Daily life

One voice, in order, from the Stone Age forward, and long enough to stop for a fifty-minute episode on the symposium when the story reaches one. A hundred and twelve numbered episodes so far and still running.

The stretch most Greek histories skip: after Alexander dies in 323 BC the empire splits between his generals, and this works through the Seleucids, the Ptolemies, the Antigonids and the Greek kingdoms that reached India.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

With Justin Jackson, Benedict Whalen

Deacon Harrison Garlick, Dr. Justin Jackson, and Dr. Benedict Whalen of Hillsdale College end the twelve-week study of the Odyssey with Books 23 and 24, unearthing more of Homer's truth.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

With David Niles

Deacon Harrison Garlick, Adam Minihan, David Niles, Thomas Lackey, and Frank Grabowski close the Odyssey with Hermes leading the suitors' souls to Hades and Athena brokering peace in Ithaca.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

Deacon Harrison Garlick and Dr. Frank Grabowski discuss Books 6 through 8 of the Odyssey, covering Odysseus' time among the Phaeacians and the nature of the Phaeacians.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

Deacon Harrison Garlick and Adam Minihan close the Iliad with Priam kissing the hands of Achilles, the man who killed his son Hector, to beg for the body's return.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

Prof. Paul Cartledge on the Spartan mirage: education, political structure and military, the unique status of Spartan women, and later uses of Sparta, from the movie 300 to the French Revolution and North America.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

With Pavlos Papadopoulos

Deacon Harrison Garlick, Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos, and Dr. Frank Grabowski open a new twelve-week study of the Odyssey with Book One, calling it one of the greatest texts in the Western canon.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

With Eli Stone

Deacon Harrison Garlick and Eli Stone discuss Book 8 of the Odyssey, where a bard's song of Troy makes Odysseus weep and the bard returns to sing of Aphrodite's adultery against Hephaestus.

Part of Ancient History Fangirl

Sex workers in ancient Greece sometimes had more freedom than most in the Greek world could imagine, a freedom that came at a price for the famous Hetaerae of Classical Athens.

Part of Professor Kozlowski Lectures

Professor Kozlowski continues the Odyssey as Odysseus' crew and the gods betray him, he finally reaches his homeland of Ithaca, and he tests his wife Penelope.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

With Alex Petkas

Deacon Harrison Garlick, Dr. Frank Grabowski, and Dr. Alex Petkas of the Cost of Glory discuss Books 13 and 14 of the Odyssey, where Odysseus reaches Ithaca sleeping through the Phaeacian voyage.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

Deacon Harrison Garlick and Dr. Frank Grabowski discuss Books 17 through 19 of Homer's Odyssey, where the disguised king returns to Ithaca as a beggar and has a heartbreaking reunion with his loyal dog Argos.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

With Pavlos Papadopoulos

Deacon Harrison Garlick and Adam Minihan welcome Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos to discuss Book 13 of the Odyssey, where the Phaeacians bring Odysseus home to Ithaca and Poseidon punishes them for it.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

Deacon Harrison Garlick, Dr. Frank Grabowski, and Thomas Lackey discuss Books 20 and 21 of Homer's Odyssey, where the stage is set for the suitors' long-awaited slaughter.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

Deacon Harrison Garlick welcomes Thomas Lackey to discuss Book 16 of the Odyssey, where Athena transforms the beggar back into Odysseus and father and son embrace and weep together.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

With Eli Stone

Deacon Harrison Garlick, Adam Minihan, and Eli Stone discuss Book 6 of the Odyssey, where Nausicaa washes clothes by the river and a naked Odysseus emerges to ask for her mercy.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

With Jack Drury

Deacon Harrison Garlick, Dr. Frank Grabowski, and Latin teacher Jack Drury discuss Books 15 and 16 of the Odyssey, covering Telemachus' journey home and the father-son reunion in the swineherd's hut.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

Greek love and sexuality through pederasty, the theories of love in Plato's Symposion, nudity in art, female and male prostitutes and the evidence for their daily life, and famous hetairai such as Aspasia and Phryne.

