. The wreck was found last year by specialist divers off the Greek island of Antikythera, more than 60…
Archaeologists, like most people, have an urge to grasp the world through something tangible or, even better, countable. There can be a great comfort in numbers, and numbers also convince; many have been the attempts to define cities by countable characteristics: an area of at least 10ha, 10,000 inhabitants, a certain number of public meeting places, a particular thickness of city walls in metres.
Graham Goodlad recalls one of the great works of military history.
When you envisage Greek statues and friezes, you probably picture pure white marble sculptures, pockmarked with age – that is, after all, how they appear today. But that was not how they appeared to the ancient Greeks who made them,…
The British submarine HMS Triumph was lost in mysterious circumstances off the coast of Greece in 1942. Now she has been located, after a search lasting more than 25 years. The submarine, which was involved in various special operations during…
Review by Diana Bentley Nearly two and a half millennia after it was written, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War not only remains vibrantly alive and regularly referred to in discussions of modern conflict and politics, but is a rich…
Eleusis – modern Elefsina – is in the spotlight as European Capital of Culture. Dalu Jones visits its ancient remains to enter the realm of the Eleusinian Mysteries, secret rites honouring the renewal of life.
Review by Robin Osborne. Thirty-three years ago, I attempted to push 7th-century BC Athens and Attica into the limelight. I managed to stimulate critical engagement from Anna-Maria D’Onofrio and James Whitley, but failed to convince the wider world that this…
These days, the term ‘philhellenism’ (literally, the love of all things Greek) is perhaps most often associated with the Romantic poets and thinkers of the late 18th and 19th centuries – a period during which a ‘new cult of the…
At which battle in 490 BC did an Athenian army repulse the first Persian invasion of Greece?
Ancient Rome’s enthusiasm for all things Greek is well known, and archaeological echoes of these influences can be found across the Empire. Looking in the other direction, though, what traces did the Romans leave in Athens, the city at the heart of their idealised view? Carly Hilts reports.
The difference between a historian and a poet is not that one uses prose and the other verse. After all, you could take the History of Herodotus and turn it into verse, but it would still be history, not poetry.
Review by David Stuttard. On an August morning just over two and a half millennia ago in 490 BC, a numerically inferior army of democratic Athenians, their liberated slaves, and Plataean allies won an overwhelming victory over Persian invaders on…
Review by Lucia Marchini. The myth of Heracles, his heroic strength and ability to meet seemingly insurmountable challenges, has proven an enduringly popular one. Emperors and kings made use of his mighty image, and he was even the subject of…
Zeus is the king of the gods. But who was his queen?
What did kallos mean to the Greeks? As the Museum of Cycladic Art explores this concept, Lucia Marchini talks to Nikolaos Stampolidis to uncover divine, mortal, and internal beauty in the Greek world.
Some time in the 8th century BC, with the Greek alphabet just decades old, two monumental poems, the Iliad and Odyssey, were committed to writing and so became the first great works of Western literature. We call their author Homer,…
Soon after the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC came another famous battle as allied Greek city-states fought to resist the invading armies of the Persian Empire. The Greek victory at Salamis 2,500 years ago was mythologised by Athenian playwrights and others, monumentalising their city’s role in saving all that was good and Greek. David Stuttard guides us through the drama.
Disease tearing through a community; mass fatalities; and no apparent end in sight: the pestilences plaguing Greeks at Troy at the start of Homer’s Iliad or Thebes in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King seem all too familiar in our COVID-haunted world.…
Boissonnas headed to Athens and worked to photograph the monuments of the Acropolis, a subject he returned to several times.
Patrick Boniface takes a look at the role of the ram in naval history.
Paul Cartledge, who has written the biography of the revolutionary idea of democracy, explains how it was practised in ancient Athens where it originated.
Themistocles was an ancient Athenian politician and general. He was one of a new breed of elected officials, and went on to become one of the city’s most successful military leaders.
Athens conjures up ancient Greece and the civilisation symbolized by the fastidious re-building of the Parthenon. Yet Athens boasts possibly the most extensive remains of any Roman city in Greece. Why should this matter? Well, for the imperial Romans, Greece…