Piero Boitani joins me in the Lesche to discuss his new book Timaeus in Paradise: Metaphors and Beauty from Plato to Dante and Beyond (Princeton University Press 2025). 

Ancient texts

• Hebrew Bible, Genesis
• Plato: Timaeus, Phaedrus, Symposium, Apology
• Aristotle: Nicomachaean Ethics
• Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
• Ovid, Metamorphoses
• Philo of Alexandria, On the Creation (de Opificio mundi: treatise on the Genesis creation narrative)
• New Testament: Acts of the Apostles
• Pseudo-Longinus, On the Sublime
• Calcidius, Latin translation of much of Timaeus (4th century CE)
• Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, mystical treatises (c. 500 CE)

Later sites of reception & influence

In Literature and Philosophy

• Johannes Scotus Eriugena (John "the Scot"), translation of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (9th century)
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Divine Names (1260s)
• Dante, Paradiso (early 1300s)
• Marsilio Ficino's work on Plato and Timaeus (15th century)
• Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), scientific treatises
• Alfred North Whitehad, Process and Reality (1929)
• Ezra Pound, Cantos (1915-1959)

In Visual Art and Architecture

• Raphael, "School of Athens" (1509-11, Apostolic Palace, Vatican) and Chigi Chapel (1510s, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome)
• Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel (1508-1512)
• Botticelli, "Birth of Venus" (mid-1480s)
• Crypt of San Magno in Anagni (11th century)
• Sculptures of Chartres Cathedral (12th century)

About our guest

Piero Boitani is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Rome “Sapienza.” A Fellow of the British Academy, the Medieval Academy of America, the Accademia dei Lincei, and the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics, in 2016 he received the Balzan Prize for Comparative Literature. He is chairman of the Fondazione Lorenzo Valla and general editor of its series of Greek and Latin Writers. 

His most recent books include Il grande racconto dei classici (Bologna, Il Mulino, 2024); «Reconnaître est un Dieu». L’anagnorisis dans la littérature occidentale (Paris, Garnier, 2025); Timaeus in Paradise: Metaphors and Beauty from Plato to Dante and Beyond (Princeton University Press 2025). A new book, The Five Elements-I cinque elementi, with a preface by Stephen Greenblatt, will be published by Mondadori, in the Lo Specchio series, in February 2026.

________________________________

Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
Email: [email protected]
Suggest a book using this form

Inger Kuin joins me in the Lesche to discuss her new book Diogenes: The Rebellious Life and Revolutionary Philosophy of the Original Cynic (Basic Books 2025). 

Ancient sources

• Aristotle, Politics 1.3-7 (on 'natural' slavery)
• Diogenes Laertius, 2.6, Life of Diogenes
• Plutarch, Life of Alexander 14 (on the 'get out of my sun' episode)
• Xenophon, Anabasis 5-6 (on Sinope, Diogenes' birthplace)
• Other Diogenes testimonia from a variety of sources

For an accessible English-language collection of testimonia for Diogenes, see Robert Dobbin's The Cynic Philosophers, from Diogenes to Julian (Penguin Classics, 2012).

About our guest

Inger Kuin is a researcher, writer, and teacher focused on the intellectual history of ancient Greece and Rome. She is Associate Professor of Classics General Faculty at the University of Virginia. Originally from The Netherlands, she splits her time between Charlottesville (VA) and Rotterdam, and publishes both in English and in Dutch.

________________________________

Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
Email: [email protected]
Suggest a book using this form

Tatiana Bur joins me in the Lesche to discuss her new book Technologies of the Marvellous in Ancient Greek Religion (Cambridge University Press 2025). 

