Ancient Art Podcast (audio)

An Orientalizing period pyxis at the Art Institute of Chicago, with Near Eastern influence on developing Greek civilization, the strategic importance of Corinth, the Temple of Artemis at Corfu and the famed Lion's Gate of ancient Mycenae.

A marble youth from ancient Athens, the so-called Metropolitan Kouros of about 590 to 580 BC, shows how the early Greek kouros type borrowed directly from Egyptian statuary.

Artwork from the Orientalizing and Archaic periods and the climate that gave rise to Greek sculpture, with Greece's contact with Egypt during the Saite Dynasty, the Greek colony of Naukratis and Egyptian and Near Eastern influences.

The Ionic frieze and its evolution from a decorative band to storyboard, then the many similarities between the Parthenon frieze and the Apadana reliefs, the Parthenon and Apadana, the Acropolis and Persepolis, and Athens and the Persian empire.

A lekythos at the Art Institute of Chicago reflects the refined aesthetic of late Archaic and Classical Athens, alongside Exekias's black-figure amphora The Suicide of Ajax in Boulogne-sur-Mer.

Ionian Greek artists carried ideas between Persia and Greece; the transitional Harpy Tomb at Xanthos in Lycia sits alongside the Persian sites of Susa and Persepolis in tracing that exchange.

The origin, construction and sordid history of the Parthenon frieze, and a new imperial Athens that seeks to model herself, her Periclean Acropolis and the frieze after her once-formidable enemy, Persia.

The fish plate, an often-overlooked curiosity among ancient Greek ceramics, and the 4th century BC appetite for fish that blossomed as a culture phenomenon, an art form and an obsession rich with sexual innuendos and double-meanings.

The history, artistry and mythology of the Hellenistic Aphrodite of Knidos by Praxiteles, through Hesiod and Pliny the Elder, the Colonna Venus, the Venus de' Medici, the Aphrodite Braschi and the misnomer of the Roman copy.

The Gorgon Medusa's roots and evolution appear in the Bronze Age Minoan Snake Goddesses, the Polyphemus Amphora, the Nessos Amphora, and the Temple of Artemis at Corfu.

Ancient poets Hesiod and Ovid supply the Gorgon Medusa's lineage and curse, and her children Pegasus and Chrysaor, alongside Perseus, Poseidon, Athena, Pindar and the Theogony.

Praxiteles sculpted Apollo Sauroktonos the Lizard Slayer, with later marble and bronze copies housed in the Vatican, the Louvre and elsewhere, its hidden meaning a struggle between Apollo and the serpent Python.