Gresham College Lectures

With Melissa Lane

Melissa Lane explores the popular uprising of 508 BCE that overthrew foreign invaders in Athens, after which Kleisthenes reorganised the political system into what became Athenian democracy.

With Edith Hall

Edith Hall traces the birth of physics around 600 BCE in Greek cities near Miletus, through the pioneering theories of Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras and Democritus.

With Edith Hall

Edith Hall examines how in 431 BCE the Athenian statesman Pericles delivered his Epitaphios, the Funeral Oration for the first soldiers lost in the Peloponnesian War, recorded by Thucydides.

With Edith Hall

Edith Hall describes how Aristotle of Stagira returned to Athens in the 330s BCE to found the Lyceum, and asks how its archaeological site, discovered in 1996, illuminates his contribution across disciplines from Zoology to Astronomy.

With Edith Hall

Edith Hall credits the 3rd century BCE Sicilian polymath Archimedes with founding statics and hydrostatics, and with inventing war machines known as Archimedes' claw and the heat-ray.

With Melissa Lane

Melissa Lane reads justice, dikē, in the poetry of the Athenian lawgiver Solon as a boundary stone, and shows how Greek societies that valued it also enforced slavery.

With Melissa Lane

With Melissa Lane

Melissa Lane poses Amartya Sen's question, equality of what, then examines isonomia, the ancient Greek principle of equal application of the law, arguing its laws need to be free of systematic bias to secure equal social freedom.

With Melissa Lane

Melissa Lane traces demokratia, the power of the people, argues that ancient Greek models of accountability are still relevant, and shows how election for some offices and lottery selection for others offer instructive possibilities for modern challenges.

With Edith Hall

Edith Hall traces how the ancient Greeks brought the universal book collection to its consummation in the Library of Alexandria, and describes other libraries that doubled as laboratories, record offices, restaurants and baths.

This lecture assesses how odd, different and exceptional ancient Sparta really was, after centuries in which its history was handed down through radically conflicting political and social traditions.

With Melissa Lane

Melissa Lane examines how Socrates tested the expertise of generals, artisans and the enslaved, then brings Aristotle's work on rhetoric to bear on norms for expert communication in public debate.

With Edith Hall

Edith Hall focuses on Plato's masterpiece, the Republic, and on the dialogues set during the last days of Socrates, tracing the Socratic method of question-and-answer in the work of the philosopher who founded the Academy.

With Edith Hall

Edith Hall traces Greek theatre from the mid-sixth century BCE, when Athenians gathered to watch tragedies, and later comedies, in the sanctuary of Dionysus on the south slope of the Acropolis.

This lecture traces Walter Crane's 1887 book The Baby's Own Aesop back to the semi-legendary Aesop, sold as a barbarian to a Greek slave-owner in the 6th century BCE.

With Melissa Lane

Melissa Lane traces unwritten laws from Sophocles' Antigone and Thucydides' Pericles to Plutarch's claim that the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus prohibited the writing down of his own laws.

With Edith Hall

Edith Hall traces the birth of rational medicine among eastern Greek communities in the 7th-to-5th centuries BCE, and the oath still taken in the name of Hippocrates of Kos.

With Edith Hall

Edith Hall traces Cynicism, Stoicism and Epicureanism through the fragments of their founders, Diogenes and Zeno, and through Lucretius, the Epicurean poet of the 1st century BCE.

With Ronald Hutton

Ronald Hutton describes Pan as a shepherds' god from a wild, backward area of Greece who became one of the best-known deities across the Greek and Roman world after Athens imported him as a saviour.

With Melissa Lane

Melissa Lane looks beyond Lycurgus of Sparta and Solon of Athens to lesser-known Greek lawgivers, including king Minos in Crete and Zaleucus and Charondas in southern Italy.

With Ronald Hutton

Ronald Hutton traces Hecate from the ruling goddess of Caria, taken over by the Greeks as the only deity able to operate in every realm of the cosmos, to a goddess of sorcery by the Roman period.

With Edith Hall

Edith Hall presents Aristotle of Stageira, Plato's student at the Academy and founder of the Lyceum in Athens, whose core beliefs appear in his Nicomachean Ethics, Politics and Rhetoric.

With Melissa Lane

Melissa Lane traces written law from the code of Hammurabi through the earliest Greek written law found at Dreros on Crete to the Athenian lawgiver Solon's commitment to writing laws down.

With Milton Mermikides, Melissa Lane

Milton Mermikides and Melissa Lane present the role of mousikē, ancient Greek music, in philosophy, society and education, arguing that for Plato training in musicality could harmonise the soul.

With Melissa Lane

Melissa Lane revisits Plato's Republic and its Cave, with its passive citizens and demagogic political leaders, to ask whether it holds lessons for tackling climate change today.