Part of Professor Kozlowski Lectures

Professor Kozlowski follows Odysseus' narrated adventures through cannibal cyclopes, good and bad hosts and guests, and the dead he encounters along the way.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

With Eli Stone

Deacon Harrison Garlick and Eli Stone discuss Book 7 of the Odyssey, where Queen Arete is the first to question Odysseus about his name and homeland and King Alcinous offers his daughter Nausicaa in marriage.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

Growing up in Athens from birth to adolescence: childbirth, childhood, the rites of passage on the way to the teenage years, Old and New paideia, and the training boys undertook to be accepted as hoplite citizen warriors.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

Life for the elderly, the liminal stage between life and death, funeral and burial rituals, the archaeology of the Kerameikos, the demosion sema and epitaphios logos in Athenian democracy, and funerary monuments from archaic to Hellenistic.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

Deacon Harrison Garlick and Adam Minihan discuss Book 9 of the Odyssey, where Odysseus finally names himself and tells of the Lotus-eaters and the cyclops who devours his men.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

With Flint Dibble

Archaeological scientist Flint Dibble studies people, animals and environment across the ancient Greek world, discussing his publication on the consumption and management of animals at Azoria on Crete and what the archaeological evidence says about food in ancient Greece.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

The notion of the barbaroi in Greek culture, the origins of slavery and the philosophical theories for it, and the legal status, roles and importance of slaves and metics in the Athenian economy.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

Amy Pistone, Visiting Professor of Classics at Notre Dame, on ancient Greek drinking culture with a side of sports, or how college students can relate to the ancient Greeks.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

With Kyle Washut

Deacon Harrison Garlick welcomes Kyle Washut, President of Wyoming Catholic College, to discuss the Odyssey as a guide for rebuilding culture and the influence of John Senior on education.

Part of Ancient History Fangirl

With Liv Albert

Liv Albert from Let's Talk About Myths Baby explores Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which immerses players in Ancient Greece through the symposia of Athens, Corinth, the Peloponnesian War and Crete.

Part of TROJAN WAR: THE PODCAST

Fifty minutes of story cover a dispute over honour that leads to a leadership shift in the Greek army, then twenty minutes of commentary retell how Paris's abandoned wife Oenone refuses to heal the wound that kills him.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

With Jerolyn Morrison

Food archaeologist Jerolyn Morrison has excavated Minoan sites on Crete for almost three decades, in a rerun with bonus ancient recipes and the myths of Labyrinth, Minotaur and Talos.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

How Greeks traveled by land and sea, the port of Piraeus, silver mining at Thorikos and the striking of coins, farming and selling in the agora, Athenian workshops, and elite disdain for the merchant and manufacturing classes.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

With Adam Conque

Deacon Harrison Garlick welcomes fellow Catholic deacon Adam Conque to discuss Penelope's test of the bow in Book 21, which Telemachus, Leodes and Eurymachus each fail before Odysseus the beggar strings it with ease.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

With Alec Bianco

Deacon Harrison Garlick and Adam Minihan welcome Alec Bianco to discuss Book 14 of the Odyssey, where the disguised Odysseus tests the hospitality of his loyal swineherd, Eumaeus.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

How Sparta worked: the diarchy, gerousia, apella and ephors, the so-called Lykourgan land reform, helots, perioikoi and Spartan women, the stages of the agoge, and why the system ultimately failed.

Part of The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

With Emily Wilson

Homer's Odyssey continues with translator Emily Wilson, examining the oikos or estate built on violence, its link to xenia or hospitality that forges military alliances, plus status distinctions and the role of the gods.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

Deacon Harrison Garlick, Dr. Frank Grabowski, and Thomas Lackey discuss Book 3 of the Odyssey, where old King Nestor from the Iliad helps Telemachus and recalls the Achaeans' wrath from Athena.

Part of New Books in Ancient History

With Emily Wilson

Emily Wilson's Odyssey (Norton, 2017) is the first English translation of The Odyssey by a woman, in iambic pentameter and matching the line count of the Greek original.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

With Jared Zimmerer

Deacon Harrison Garlick welcomes Dr. Jared Zimmerer to discuss Book 17 of the Odyssey, where the dog Argo recognizes his master and then dies, and Antinous hurls a stool at the beggar.

Part of Young Heretics

Odysseus reaches Ithaca but still has one journey left, learning with the help of his nursemaid Eurycleia that war shaped him without erasing who he was before he left home.

Part of Young Heretics

The Odyssey opens with an empty space where Odysseus should be, and the story sets out to answer who he is, beginning with the moment Odysseus reveals his true identity to his hosts the Phaeacians.

Part of Young Heretics

The Odyssey picks up where the Iliad ends, tracing soldiers returning to society, and begins Odysseus' long journey home with his son Telemachus growing to manhood without his father around.

Part of Ancient History Fangirl

Conventional wisdom divides sex workers in ancient Greece into enslaved pornai and elite hetaerae, a drastic oversimplification; life varied at every level of the profession, including those who fit neither category.

