Lesche: Ancient Greece, New Ideas

With Daniel Mendelsohn

Daniel Mendelsohn, Editor-at-large at the New York Review of Books, discusses his new translation of Homer's Odyssey for the University of Chicago Press, following his earlier translation of the poetry of Constantine Cavafy.

With Emily Wilson

Emily Wilson, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and a MacArthur Fellow, discusses translating two passages of the Iliad, Book 6 lines 482 to 502 and Book 22 lines 199 to 204.

With Emily Hauser

With Christopher Metcalf

Christopher Metcalf, Associate Professor in Classical Literature at the University of Oxford, compares myths of kingship in early Greece and the ancient Near East, from Gilgamesh and Sargon to Iliad Book 1.

With Bill Beck

Bill Beck, Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at Indiana University, publishes the first volume of a translation of the ancient scholia to Homer's Iliad, the vetera scholia to Iliad Book 1-2, first in a series.

With Christos C. Tsagalis

Christos Tsagalis, Professor of Ancient Greek Literature at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, discusses Iliad Book 10, traditionally split into the Nyktegersia night-watch scene and the spy-mission that follows it.

With Naoise Mac Sweeney

Naoíse Mac Sweeney, Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Vienna, discusses her ERC-funded project Migration and the Making of the Ancient Greek World, whose first volume covers local migration from about 1200 to 550 BCE.

With Leah Lazar, Christy Constantakopoulou

Leah Lazar, postdoctoral researcher at Oxford's Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, and Christy Constantakopoulou examine Athens and its fifth-century subject allies, the Athenian empire Constantakopoulou traced in The Dance of the Islands.

With Vincent Azoulay, Paulin Ismard

Vincent Azoulay of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and Paulin Ismard of Aix-Marseille University study the restoration of democracy in Athens in 403 BC, examining the Athenian civil war through the prism of chorality.

With James Romm

James Romm, the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College, discusses his biography Demosthenes: Democracy's Defender, part of Yale University Press's Ancient Lives series, drawing on speeches by Demosthenes and Aeschines.

With Rachel Kousser

With Patricia Kim

Patricia Kim, assistant professor at New York University, discusses her book on the art of Hellenistic queenship, tracing Pliny's account of Timochares' proposed floating statue of Arsinoe II.

With Paul Kosmin

Paul Kosmin, Philip J. King Professor of Ancient History at Harvard, discusses The Ancient Shore, winner of the American Historical Association's 2025 prize, drawing on Agatharchides of Cnidus, On the Erythraean Sea, from the second century BC.

With Anthony Kaldellis

Anthony Kaldellis, professor of Classics at the University of Chicago, argues classicists should study Byzantium, and discusses an in-progress edited volume on the transmission of classical texts there, including Eustathius of Thessalonica's commentaries on the Iliad and the Odyssey.

With Yvona Trnka-Amrhein, John Gibert

Yvona Trnka-Amrhein and John Gibert, both of the University of Colorado Boulder, publish the editio princeps of a newly-discovered papyrus containing lines from Euripides' fragmentary plays Ino and Poluidos.

With Sasha-Mae Eccleston

Sasha-Mae Eccleston, the John Rowe Workman Assistant Professor of Classics, discusses classicizing and chronopolitics in the United States, reading Homer's Iliad and Euripides' Medea alongside a much-quoted line of Virgil's Aeneid.

With Lindsey Mazurek

Lindsey Mazurek, assistant professor of Classical Studies at Indiana University, traces how Isis worship under the Roman Empire intersected with constructions of Greek identity, the subject of her book Isis in a Global Empire.

With David M. Pritchard

David Pritchard, Associate Professor of Greek History at the University of Queensland, edits The Athenian Funeral Oration: After Nicole Loraux, and researches the symbiosis between war, democracy and culture in classical Athens.

With Scarlett Kingsley

Scarlett Kingsley, Associate Professor of Classics at Agnes Scott College, sets Herodotus in the intellectual milieu of the fifth century, reading his account of Solon's meeting with Croesus in the Histories.

With Eric Csapo, Peter Wilson

Eric Csapo, Emeritus Professor at the University of Warwick, and Peter Wilson, William Ritchie Professor of Classics at the University of Sydney, discuss their three-volume social and economic history of the theatre to 300 BC.

With John Ma

With Seth Estrin

Seth Estrin, Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard, discusses Grief Made Marble, his emotion-based reading of Classical Athenian funerary sculpture, drawing on Euripides' tragedy Alcestis.

