Lesche: Ancient Greece, New Ideas

Richard Hunter and Rebecca Laemmle join me in the Lesche to discuss their new commentary on Odyssey Book 11, in the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics ("Green and Yellow") commentary series. 

Ancient texts

• Homer, Odyssey (general) and Iliad (esp. Book 9 and Book 23)   
• Aristophanes, Frogs   
• Plato /Platonic eschatological accounts/underworlds, esp. the Myth of Er in in Republic 10  
• Timon of Phlius (Hellenistic philosopher)
• Vergil, Aeneid
• Seneca, Medea
• Lucian, Dialogues of the Dead   
• Pausanias, Description of Greece (description of Polygnotus' Nekuia painting at Delphi; view a reconstruction here)
• Homeric scholia

Other works

• Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus"
• Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey

About our guests

Richard Hunter is Regius Professor of Greek Emeritus in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College. He has published extensively in the fields of Greek and Latin literature; his recent books include The Measure of Homer (Cambridge, 2018), (with Rebecca Laemmle) Euripides, Cyclops (Cambridge, 2020), and Greek Epitaphic Poetry: A Selection (Cambridge, 2022), both in the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series. His essays are collected in On Coming After: Studies in Post-Classical Greek Literature and its Reception (2008) and The Layers of the Text (2021). He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Rebecca Laemmle is Professor of Greek Literature at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College. Her award-winning doctoral thesis was published as Poetik des Satyrspiels (2013). She co-edited, with Richard Hunter, Euripides, Cyclops (Cambridge, 2020) in the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series and has published widely in both English and German on ancient literature and its reception.

________________________________

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]
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Andrej Petrovic joins me in the Lesche to discuss a new verse-inscription from Teos (in Turkey) discovered in 2013 by Musa Kadıoğlu, director of the excavations at Teos. Together with Mustafa Adak (Professor of Greek Language and Literature, University of Akdeniz) and Christian Marek (University of Zurich), Andrej has co-authored a monograph with edition, commentary, and interpretative essays on the inscription (publication details TBD).

Ankara University press release announcing the discovery (in Turkish)

Harvard Gazette article on the new monumental portrait statue from Sardia

American Society for Greek and Roman Epigraphy (ASGLE)

Ancient authors/works 

• Theognis of Megara/the Thegonidea, esp. lines 19-20 (the σφραγίς, 'seal') and line 460, πολλάκις ἐκ νυκτῶν ἄλλον ἔχει λιμένα. 
• Semonides of Amorgos
• The "Sosthenes inscription"
• The "Mnesiepes inscription"
• The "Salmacis poem"/"Pride of Halicarnassus"

Modern scholarship

• Adak, M. and Thonemann, P. 2022. Teos and Abdera: Two Cities in Peace and War. Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents. Oxford University Press. 
• Bernsdorff, H. 2021. Anacreon of Teos: Testimonia and Fragments. Oxford University Press. 
• Bowie, E. 2012. "An early chapter in the history of the Theognidea"
• West, M. L. 1974. Studies in Greek Elegy and Iambus, ch. III "On the history of the Theognidean Sylloge"
• See also esp. Diskin Clay's 2004 Archilochus Heros: The Cult of Poets in the Greek Polis (Center for Hellenic Studies), which contains many translated ancient testimonia. BMCR review here.

About our guest

Andrej Petrovic is a specialist in Greek literature, epigraphy, and religion. Born in Yugoslavia and trained in Serbia and Germany, he held academic positions in Munich, Heidelberg, and Durham (UK) before becoming Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia. He edits Greece and Rome and serves as president-elect of the American Society for Greek and Latin Epigraphy. He has published books on Simonidean verse-inscriptions, co-authored (with Ivana Petrovic) Inner Purity and Pollution in Greek Religion, and written some 50 articles on archaic and classical epigram and text materiality. He has held Humboldt, Mellon, and CHS fellowships. 

________________________________

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

Nilo Otero joins me in the Lesche to discuss his work as First Assistant Director on Christopher Nolan's 2026 film The Odyssey. 