Part of New Books in Ancient History

With Sarah F. Derbew

Sarah F. Derbew's Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2022) is called the first concerted treatment of black skin color in Greek literature and visual culture, covering Egyptians, Aithiopians and Indians.

Part of New Books in Ancient History

With Jessica Romney

Jessica Romney's Lyric Poetry and Social Identity in Archaic Greece (U Michigan Press, 2020) reads sympotic lyric for how Greek poets built group identity in martial poetry, in exile and in political verse.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

With Rachel Greb

Deacon Harrison Garlick welcomes Rachel Greb to discuss Book 23 of the Odyssey, where Penelope tests her husband with the secret of their marriage bed rooted in an olive tree.

Part of Ancient Greece Declassified

Homeric scholar Olga Levaniouk on the intelligence and agency of Penelope in Homer's Odyssey, which is seldom appreciated, and the old debate over whether she realizes who the disguised beggar is.

Part of Ad Navseam

Athena, disguised as Mentor, wants the punishment of the suitors and disloyal staff, raising hard questions about the deaths of Leodes and the executed maids.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

With Mary Pat Donoghue

Deacon Harrison Garlick welcomes Mary Pat Donoghue to discuss Book 19 of the Odyssey, where the beggar tells Penelope her husband is returning and the maid Eurycleia recognizes his scar.

Part of Ad Navseam

Penelope wins her battle of wits over their bed as the suitors are sent to Hades, where Agamemnon jeers, while Odysseus tests his old father with one more false identity.

Part of Young Heretics

Odysseus gets re-acquainted with his furry friend and his long-lost son in a moving series of reunion scenes, learning that he also left much of himself at home and that his worst failures are not the last word.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

Basic designs of Greek homes and the furniture, decoration and lighting that might be found in them, the gynakeion and andron, the pitfalls and benefits of urban Athens, Hestia in the oikos, and Athenian clothing and hairstyles.

Part of Spartan History Podcast

Sparta's compulsory, state sponsored education raised children of both sexes as future warriors and mothers, set against Athenian rivals, and the episode addresses pederasty, misogyny and child abuse within that system directly.

Part of Classical Stuff You Should Know

Book V of Plato's Republic, an aside on something he glossed over earlier, holding women and children in common, and the hosts calling him the first true feminist before taking it back.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

Medical and philosophical writing on women's bodies, particularly the Hippokratic Corpus and Aristotle, on menstruation, pregnancy and the wandering womb, methods of conception, contraception, abortion and exposure, divorce procedure, and the punishment of adulterers.

Part of The Ancients

With Paul Cartledge

From the Spartan king Menelaus and his wife Helen of Troy to adolescent same-sex relationships, Tristan and Professor Paul Cartledge look at sex and courtship in Sparta, and tackling infertility in the ancient world.

Part of Mythunderstood : A Greek (& other) Mythology Podcast

With Weslie Lechner

The hosts follow up an earlier episode on Vestal Virgins by turning to Ancient Greek prostitutes Phryne, Lamia and Aspasia, women who the episode says ascended to legend through the world's oldest profession, joined by guest Weslie Lechner.

Part of Combat and Classics Podcast

Jeff, Lise and Brian continue their close read series on Aristotle's Politics, tackling his discussion of slavery, which raises questions about nature, law and virtue in this fourth installment.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

Early Lakedaimon: the 1st and 2nd Messenian Wars that brought about the helot system, reform supposedly by Lykourgos yet more likely gradual, losses to Argos and Tegea before defeating them, Chilon, and Sparta's rise to hegemony.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

Deacon Harrison Garlick and Adam Minihan discuss Book 15 of the Odyssey, where Athena sends Telemachus home from Sparta and the swineherd reveals he was once a kidnapped prince.

Part of Alexandria: A Hellenistic World Podcast

With Philip II

In 341 BCE the Thracian Mukasokos, captured and enslaved by King Philip II's army, must learn the preferences and particularities of her new masters, the Macedonians.

Part of WINNOW: A Couple’s Close Reading of the Iliad and Odyssey

Book 19 of the Odyssey brings Odysseus and Penelope's first conversation, short of a reunion, asking whether she already recognizes him and why she stays silent if so.

Part of Lesche: Ancient Greece, New Ideas

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.

Part of Ancient History Fangirl

Athenian symposia were all-male drinking parties, the playground and hunting ground of the city's elite courtesans, the hetaerae, where guests drank, flirted and debated with the philosophers, and they had their dangers too.

Part of Combat and Classics Podcast

Brian, Lise and Jeff dig deeper into Aristotle's Politics in part 3 of their discussion, asking what slavery is and what slavery has to do with the household or the state.