With Clare Rowan, M.E. Gkikaki

Clare Rowan, Associate Professor at the University of Warwick and principal investigator on the ERC-funded project Token Communities of the Ancient Mediterranean, and M.E. Gkikaki discuss monetiform tokens in Greek antiquity, via Aristophanes' Ekklesiazousai.

With Debbie Felton, Carolina López-Ruiz

Debbie Felton, Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Carolina López-Ruiz, Professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, discuss monsters in classical myth, including López-Ruiz's chapter on the Sphinx.

With Carol Atack

Carol Atack, fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, discusses her biography Plato: A Civic Life, the second volume in Paul Cartledge's Great Lives of the Ancient World series.

With Josh Billings, Christopher Moore

With Andromache Karanika

Andromache Karanika, Professor of Classics at the University of California, Irvine, traces wedding poetics through the Iliad's Teikhoskopeia scene and Sappho 44, on the wedding of Hector and Andromache.

With Scott Lawin Arcenas

Scott Lawin Arcenas, associate professor of history and classics at the University of Montana, examines political violence in Greek city-states between 500 and 301 BCE, the stasis his new book quantifies and qualifies.

With Rosa Andújar

Rosa Andújar, Associate Professor of Classics at Barnard College, Columbia University, discusses her book Playing the Chorus in Greek Tragedy, examining the chorus in Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, from fragmentation to semi-choruses and actor-chorus interaction.

With Emma Greensmith, Tim Whitmarsh

Emma Greensmith, Associate Professor of Classical Languages at Oxford, and Tim Whitmarsh, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, trace Imperial Greek epic from Quintus of Smyrna's Posthomerica to Nonnus's Dionysiaca.

With Alex Knodell

Alex Knodell, chair of the classics department at Carleton College, reflects on the six-season Small Cycladic Islands Project, co-directed with Demetrios Athanasoulis of the Ephorate of Antiquities of the Cyclades.

With James Diggle

James Diggle, Professor Emeritus of Greek and Latin at Cambridge and Editor-in-Chief of the 2021 Cambridge Greek Lexicon, explains why the two-volume dictionary took 24 years to complete and how it improves on LSJ.

With Charlie Covell

With Mirjam E. Kotwick

Mirjam Kotwick, Associate Professor of Classics at Princeton University, discusses her new book The Ancient Interpretation of Dreams, tracing early Greek hermeneutics from Homer's dream scenes to Aristotle's writings on divination in sleep.

With Marie-Louise Nosch

Marie-Louise Nosch, Professor of Ancient Greek History at the University of Copenhagen and former director of its Centre for Textile Research, discusses weaving scenes in Homer and Hesiod's account of Pandora's creation.

With Inger Kuin

Inger Kuin, Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia, discusses her book on Diogenes the Cynic, drawing on Diogenes Laertius's Life of Diogenes and on Xenophon's Anabasis for Sinope, his birthplace.

With Tatiana Bur

Tatiana Bur discusses her book Technologies of the Marvellous in Ancient Greek Religion, tracing self-moving devices from Hephaestus's tripods in Iliad 18 to the mechanical works of Hero of Alexandria.

With Verity Platt

Verity Platt, professor of Classics and History of Art at Cornell University, discusses her new book Epistemic Impressions, tracing ancient image-making through Herodotus's account of the seal of Polycrates and Pliny's Natural History.

With Piero Boitani

Piero Boitani, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Rome, discusses his book Timaeus in Paradise, which names Dante's Paradiso and Raphael's School of Athens among the later sites of the Timaeus's reception and influence.

With Sam Holzman

Sam Holzman, assistant professor at Princeton's Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, discusses bilingual Ionic column capitals in his book Retrospective Columns, tracing the style through Vitruvius's de Architectura and the architectural drawings in Stuart and Revett's Antiquities of Athens.

With Ferdia Lennon

Ferdia Lennon, winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2024, discusses his novel Glorious Exploits, set in Syracuse after the Athenian invasion of Sicily during the Peloponnesian War.

With Andrej Petrovic

Andrej Petrovic, Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia, discusses a new verse-inscription from Teos in Turkey, discovered in 2013; he has co-authored a monograph on it with Mustafa Adak and Christian Marek.

With Daniel Schillinger

Daniel Schillinger, a Lecturer in Political Science at Yale University, discusses his new book Luckless, tracing the idea of luck through Sophocles, Euripides, Thucydides and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

With Barbara Graziosi