Works mentioned

• Translations of The Odyssey by Richmond Lattimore, Robert Fagles, Peter Green, and Robert Fitzgerald.
• “Postscript," in The Odyssey. Trans. by Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (1967): pp. 467-510. 

On the difficulty -- for translators and filmmakers alike -- of envisioning the axe-setup in the "Contest of the Bow" see:

• Winkler, Martin M. (2024) Classical Antiquity and the Cinematic Imagination. Cambridge. (Ch. 11 "Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey; or, The Case of the Insoluble Enigma")

About our guest

Nilo Otero is a first assistant director known for managing major Hollywood productions. Otero studied English literature, and Classics, at Cornell University, where he was also an All-American Fencer. After graduating, he entered the film industry and completed the Directors Guild of America training program. Otero served as first assistant director on films such as Seven and The Last Samurai, before becoming a frequent collaborator with Christopher Nolan on blockbusters including Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Oppenheimer and, most recently, The Odyssey. 

________________________________

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

Naoise Mac Sweeney joins me in the Lesche to discuss her ERC-funded multi-year project "Migration and the Making of the Ancient Greek World" (MIGMAG). Read more about the project here.

The first major output is a volume titled Local Migration and the Making of the Ancient Greek World (c.1200-550 BCE), edited by MIGMAG team members Naoíse Mac Sweeney, Jana Mokrišová, and Francesco Quondam. 

Naoise refers briefly to Euripides' tragedy Ion in the episode. 

The book she recommends at the end of the episode is Richard Powers' 2018 novel The Overstory.

About our guest

Naoíse Mac Sweeney is Professor of Classical Archaeology (Greek) at the University of Vienna. Her work focuses on the construction of identity and cultural interaction in the Iron Age to Classical Greek world, with a particular focus on Anatolia. A subsidiary strand of her research considers the intersection of modern politics and reception. She is the author of books including Community Identity and Archaeology (2011), Foundation Myths and Politics in Ancient Ionia (2013), Troy: Myth, City, Icon (2018) and, most recently, The West: A New History of an Old Idea (2023).

________________________________

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

Mirjam E. Kotwick joins me in the Lesche to discuss her new book The Ancient Interpretation of Dreams: Early Greek Hermeneutics and Its Sources, which is hot off the (Princeton University) press.

For more on Katerina Evangelatou's 2015 production of Rhesus, as part of the Epidaurus-Athens Theatre Festival, see this article by Scott Andrew Cally in Didascalia.

Ancient works 

• Homer, Odyssey: Penelope's dream in Book 19
• Aeschylus, Libation Bearers (Clytemnestra's dream)
• Aristophanes, Wasps
• Dissoi Logoi
• Antiphon's lost work on dream interpretation
• Hippocratic Corpus de Victu / On Regimen
• Derveni Papyrus
• Aristotle, On Dreams and On Divination in Sleep
• Artemidorus, Oneirokritika

Modern works

• Billings, Joshua, and Moore, Christopher (eds.). 2023. The Cambridge Companion to the Sophists. Cambridge University Press.
• Ford, Andrew. 2003. The Origins of Criticism: Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in Classical Greece. Princeton University Press (mentioned for concept of "critical scenes")

About our guest

Mirjam E. Kotwick is Associate Professor of Classics at Princeton University. She has published articles and monographs on Greek philosophy and literature and their textual traditions, including Alexander of Aphrodisias and the Text of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Der Papyrus von Derveni. Her most recent book is The Ancient Interpretation of Dreams: Early Greek Hermeneutics and Its Sources (Princeton University Press, 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

Daniel Schillinger joins me in the Lesche to discuss his new book Luckless: The Idea of Luck in Ancient Greek Thought, which recently appeared with Oxford University Press.