Part of Ad Navseam

Odysseus survives Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens and his men's fatal hankering for a decent steak on the island of Helios, before Athena sends him to Eumaeus's hut on Ithaca.

Part of Ad Navseam

Odysseus clocks the mouthy Irus in a bum fight, then Penelope overshares with the stranger, Eurykleia shrieks at a telling scar, and a geesey dream puts his wife in the driver's seat.

Part of Ad Navseam

Telemachus finally reunites with Odysseus at the hut of the swineherd Eumaeus, complete with bird omens and Odysseus dodging stool legs while disguised as a beggar.

Part of The Ancients

With Owen Rees

Man's best friend was at people's sides in Ancient Greece too; Tristan and Dr Owen Rees discuss dog names, their function in Greek religion, and their possible deployment on the battlefield.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

With Stephen Cerone

A personal journey into ancient cooking explores foods and ingredients of Ancient Greece and Rome from 2500 years ago, made together with guest and co-host Stephen Cerone, a keen baker and sourdough enthusiast.

Part of Ancient Greece: Myth, Art, War

Dr Gillian Shepherd surveys Dark Age Greece after the Mycenaean collapse around 1200 BC, from finds at Lefkandi and 9th century burials in Athens to the alphabet borrowed from the Phoenicians in the 8th century BC.

Part of Lesche: Ancient Greece, New Ideas

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.

Part of New Books in Ancient History

With Emily Hauser

Emily Hauser's Penelope's Bones (Univ of Chicago Press, 2025) uses archaeology and science to recover the lives of Bronze Age women standing behind Helen, Briseis, Cassandra and Circe.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

With Father Bonaventure

Adam Minihan and Father Bonaventure, OP discuss Book 4 of the Odyssey, where Telemachus reaches Sparta during a double wedding feast as Menelaus' daughter marries the son of Achilles.

Part of Ithaca Bound

With Kim Shelton

Dr Kim Shelton of the University of California, Berkley, explains what is known about Mycenaean settlements on mainland Greece and how they would have been used in the Bronze Age.

With Jo Furniss, Andrew Bayliss

Jo Furniss asks whether Sparta, where 300 soldiers died at Thermopylae in 480BC and weak babies were culled, was really a utopia, or whether Aristotle was right that it turned men into machines.

Part of New Books in Ancient History

With Michael Leese

Michael Leese's Making Money in Ancient Athens (U Michigan Press, 2021) reads inscriptions and lawsuit speeches to argue Athenians practiced rational, profit-driven economic strategies.

Part of Combat and Classics Podcast

Socrates and Alcibiades reappear at a party where several characters take turns praising Eros, often called in English the god of love, and the conversation moves from sexual desire to politics, law and philosophy.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

With Jared Zimmerer

Deacon Harrison Garlick and Adam Minihan, with Dr. Jared Zimmerer, discuss Book 18 of the Odyssey, where Odysseus the beggar defeats the beggar Irus and Penelope lures gifts from the suitors.

Part of Ancient Greece: Myth, Art, War

With Dr David Pritchard

Dr David Pritchard examines the paradox that evidence on Attic women in classical Athens was produced by men, largely about elite wives and daughters, and traces a woman's career through education, marriage and household life.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

Forty-nine minutes at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where curator Phoebe Segal gives a one-on-one tour of the new Daily Life in Ancient Greece exhibit.

Part of Spirits: Mythology, Legends, & Folklore

Hestia, the living embodiment of the heart of the home, gets her due as an oft-forgotten Olympian who might not have gotten into the same shenanigans and antics as the other gods yet still matters greatly.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

Ancient Spartan society, how it functioned and the role of slavery and the Helots, the origin myths of Sparta, and the infamous black broth soup that supposedly only Spartans loved, how it was made and whether it was tasty.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

What different subgroups of Greeks ate each day, early cookbook authors, the economic, religious and medicinal role of wine, the Anthesteria that opened the previous autumn's wine jars, and the symposion with its discussion, music, flirting and kottabos.

Part of Ancient Greece Declassified

Poet and translator Alicia Stallings unpacks Hesiod's Works and Days, home of the Prometheus and Pandora myths, as a guide to living justly in a harsh world.

Part of The Ancients

With Alastair Blanshard

Frederick the Great, Marie Antoinette and Oscar Wilde have all been discussed in terms of Ancient Greek ideas of homosexual love; Alastair Blanshard, Paul Eliadis Chair of Classics at the University of Queensland, discusses the concept's ripples through history.