Ancient texts

• Homer, Iliad 18 (on Hephaestus and his self-moving tripods) 
• Many Athenian tragedies and comedies that made use of the μηχανή or κράδη (in comedy)
• Aristotle, Poetics (on the theatrical ‘crane’/μηχανή) 
• The Aristotelian/Peripatetic work Mechanical Questions (Μηχανικά)
• Philo of Byzantium, Μηχανική Σύνταξη 
• Works on mechanics by Hero of Alexandria 
• Polybios, History 12.13, on the mechanical snail in the procession at Athens 
• Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 2.5, on Herodes Atticus’ mechanical Panathenaic ship
• Athenaeus, Deipnosophistai 196a-203c, on the πομπή of Ptolemy Philadelphus

Modern bibliography

• Eric Csapo's work on ancient theater
• Alfred Gell’s work on art agency, particularly "technologies of enchantment"
• Susan Harvey, 2006. Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination. Berkeley, Ca. 
• Verity Platt, 2011. Facing the Gods: Epiphany in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature, and Religion. Cambridge.
• Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, 1997. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford, CA.

________________________________

Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
Email: [email protected]
Suggest a book using this form

Mary Beard, Classics editor at the Times Literary Supplement, and Clifford Ando, senior editor of the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, join me in the Lesche to discuss the state of Classics reviewing today. 

• How do the TLS and BMCR assign appropriate reviewers? 
• What makes for a good review? 
• What's the line between critique and nastiness? 
• Why are reviews these days so often lacking in susbtantive criticism? 
• What do editors wish review authors knew or would consider before writing a review? 

Some bibliography

• Clifford Ando, "BMCR: A view under the hood." Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2022.11.26. (Read all the papers from the 30th anniversary celebration of BMCR here. Several deal with book reviewing.)
• Mary Beard, Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations. Liveright 2013. (See especially the Afterword, "Reviewing Classics".)
• Daniel Mendelsohn, "A Critic's Manifesto," The New Yorker, August 28, 2012.

About our guests

Clifford Ando teaches Classics and History at the University of Chicago.  His work focuses on the histories of law, religion, and government in the ancient world.  He is the author, editor, and translator of some 20 books, and he has served as an editor, associate editor, or senior editor of Bryn Mawr Classical Review for not quite twenty years.

Mary Beard is professor emerita of classics at the University of Cambridge, a fellow of Newnham College, and professor of Ancient Literature at the Royal Academy. She is also the classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, a fellow of the British Academy, and an international member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  She is the author of more than twenty books on the ancient world. Her latest book, Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old, is due out in spring 2026 with Profile Books (UK) and the University of Chicago Press (USA).

________________________________

Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
Email: [email protected]
Suggest a book using this form

Harvard University historian Paul Kosmin joins me in the Lesche to discuss his recent book The Ancient Shore (Harvard University Press 2024), winner of the American Historical Association's 2025 Prize in History Prior to CE 1000. 

Works mentioned

• Agatharchides of Cnidus, On the Erythraean Sea (2nd C. BC)
• Philip de Loutherbourg, "Shipwreck" (painting, 1793).
• Demuth, Bathsheba. 2019. Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. W. W. Norton.
• Dening, Gregory Moore. 1980. Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas, 1774–1880. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

About our guest

Paul Kosmin completed his undergraduate degree at Oxford and earned a PhD in Ancient History from Harvard University in 2012. He was appointed an Assistant Professor in Harvard's Classics Department in 2012, was tenured in 2019, and in 2020 became the Philip J. King Professor of Ancient History, where he currently serves as Interim Chair. His research focuses on the political and cultural history of the ancient Greek world, concentrating on the globalizing and colonial Hellenistic period, and now includes an environmentally-oriented turn.

________________________________

Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
Email: [email protected]
Suggest a book using this form

James Romm joins me in the Lesche to discuss his new biography Demosthenes: Democracy's Defender. The book is a part of Yale University Press's Ancient Lives series, of which James is also the editor. 