Find out more about Daniel's work here: https://www.danielschillinger.com/

Ancient authors and texts

• Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
• Euripides, Trojan Women (and Hippolytus)
• Thucydides
• Aristotle, Physics, Nicomachean Ethics, Poetics (Daniel's book also contains a chapter on the Eudemian Ethics)

Other works/authors

• Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy; The Prince
• Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy
• Arlene Saxenhouse, work on tragedy (see esp. her 1988 "The tyranny of reason in the world of the polis, in The American Political Science Review 82: 1261-1275)
• H.P. Stahl, Thucydides: Man's Place in History
• Leo Strauss, On Thucydides' War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians," chapter in The City and Man
• Bernard Williams, Moral Luck
• Adam Parry's scholarship on Thucydides
• And others: Arendt, Freud, Kant, Nietzsche, Rawls...

About our Guest

Daniel Schillinger is a Lecturer in Political Science at Yale University, where he teaches in the Directed Studies Program and offers seminars on Greek political thought. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Yale Center for Civic Thought and a recipient of the Lux et Veritas teaching prize.

________________________________

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

Scott Lawin Arcenas joins me in the Lesche to discuss his new book, Political Violence in Ancient Greece: Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches to Stasis, 500-301 BCE (Cambridge University Press 2026).

Ancient texts (select)

• Homer, Odyssey and Iliad
• Alcaeus
• Solon
• Herodotus, esp. the account of the stasis in Chios
• Thucydides, esp. the account of the stasis at Corcyra (Book 3)   
• Xenophon, Hellenika, esp. the account of stasis in Elis
• Aeneas Tacticus, Stratagems
• [Aristotle], Athenaion Politeia

Modern bibliography mentioned

• Carawan, Edwin. 2013. The Athenian Amnesty and Reconstructing the Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Driscoll, Eric. 2016. “Stasis and Reconciliation: Politics and Law in Fourth-Century Greece.” Chiron 46: 119–155.
• Gehrke, Hans-Joachim. 1985. Stasis: Untersuchungen zu den inneren Kriegen in den griechischen Staaten des 5. und 4. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. München: C. H. Beck.
• Gray, Benjamin. 2013. “Justice or Harmony? Reconciliation after Stasis at Dikaia and the Fourth-Century BC Polis.” Revue des Études Anciennes 115 (2): 369–401.
• Hansen, Mogens H., and Thomas H. Nielsen, eds. 2004. An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Loraux, Nicole. 2002. The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens. New York: Zone Books. (Originally published 1997 as La cité divisée: L’oubli dans la mémoire d’Athènes. Paris: Payot & Rivages).
• Ma, John. 2024. Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Simonton, Matt. 2026. Ancient Greek Democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Wees, Hans van. 2008. “‘Stasis, Destroyer of Men’: Mass, Elite, Political Violence and Security in Archaic Greece.” In Sécurité Collective et Ordre Public Dans Les Sociétés Anciennes, edited by Hans van Wees, Cédric Brélaz, and Pierre Ducrey, 1–39. Genève: Fondation Hardt.

About our guest

Scott Lawin Arcenas is a historian and classicist who specializes in the history of democracy and political violence. His first book, Political Violence in Ancient Greece: Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches to Stasis, 500-301 BCE (Cambridge University Press) reveals the nature, frequency, and intensity of political violence in fifth- and fourth-century Greek city-states. He holds degrees from Princeton, Cambridge, and Stanford and is currently an associate professor of history and classics at the University of Montana.

________________________________

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

Content warning: This episode contains detailed descriptions of childbirth complications -- including maternal and infant mortality -- and of how such complications were handled by ancient midwives and physicians. There are graphic references to surgical procedures.

Tara Mulder joins me in the Lesche to discuss her brand new book, A Womb of One's Own: Lost Histories of Childbirth in Ancient Rome (University of California Press 2026). 

You can read a Q&A with Tara on the UC Press blog here. 

Tara's personal website: taramulder.com

Ancient texts/authors

• Hippocratic corpus
• Galen of Pergamon
• Soranus of Ephesus
• Agrippina the Younger's lost memoirs

Modern scholarship

• Bonell Freidin, Anna. 2024. Birthing Romans: Childbearing and Its Risks in Ancient Rome. University of Michigan Press. 
• Hug, Angela. 2023. Fertility Ideology and the Cultural Politics of Reproduction at Rome. Brill. 