Part of The Ancients

With James Lloyd

Without recordings, and with notation and instruments long forgotten, James Lloyd tells Tristan the reaction to music in Ancient Greece may sometimes have resembled the reaction to rock in the 20th-century United States, and to drill in the UK today.

Part of Ithaca Bound

With Alexander Jones

Professor Alexander Jones of New York University explains how varied and plentiful Greek calendars were in this region of the Mediterranean in the first millennium BCE.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

Food markets of Oxyrhynchos, the city of the sharp-nosed fish, in Hellenistic Egypt: what they sold, who could trade and where in the city they stood, based on the book of Peter Parsons.

Part of The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

With Emily Wilson

Homer's Odyssey, an epic poem from around 750 BC, is discussed with translator Emily Wilson, whose eighty-page introduction frames hospitality as a political tool while the episode asks whether that story teaches anything about ethics.

Part of Ad Navseam

The Odyssey opens with Penelope and Telemachus besieged on Ithaca by greedy suitors, and the poem's first word, andra, might be a guidestone for its deeper themes.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

Homer's Odyssey supplies the frame for exploring feasting, cooking and xenia, the Greek custom of hospitality to strangers, alongside archaeological discoveries from the real Bronze Age Greece behind the epic.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

With Flint Dibble

Part 2 with archaeologist Dr Flint Dibble goes deeper into the ancient Athenian world: butchering, sacrificial feasts set against home cooking, bones from the Agora, and eating habits up to Athens's hegemony in the Delian League.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

Archestratus, a Sicilian Greek from Gela or Syracuse, circumnavigated the ancient Mediterranean chasing his hunger, and what survives of his lost poem Hydipatheia comes only through Athenaeus's Deipnosophistai, composed around AD 200.

Part of WINNOW: A Couple’s Close Reading of the Iliad and Odyssey

Book 1 of the Odyssey opens on Ithaca, introducing Telemachus, Penelope and the suitors before Odysseus ever appears, and asks why the epic begins there.

Part of Spartan History Podcast

The Spartiates, or Homoioi, are examined as a ruling class funded by helot labour, bound to land tenure and communal dining halls, with the very word Homoioi better read as similars, not strict equals.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

Medical writers from Hippocrates to Galen, Oreibasius and Haly Abbas in Islamic Persia all linked diet to a healthy body, carrying the ancient Greek theory of humours forward into medieval European medical schools.

Part of TROJAN WAR: THE PODCAST

Thirty minutes of story cover Paris settling into Troy and his road trip to Sparta, then fourteen minutes of commentary trace the cliff-throwing stories about Spartan infanticide back to Plutarch, writing five centuries after the events he describes.

Part of The Ancients

Alexander the Great and the Queen of the Amazons reportedly had sex for 13 days solid, and the record on his male lovers stays an open question; Kate Lister interviews Tristan Hughes about it on Betwixt the Sheets.

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

With Jason Craig

Deacon Harrison Garlick and Adam Minihan welcome Jason Craig of Sword and Spade magazine to discuss fatherhood in the Odyssey, the problem of fatherlessness in Ithaca, and Telemachus' coming of age.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

Dan Snow's documentary on Libya and the ancient city of Cyrene inspired a fresh look at silphium, its relationship with asafoetida in Indian cuisine, and what ancient authors say it tasted like.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

The demos and the oikos in the late Dark Age, their unification through synoikismos into the polis, and later Greek philosophical thought on what it meant to live in a polis.

Part of HistoryExtra podcast

With Paul Cartledge

Paul Cartledge comments on the practice of slavery in ancient Greece, one of three topics in this episode.

Part of Spartan History Podcast

Spartan society's castes are surveyed: the Spartiate ruler class, the Helot slave class forming a massive share of the population, and the Perioikoi, dwellers around who worked as blacksmiths and fought as Hoplites.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

Part two follows Archestratus on an imaginary trip across the Black and Aegean seas some 2330 years ago, the Daedalus of tasty dishes, whose Gastrology takes that title according to Lycophron in his books on comedy.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

Silphium, valuable to ancient Greeks and Romans alike, connects to the prosperous ancient Greek colony of Cyrene in modern Libya, and the long-standing question of whether the plant truly went extinct.

Part of Ancient Greece: Myth, Art, War

Dr Gillian Shepherd traces the black and red figure vases made in Athens between the seventh and fourth centuries BC and exported across the Greek world, reading their scenes of warfare and women for evidence of daily life.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

Tens of thousands of Greeks immigrate to Egypt for posts in the bureaucracy or army, or perhaps to farm, and papyri show lives like Ptolemaeus, devotee of Serapis, and Kleon, chief engineer of the Fayyum reclamation.