James's author website

Ancient texts mentioned

• Demosthenes, speeches
• Aeschines, speeches

About our guest

James Romm is an author, reviewer, and the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College in Annandale, NY. He specializes in ancient Greek and Roman culture and civilization. His reviews and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the London Review of Books, the Daily Beast, and other venues. He has held the Guggenheim Fellowship (1999-2000), the Birkelund Fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library (2010-11), and a Biography Fellowship at the Leon Levy Center of the City University of New York (2014-15).

________________________________

Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
Email: [email protected]
Suggest a book using this form

Sam Holzman joins me in the Lesche to discuss "bilingual" Ionic column capitals (i.e., column capitals that combined an archaic convex style of relief carving with a more modern concave style). These are the subject of his book Retrospective Columns: Ionic Capitals and Perceptions of the Past in Greek Architecture, which just came out with Princeton University Press.

Ancient source

• Vitruvius, de Architectura, esp. Books 3 & 4.

Modern works

• Architectural drawings in James Stuart and Nicholas Revett's Antiquities of Athens and Julien-David Le Roy's Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce.
• Alzinger, Wilhelm. 1967. "Alt-Ephesos: Topographie und Architektur." Das Altertum 13.1: 20-44.
• Hanink, Johanna. Lycurgan Athens and the Making of Classical Tragedy. Cambridge 2014.
• Rudwick, Martin J. S. 1976. "The Emergence of a Visual Language for Geological Science 1760—1840," History of Science 14.3: 149-95.
• Schmidt-Dounas, Barbara. 2005. "Frühe Peripteraltempel in Nordgriechenland." Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Athenische Abteilung 120: 107-41.

About our guest

Sam Holzman is an assistant professor in the Department of Art & Archaeology and the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. He received his BA from Brown, where his senior thesis advisor in Classics was none other than Professor Hanink! He also received an MPhil from Cambridge and PhD from UPenn. He has excavated in Greece and Turkey and now leads the architectural research team of American Excavations Samothrace. 

________________________________

Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
Email: [email protected]
Suggest a book using this form

Dan-el Padilla Peralta joins me in the Lesche to discuss the critique of classicism that he articulates in his recent book Classicism and Other Phobias (PUP 2025).

Works mentioned (select)

• Adeshei Carter, Jacoby. “Racing the Canon.” In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race, edited by Paul C. Taylor, Linda Martín Alcoff, and Luvell Anderson, 163–174. New York: Routledge, 2017.
• Baldwin, James. “Stranger in the Village.” Harper’s Magazine, October 1953.
• Du Bois, W. E. B. Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920.
• Eccleston, Sasha-Mae, and Dan-el Padilla Peralta. “Racing the Classics: Ethos and Praxis.” American Journal of Philology 144, no. 2 (2023): 199–218.
• de la Vega, Garcilaso. Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru. Translated by Harold V. Livermore. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966.
• Guevara, Ernesto “Che.” The Congo Diary: Episodes of the Revolutionary War in the Congo. Edited by Mary-Alice Waters. Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1999.
• Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• Morrison, Toni. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Delivered at the University of Michigan, October 7, 1988.
• Proctor, Hannah. Burnout: A Guide to the Psychopolitical Condition. London: Pluto Press, 2024.
• Shia, Moon-Ho Jung. Archive of Tongues: An Intimate History of Brownness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.
• Umachandran, Mathura, and Marchella Ward, eds. Critical Ancient World Studies: The Case for Forgetting Classics. London: Routledge, 2023.
• Wynter, Sylvia. Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World. Manuscript, 1970s. Edited version published in Katherine McKittrick, ed., Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.
• Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Why Arendt Matters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.

About our guest

Dan-el Padilla Peralta is professor of Classics, and associated faculty in African American Studies and affiliated faculty in the Programs of Latino Studies and Latin American Studies and the University Center for Human Values, at Princeton University. He is the author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (Penguin 2015); Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic (Princeton 2020); and Classicism and Other Phobias (Princeton 2025).