About our guest

Tara Mulder is assistant professor of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with an affiliation in Gender and Women's Studies. She is the editor of the forthcoming volume, A Cultural History of Pregnancy and Childbirth in Antiquity. As the daughter of a home birth midwife, she has assisted in over two dozen births. More of her writing on pregnancy, childbirth, abortion, medicine, gender, and sexuality in antiquity can be found at taramulder.com. 

________________________________

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

Eric Csapo and Peter Wilson join me in the Lesche to discuss their three-volume A Social and Economic History of the Theatre to 300 BC (Cambridge University Press). 

Volume 1, The Theatre Festivals of Athens: Documents with Translation and Commentary, appeared earlier this year. Volume 2, Theatre Beyond Athens: Documents with Translation and Commentary, came out in 2020. Volume 3, on theater personnel and individuals associated with the theater, is in the works.

Ancient texts (many are mentioned)

Aristophanes, Acharnians (Dicaeopolis' celebration of a private "rural" Dionysia)

Several ancient plays!

Plato, Ion and Laws 

Inscriptional records for dramatic festivals (IG II2 2318-2325; see Millis and Olson's 2012 edition). These include the "Fasti" (IG II2 2318).

Modern works

Boeckh, A. 1817 Die Staatshaushaltung der Athener (The Public Economy of Athens). Berlin.

Csapo, E. and N. Wilson. 1995. The Context of Ancient Drama. Ann Arbor.

Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens. First published 1953; 2nd edn. 1968; revised edn. by J. Gould and D. M. Lewis (1988).

About our guests

Eric Csapo is Emeritus Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick and Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney. He is co-author of The Context of Ancient Drama (1995), Theories of Mythology (2005), and Actors and Icons of the Ancient Theatre (2010), as well as co-editor of various volumes on ancient theatre history.

Peter Wilson is William Ritchie Professor of Classics at the University of Sydney and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He is the author of The Athenian Institution of the Khoregia: the Chorus, the City and the Stage (2000) and the editor or co-editor of The Greek Theatre in the Fourth Century (2014), Dithyramb in Context (2013), Music and the Muses: the Culture of ‘Mousike’ in the Classical Athenian City (2004) and Greek Theatre and Festivals: Documentary Studies (2007).

________________________________

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

Bill Beck joins me in the Lesche to discuss his new translation of the vetera scholia to Iliad Book 1-2: The Ancient Scholia to Homer's Iliad: A Translation, Volume 1 (Cambridge 2025). The book is the first in a series dedicated to translation of the Iliadic scholia.

For an episode on the Iliad itself, and its translation, see Lesche episode 1.6, "Translating the Iliad, with Emily Wilson" (by far the most popular Lesche episode ever!).

Ancient works

• Homer's Iliad (and Odyssey)
• The various scholia traditions
• "Mythographus Homericus"

Modern bibliography & references

• Dickey, E. 2007. Ancient Greek scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica, and Grammatical Treatises, from their Beginnings to the Byzantine Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Erbse, H. 1969-1988. Scholia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem (Scholia vetera). Berlin: de Gruyter.
• Nünlist, R. 2011. The Ancient Critic at Work: Terms and Concepts of Literary Criticism in Greek Scholia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• van Thiel, H. 2014. Scholia D in Iliadem. Cologne: Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek.
• Wolf, F. A. 1795. Prolegomena to Study of Homer. See Anthony Grafton's 2016 translation (the original is in Latin), published by Princeton University Press.

About our guest

Bill Beck is an Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at Indiana University. His research focuses on Archaic Greek epic and ancient Homeric scholarship. He is the co-editor of The Ancient Scholia to Homer’s Iliad: Exegesis and Interpretation (Oxford, 2021) and the author of The Ancient Scholia to Homer’s Iliad: A Translation, Volume 1 (Cambridge, 2025). He is currently completing a monograph on the Iliad’s representation of the first nine years of the Trojan War, provisionally entitled Ten Years in Troy, Fifty-One Days at Ilios: The Iliad and the Trojan War.

N.B. The podcast Bill recommends at the end of the episode is called Totalus Rankium.

________________________________

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