Part of In Our Time

A large body of work originally attributed to Hippocrates, the Hippocratic Corpus, cannot have been written by a single author.

Part of History Unplugged Podcast

With Myke Cole

Their last stand at Thermopylae made the Spartans legends, but guest Myke Cole's book 'The Bronze Lie' argues their militarism aimed mainly at controlling the helot population, and their hegemony over Greece was brief.

Part of The Ancients

With Michael Scott

The Ancient Greek symposium extended beyond simple after-dinner drinking to wine, recline and philosophy among Hellenic men; Tristan and Michael Scott, Professor of Classics, explore this soiree of booze, babes and slaves, exclusively male aside from the occasional courtesan.

Part of WINNOW: A Couple’s Close Reading of the Iliad and Odyssey

Book 4 of the Odyssey finds Telemachus in Sparta with Menelaus and Helen, who slips something into the wine as Menelaus recounts his own homecoming.

Part of Dan Snow's History Hit

With Tristan Hughes, Michael Scott

Professor Michael Scott joins Tristan to describe the Ancient Greek symposium, a drinking party led by a symposiarch, male aside from the occasional courtesan, where Hellenic men would wine, recline and philosophise.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

The history of sesame seeds and their use in ancient cuisines, especially Greek, from their source in India through Mesopotamia and Egypt to ancient Greek desserts and China, with halva made of tahini and honey.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

Oxyrhynchus, a Hellenistic-Egyptian city at the turn from Greek to Roman influence, gave up 280 boxes of papyri after a low mound was dug on 11 January 1897, opening a window onto Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine Egypt.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

Ancient Classical Greece drank Lemnio, Savvatiano, Assyrtiko, Thassian and Chian wines at symposiums, opening the agape festivity with a libation poured onto the sacred family hearth before any guest raised a cup.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

Oligarchia and aristokratia replacing the waning basileis, the divide between nobles and commoners brought on by a spike in population, and Hesiod's Works and Days as life in the emerging polis seen by an ordinary citizen.

Part of WINNOW: A Couple’s Close Reading of the Iliad and Odyssey

Book 17 of the Odyssey has Odysseus entering the palace to a hostile welcome, kicked and pelted with chairs, while one loyal dog, Argos, seems to remember the master of the house.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

The ancient food traditions of Massalia, today Marseilles, where Greeks settled around 600 BCE with wine, grapes, olives and herbs, read through Archestratus and linked to Provençal sartanado and French bouillabaisse.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

Women in the Hellenistic Age, part one: the perils of childbirth, female poets and scholars, and the raunchier mimes of Herodas, as evidence for how women lived and died in a new cosmopolitan world.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

With Flint Dibble

Archaeologist Dr Flint Dibble researches the foodways of ancient Greece, explaining how animal bones once discarded now inform isotope analysis revealing how daily ancient diets varied from season to season.

Part of Expanding Eyes: A Visionary Education

Telemachus searches for his own identity in relation to his unknown parent in book 1 of the Odyssey, a timeless human dilemma set within the poem's complex structure.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

With Mariana Kavroulaki

An interview with Greek archaeologist and food historian Mariana Kavroulaki on the food and foodways of Classical Greece, with beer in ancient Greece, Franchthi Cave and garos among the topics of the conversation.

Part of History of Persia

Alexander the Great had many relationships, romantic and familial, from his parents Olympias and Philip to a vast array of step-mothers, siblings, and at least four romantic partners in a Macedonian royal family as vast as it was controversial.

Part of Ancient Greece: Myth, Art, War

With Dr David Pritchard

Dr David Pritchard of the University of Queensland examines Spartan women as a foil for Athens, alongside Attic women's supposed wantonness and their prominent role in Greek religious practice.

Part of The Ancients

With Thomas Ntinas

Tristan is joined by Thomas Ntinas, host of The Delicious Legacy, to discuss how much Mediterranean food has changed over two millennia, with mouth-watering home-made recreations of what people would have eaten, and the importance of honey and wine.

Part of WINNOW: A Couple’s Close Reading of the Iliad and Odyssey

Book 14 of the Odyssey has Odysseus meeting the swineherd Eumaeus first in Ithaca, ahead of the suitors or Penelope, asking what he represents.

Part of Ancient History Hound

The first of three episodes on Sparta examines the agoge, the syssitia and the Krypteia, asking what the sources say and how these differ from the ways they are sometimes depicted.