________________________________

Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
Email: [email protected]
Suggest a book using this form

Patricia (Tricia) Kim joins me in the Lesche to discuss the art of Hellenistic queenship -- i.e., art that depicted Hellenistic queens, art patronized by Hellenistic queens, and art that spoke to the construction of queenship across the Hellenistic world. 

Egypt Museum on the "Arsinoe-Aphrodite" statue

Franck Goddio write-up of the statue

Lesche episode 18 is a conversation about Isis Worship in the Greek East (including Egypt) with Lindsey Mazurek.

Ancient passage 

Pliny, Natural History 34.148 (on Timochares' idea for a floating statue of Arsinoe II)

Works mentioned

• Historical work by Sheila L. Ager, Elizabeth Carney, Sabine Müller, et al. on Hellenistic queenship.
• Najmabadi, Afsaneh (2006) "Beyond the Americas: Are Gender and Sexuality Useful Categories of Analysis?" Journal of Women's History 18: 11-21.
• Parmenter, Christopher Stedman (2024) Racialized Commodities: Long-Distance Trade, Mobility, and the Making of Race in Ancient Greece, C. 700-300 BCE. Oxford.
• Seaman, Kristen (2020) Rhetoric and Innovation in Hellenistic Art. Cambridge.
• Smith, R.R.R. (1989) Hellenistic Royal Portraits. Oxford.
• Stewart, Andrew (1993) Faces of Power: Alexander's Image and Hellenistic Politics. University of California.
• Waywell, Geoffrey B. (1978) The Free-Standing Sculptures of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in the British Museum. London.

About our guest

Patricia Kim is assistant professor at New York University and author of The Art of Queenship in the Hellenistic World (Cambridge University Press, 2025)—the first book-length study on the visual and material cultures of queenship from the 4th-2nd centuries B.C.E, across the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia. She is guest-curator of a forthcoming exhibition on ancient queenship at the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Getty Villa (2027). 

________________________________

Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
Email: [email protected]
Suggest a book using this form

Anthony Kaldellis joins me in the Lesche to discuss an in-progress edited volume about the transmission of classical texts in the East Roman Empire (aka Byzantium), and why, more generally, classicists should be better informed about the Greek Middle Ages, aka the Byzantine Millennium.

Anthony is the host of a wonderful podcast called Byzantium and Friends, which was (and still is) a major inspiration for Lesche.

Ancient texts mentioned

• Photius, Bibliotheca
• Eustathius of Thessalonica's commentaries on the Iliad and the Odyssey

Some bibliography

• Anthony has written a huge amount. During this episode we mention in particular:
  • his "minigraph" Byzantium Unbound (Arc Humanities 2019)
  • his groundbreaking article "The Byzantine Role in the Making of the Corpus of Classical Greek Historiography: A Preliminary Investigation," in the 2012 issue of the Journal of Hellenic Studies (vol. 132).
• Baukje van den Berg, Homer the Rhetorician: Eustathios of Thessalonike on the Composition of the Iliad. (Oxford 2022).
• Elizabeth Jeffreys, "We need to talk about Byzantium: or, Byzantium, its reception of the classical world as discussed in current scholarship, and should classicists pay attention?" Classical Receptions Journal 6 (2014) 158-74.
• Filippomaria Pontani, "Scholarship in the Byzantine Empire (529-1453)," in F. Montanari, ed., History of Ancient Greek Scholarship: From the Beginnings to the End of the Byzantine Age (Brill 2020).
  • Listen to Anthony's "Byzantium and Friends" podcast episdoe, in which he and Pontani discuss the article, here.
• L.D. Reynolds and N.G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature. 4th edn. Oxford 2013.

About our guest

Anthony Kaldellis is a professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. He has published many books and articles on the history, culture, and literature of Byzantium, ranging from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries. His most recent book is a comprehensive history of the eastern Roman empire: The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (Oxford, 2023). He is also the host of the academic podcast “Byzantium & Friends.”

________________________________

Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
Email: [email protected]
Suggest a book using this form