Tides of History

With Sarah Murray

The episode traces how Minoan civilization on Crete reached an apex of sophistication in the Late Bronze Age, while the Mycenaeans emerged on the Greek mainland, building the palaces and society that founded the later Greek world.

The episode asks what tied together mainland Greece, Minoan Crete and the city of Troy within the Bronze Age world, pointing to trade, the emergence of cities and elite classes, and the development of state structures and writing.

The episode asks whether burned palaces in Mycenaean Greece, and a city known as Troy among those destroyed on the Asian side of the Aegean, were the context that centuries later gave rise to Homer's tale of the Trojan War.

With Michael Clarke

The episode asks what Achilles and Gilgamesh have in common, drawing on Professor Michael Clarke's book on mortality and wisdom in early epic poetry to discuss Homer, the Bronze Age world, and shared motifs in heroic literature.

With Lieve Donnellan

The episode presents Dr. Lieve Donnellan's use of network theory to study southern Italy and the Greek world in the Iron Age, offering fascinating and innovative ways of understanding the ancient Mediterranean.

With Alex Knodell

The episode asks how dark Greece's so-called Dark Age truly was after the Bronze Age Collapse, when the palaces were gone, long-distance trade declined, crafts became much simpler and fewer people lived in Greece than during the Mycenaean period.

The episode dates Greece as an unremarkable corner of the Aegean in 800 BC, tracing a century in which its population exploded, cities emerged, long-distance trade boomed, and the first overseas colonies were founded.

With John Hyland

The usual perspective on the Greco-Persian Wars is quite explicitly that of the Greeks; the episode asks how the Persians viewed these conflicts and what they were after, presenting Professor John Hyland's research on how the Persians understood war.

Covering the Ionian Revolt to the Battle of Marathon, the episode argues the Persian Wars were far more complicated than a simple civilizational clash, and sets out the background that made them possible.

The episode describes the Persian invasion burning much of Athens after defeating Leonidas, before the Greek allies met them nearby at Salamis in what became one of the largest and most decisive naval battles in history.

In the spring of 479 BC the allied Greeks' land forces met the Persian army at Plataea, and the legacy of the Persian Wars would shape memory, identity and the future relationship between Greeks and Persians for decades and centuries.

With Josiah Ober

The episode traces nearly 30 years of the Peloponnesian War across the whole of Greece, concluding that Athens' fate was decided in faraway Sicily and not in Greece itself.

With Robin Waterfield, Polly Low

The episode calls Thucydides perhaps the greatest historian to ever live, whose account of the Peloponnesian War has been read, digested and debated for more than 2,400 years.

The episode traces the Peloponnesian War's roots back to the Persian Wars, when Athens seized the chance to build an empire in their aftermath, setting up the 30-year conflict with Sparta for control of Classical Greece.

The episode traces classical Athens' wealth to democracy, law and institutions that made people feel safe doing business, beyond the silver lodes of Attica and access to the sea.

With Fred Naiden

The episode presents Professor Fred Naiden's view of Alexander the Great as a deeply religious figure, arguing that his beliefs about religion were at the core of understanding his actions, unlike the warrior king so often seen in modern treatments.

The episode credits Philip the One-Eye with turning Macedonia into the preeminent power in the Greek world within just 20 years, laying the foundation for the much better-known exploits of his son Alexander.

The episode follows Alexander the Great's campaigns beyond his defeat of the Persian king Darius III, into the Iranian Plateau, Central Asia, and finally south into India.

The episode describes the troubled final years of Alexander's reign, when his soldiers were spent from campaigning even as the king wanted to keep fighting, until his sudden death left the generals to decide the empire's fate.

The episode describes Macedonia as a semi-barbarian backwater on the fringes of the Greek world for most of ancient Greek history, until the rise of King Philip II began to change that very quickly.

The episode credits Philip of Macedonia as a towering figure, assassinated in 336 BC at the peak of his powers, leaving Alexander a kingdom he expanded beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

The episode imagines a Macedonian soldier called Red Cleitus and asks how he spent the vast amounts of coin he plundered and earned fighting across Asia under Alexander the Great.

The episode asks how history would look different if Alexander the Great had died at the Granicus River in 334 BC, and whether Macedonia would still have conquered most of Asia.

With Charlotte van Regenmortel

The episode traces how the decades after Alexander the Great's death saw warfare intensify across an area stretching from Italy to Afghanistan, and how that warfare created a concept of wage labor transforming the Hellenistic world's economies.

The episode describes the Hellenistic world stretching from Sicily to India across centuries of new kingdoms, and argues that war, more than any other phenomenon, defined it for the whole of its existence.

The episode places Syracuse and Carthage battling for dominance in Sicily and beyond as the fourth century drew to a close, fighting wars of ever-increasing scale that led directly to the eventual conflicts known as the Punic Wars.

The episode traces how, after Alexander's death, the chance of a relative truly ruling the empire shrank while the generals fought for power, and the outlines of a new world order began to take shape.

While Alexander the Great's successors fought over control of his empire, Celtic-speaking migrants moved east along the Danube largely unnoticed by the Greeks to their south, before those Celts launched one of the largest invasions of Greece in recorded history.

The episode credits Pyrrhus of Epirus with costly but clear victories in his first battles against Rome, yet says he could not win the war, which Rome's dogged determination eventually won, opening the path to seemingly inevitable conflict with Carthage.

By 281 BC Rome controlled much of Italy, still a minor player on the larger Mediterranean scene, until King Pyrrhus of Epirus crossed the Adriatic with Macedonian pikemen and war elephants.

The episode credits Antigonus the One-Eyed with coming closer than almost any other post-Alexander figure to recreating the dead king's empire, though his success aroused the other Successors' anger and his downfall soon followed.

The episode places the 280s BC as the moment when only a few men who had campaigned across Asia with Alexander remained alive, and the Hellenistic world they fought to create was ready to be born.

The episode argues that Rome's entrance onto the stage of Mediterranean power politics came a decade before the Punic Wars, in a bloody, grinding war against the Hellenistic king Pyrrhus of Epirus.

The episode notes Rome barely bothered with the Greek east for most of its history, then suddenly laid low the two most powerful Hellenistic warrior-kings of the past century and became the Mediterranean's hegemonic power within ten years.

With Greg Anderson

It's often said that the past is a foreign country where basic assumptions about how the world is supposed to work don't apply; Professor Greg Anderson has ideas about understanding people of the past on their terms in ancient Greece.