Part of Ancient History Hound

The helots of Sparta were indispensable to the Spartan state, and this episode asks what they did, how Sparta had acquired them and how their population was controlled.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

Unknown delicacies of the ancient Greek world surface through Athenaeus and his Deipnosophistai, drawing on texts from the sixth to the fourth century BC that praise local specialities and their prized regional excellence.

Part of Expanding Eyes: A Visionary Education

Father and son reunite in the hut of Eumaios in a moving, psychologically complex scene; strategies are devised to make up for being outnumbered, and Odysseus meets his old dog Argos.

Part of Expanding Eyes: A Visionary Education

Telemachus visits Menelaus and Helen in Lakedaimon and Nestor in Pylos, learning that becoming a man in the Odyssey takes more than being a warrior, including a lesson on the complexities of marriage.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

The earthquake of 464 BC devastates Sparta and the helots of Messenia revolt; Sparta calls on allies, then sends only the Athenians home, a snub marking open hostility as Cimon's popularity declines.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

Archestratus of Gela or Syracuse circumnavigated the Med for his hunger, and this final part closes out the surviving Athenaeus quotes from his poem Hydipatheia, found in Deipnosophistai, including a parrotfish recipe.

Part of WINNOW: A Couple’s Close Reading of the Iliad and Odyssey

Book 18 of the Odyssey has Odysseus beginning to make small moves in the palace while Penelope scams the suitors for more gifts.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

How much fish the ancient Greeks ate, whether it was popular or expensive, and the surviving recipes, with Plutarch's Moralia on Aedepsus in Euboea, where the sea nourishes a store of delicious fish.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

The ancient Greek chef was the first of the genre known today as Celebrity Chef, competitive and innovative amid feuds and gossip, and Mithaecus of Sicily, Europe's oldest cookbook author, left one surviving fish recipe.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

Salted, cured ham and bacon ranked above all other cures in ancient dietetics, a theory traced to sixth-century-BC Greek philosophers Anaximenes, Heraclitus and Thales, refined by Hippocrates and later systematised by Galen of Pergamon.

Part of WINNOW: A Couple’s Close Reading of the Iliad and Odyssey

Book 23 of the Odyssey reunites Odysseus and Penelope, though Odysseus must first pass the test.

Part of Spartan History Podcast

Part one of a three part biography traces Helen from her conception on the banks of the Eurotas river through her marriage to Menelaus, framing her as the classical Spartans' most famous ancestor.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

Archestratus of Gela supposedly gave the world the word gastronomy, and this favourite ancient foodie hero left mere whispering echoes from 23 centuries ago, weighed as legend or real, gastronomer, cook, poet or glutton.

Part of Good in Theory: A Political Philosophy Podcast

Socrates proposes nationalizing the family into one giant clan, women taking jobs and a eugenics program disguised as a religious festival, testing how family loyalty, political unity and meritocracy fit together in book 5 of Plato's Republic.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

Fava beans and peas from the genus Lathyrus have fed the ancient Greek world since time immemorial, cultivated from Neolithic remains through thousands of years on the modern Hellenic table.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

Feasting mattered greatly to the ancient Greeks and the wider Aegean societies, and sylphium, a herb popular in the cuisine of ancient Greece and Rome, helped make the Greek colony of Cyrene a rich, powerful democracy.

Part of Expanding Eyes: A Visionary Education

The suitors of the Odyssey humiliate themselves, unable to draw the bow that Odysseus shoots through twelve axe heads; after the battle and the hanging of the treacherous maids, Penelope tricks Odysseus before their reunion.

Part of Ancient History Hound

The first of two episodes on the experiences of a Spartan woman throughout her life opens with a general overview of Sparta before recounting what it might have been like as she grew up.

Part of Ancient History Fangirl

Silphium was the miracle plant of ancient Greece and Rome; the people of Cyrene printed it on their money, and it was considered a medicine that could cure baldness, epilepsy and poisonings, and may even have been a contraceptive.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

The first recorded fish sauce came from the ancient Greeks of the Black Sea colonies, and the surviving Greek recipes for it still affirm the distinction between a blood-viscera sauce and one made from whole fish.

Part of Ancient History Fangirl

Genn McMenemy co-created the Official Lore Olympus Cookbook, weaving the history and mythology of Greek cuisine into the world of Rachel Smythe's Lore Olympus, and Jenny interviews her here about making it.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

Part two follows the trails of frankincense and asks who the Nabataeans were, tracing how frankincense and other spices reached the temples and plates of ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans along a route tied to Arabia.

Part of Garner's Greek Mythology

A visit by Zeus and Hermes to an old couple's home in ancient Greece sparked philoxenia, the Greek tradition of hospitality to strangers; inhospitality could bring divine punishment, and violating that tradition led to the Trojan war.

