Phillips Payson O’Brien

As a young man, I couldn’t wait to come to Europe and visit all the sites I’d read about. I became interested in history when… I was around nine years old, when in my first ever history class we did a course on Ancient Egypt. And I recall thinking, what is this? These people from almost 5,000 years earlier, the pyramids, the mummies… Everything about that left an indelible memory. Growing up I was fascinated by… Mostly ancient history, until I was at college. Beyond Ancient Egypt I was also interested in Persia, Greece, Rome, and the whole swathe of ancient European and Middle Eastern civilisations. The first paper I wrote was about Alcibiades (below), the Ancient