Part of Ancient History Hound

The final part of this Spartan miniseries covers marriage, money and mothers, closing out the Sparta episodes with reading drawn from Pomeroy's Spartan Women and other modern sources.

Part of The Ancients

With Stephen Hodkinson

A legendary city-state associated with fierce warriors in battle, Sparta also had an everyday life; this second episode with Professor Stephen Hodkinson discusses the eating habits, training and even kingship of Sparta.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

Chios, fifth largest Greek island and reputed birthplace of Homer, is famous for mastiha, which flavours many Greek recipes, gives English the word masticated from the ancient Greek for chewing, and was popular from antiquity till today.

Part of Chronicles of Ancient Greece

After a newborn hiatus, the episode covers babies in Ancient Greece: motherhood, fatherhood, and the midwives who helped give birth through the ages.

Part of Garner's Greek Mythology

2,500 years ago Delos, birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, was the most sacred island in Greece and also the region's largest slave market, where traders grew rich on slaves taken by pirates until that wealth became the island's ruin.

Part of Not another Greek History podcast!

The episode asks whether ancient Greeks could mourn at any hour or only on a schedule for sorrow, whether you could be punished for not burying someone, and what kinds of tombs ranged from heroes to everyday souls.

Part of Garner's Greek Mythology

Medea, daughter of the sun god Helios and perhaps the most powerful woman in Greece, was the sorceress wife of Jason, leader of the Argonauts, and mastermind behind his heroic acts, until he betrayed her and Medea sought revenge.

Part of Garner's Greek Mythology

Hermes, the winged-foot god of fertility and patron of thieves and dreams, shares the episode with Hera, queen of the heavens and vindictive wife of Zeus, and Hestia, goddess of home and hearth who chose to be nobody's wife.

Part of Garner's Greek Mythology

Priestesses were among the most exalted and powerful mortal women in Greece, serving goddesses and in some cases gods, conducting sacrifices, leading festivals throughout the year, and acting as intermediaries connecting ancient Greek women to the divine.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

A celebratory recipe from the ancient Greco-Roman world bathes lamb or kid goat overnight in milk and honey for a slow roast, cooked with a luxurious sauce of red wine, dates and garum, from Apicius.

Part of Not another Greek History podcast!

The episode asks what 17th-century Pilgrims and ancient Greek farmers have in common, and why the Greek word for 'turkey' is a clue that the entire world is confused about poultry.

Part of Ancient Art Podcast (audio)

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.

Part of Live from Mount Olympus

With Beth Clancy

Athena taught Pandora at a huge loom hung with clay weights, and scholar Beth Clancy still weaves cloth and stories on one of those rare ancient looms in an upper Manhattan apartment.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

Episode zero introduces a podcast on ancient food and gastronomy, with recipes and ingredients from Classical Greece and ancient Rome, and promises a whole episode on garum and its lineage down to Thai and Vietnamese cooking.

Part of The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast · Philosophy texts read and chatted through; only the Greek texts are indexed

With Mark Lint, Philosophy Bro

Part of Ascend - The Great Books Podcast · The Great Books read in seasons; the Homer, tragedy and Plato seasons are indexed

Part of The History of Ancient Greece · The long chronological run, from the Stone Age forward

Part of Lesche: Ancient Greece, New Ideas · Johanna Hanink talks with fellow Hellenists about their latest work

With Emily Hauser

Part of Epic Greek History · From Mycenaean kings through the Persian invasions, one full and one short episode a month

Part of In Our Time · The BBC seminar format; only the Greek episodes are indexed

Part of The Ancient Philosophy Podcast · A philosophy professor on ancient thought worldwide; only the Greek episodes are indexed

Part of The Delicious Legacy · Food history from a Greek gourmand; only the Greek episodes are indexed

Part of New Books in Ancient History · Scholars on their new books, interviewed by a peer; only the Greek episodes are indexed

With Donni Wang

Part of Ancient History Hound · Ancient Blogger on Greece, Rome and antiquity for every level; only the Greek episodes are indexed

Part of Chronicles of Ancient Greece · A small amateur podcast on Greek myth and history

Part of Epic Greek History · From Mycenaean kings through the Persian invasions, one full and one short episode a month

Part of Myth Madness: A Mythology Podcast · Myths from around the world; only the Greek episodes are indexed

Part of Myth Madness: A Mythology Podcast · Myths from around the world; only the Greek episodes are indexed

Part of Ancient Art Podcast (audio) · Art and culture of the ancient Mediterranean; only the Greek episodes are indexed