Lesche: Ancient Greece, New Ideas

Art historian Verity Platt joins me in the Lesche to discuss her much-anticipated new book Epistemic Impressions: Making and Mediating Classical Art and Text (Oxford 2026).

On May 11, the Queen Mary University of London Imagination Research Network will be hosting a "launch symposium" to celebrate the book's publication. Information and tickets are available here.

The novel that Verity recommends at the end of the podcast is When the Museum is Closed, by Emi Yagi. Read an excerpt here, in Yuki Tejima's translation.

Ancient sources

• Dionysius of Halicarnassus, various treatises (see Verity's Ch. 5) for the term archetypon (and 'style' as charaktēr)
• Herodotus 3.40-43, on the "seal" of Polycrates
• Mesomedes 9, "Ekphrasis of a sponge" (see here on Mesomedes, a Hadrianic-era poet)
• Philostratus, for using languge relating to "impressions" and typoi
• Plato's, esp. Republic, Phaedrus, Timaeus and on mimesis
• Pliny the Elder, Natural History book 35 (103 on the story of Protogenes and the sponge)
• Posidippus, various epigrams, esp. AB 13-15 (Verity reads AB 14)
• Theophrastus, On Stones

Modern bibliography/references

• The work of Charles Sanders Peirce (American scientist, mathematician and semiotician) on the "index" and "indexical reference"
• Platt, V. J.  2016. ‘The Artist as Anecdote: Creating Creators in Ancient Texts and Modern Art History’. In J. Hanink and R. Fletcher, (eds). 2016. Creative Lives in Classical Antiquity: Poets, Artists, and Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 274–304.
• Pollitt, J. J.  1974. The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History, and Terminology. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Stoichita, V. I. 1997. A Short History of the Shadow. London: Reaktion Books.
• Image: Joseph Wright's "The Corinthian Maid" (oil on canvas, 1782-84), in the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.).

About our guest

Verity Platt is a professor of Classics and History of Art at Cornell University, where she is also co-curator of the plaster cast collection and directs the Humanities Scholar Program for undergraduates. She is the author of Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature, and Religion (Oxford 2011), and the newly published Epistemic Impressions: Making and Mediating Classical Art and Text (Oxford 2026). She is also an editor of the Classical Receptions Journal.

________________________________

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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Marie-Louise Nosch, former director of the Centre for Textile Research at the Saxo Institute of the University of Copenhagen, joins me in the Lesche to discuss her new book Time of Textiles in Ancient Greece (DeGruyter 2025).

If you like this episode, you might also enjoy Lesche episode 1.10, "Wedding Poetics in Ancient Greek Literature," with Andromache Karanika.

Ancient texts

• Homer, Iliad and Odyssey (lots of weaving scenes)
• Hesiod, on the creation of Pandora (Theogony and Works and Days)
• Aeschylus, Libation Bearers (the "recognition scene" also parodied in Euripides' Electra)
• Euripides, Ion (on Creusa's "sampler" as recognition token)
• Thucydides 1.6 (on ancient Ionian dress)
• The "Old Oligarch"/[Xenophon] Constitution of the Athenians 1.10 (on the indistinguishability of free and enslaved persons on the basis of dress in Athens)

Modern bibliography

• Andersson Strand, Eva and Mannering, Ulla. 2021. “Sailmaking. A Gigantic Collective Undertaking”, in Jeanette Varberg and Peter Pentz (eds.), The Raid. Join the Vikings, 29 – 44. Copenhagen: National Museum of Denmark.
• Brøns, Cecilie. 2016. Gods and Garments: Textiles in Greek Sanctuaries in the 7th to the 1st Centuries BC. Oxbow.
• Bücher, Karl. 1896. Arbeit und Rhythmus. Leipzig: Teubner.
• Karanika, Andromache. 2014. Voices at Work: Women, Performance, and Labor in Ancient Greece. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Pantelia, Maria C. 1993. “Spinning and Weaving. Ideas of Domestic Order in Homer”, The American Journal of Philology 114 no. 4, 493 – 501.

About our guest

Marie Louise Nosch studied Ancient Greek History in Nancy and Naples and completed her doctoral thesis at the University of Salzburg. Her special field of research is Aegean epigraphy and Mycenaean Linear B inscriptions, as well as ancient textile production. She was the Director of the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre for Textile Research (2005-2016) at the University of Copenhagen and has been Professor of Ancient Greek History at the University of Copenhagen since 2011. She was elected to the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2017 and served as President from 2020-2024.

________________________________

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

Christos C. Tsagalis joins me in the Lesche to discuss the Doloneia, i.e., Iliad 10, which is the topic of both Christos' monograph The Homeric Doloneia: Evolution and Shaping of Iliad 10 (Oxford 2024) and his chapter in Jonathan Ready's recent edited volume, the Oxford Critical Guide to Homer's Iliad (Oxford 2024).

The Doloneia/Iliad 10 is traditionally divided into two sections: the Nyktegersia (the 'night watch' or nocturnal council scene, lines 1-179) and the spy-mission itself. 

Bibliography

Danek, Georg. (1988) Studien zur Dolonie. Vienna.

Dué, Casey and Mary Ebbott (2010. Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush: a Multitext Edition with Essays and Commentary. Hellenic Studies 39. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University Press.

Also mentioned

Homeric scholarship by Gregory Nagy and his pupils

The Parry-Lord Hypothesis (of oral composition)

About our guest

Christos C. Tsagalis is Professor of Ancient Greek Literature at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Ordinal Member of the Academia Europaea, Corresponding Member of the Cypriot Academy of Sciences, Letters, and Arts, Member of the Governing Board of the Center for the Greek Language in Thessaloniki. He is the Co-Editor of the Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic (Brill), the series of monographs Key Perspectives on Classical Research (Walter de Gruyter), Assistant Editor of the series Trends in Classics Supplementary Volumes (Walter de Gruyter), and Member of the scientific board of the series of classical commentaries Aris and Philips. Ηe specializes in Early Greek Epic Poetry. 

________________________________

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

Rosa Andújar joins me in the Lesche to discuss her new book, Playing the Chorus in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 2025).

Tragedies mentioned

Aeschylus

• Agamemnon (chorus fragmentation)
• Seven Against Thebes (use of semi-choruses)
• Suppliant Women ("choral swarm" with multiple groups)

Sophocles

• Oedipus Rex (actor-chorus interaction)

Euripides

• Phaethon ( "augmentation" and secondary choruses)
• Trojan Women (chorus entering in fragmented small groups)
• Hippolytus ( subsidiary chorus appears before the main chorus)
• Orestes (unusual choral divisions)
• Suppliant Women (exceptional choral activity)

Other ancient texts

• Aristotle, Poetics (mentioned for lack of interest in the chorus)
• Aristophanes, Birds (for having a 'differentiated' chorus)
• Plutarch, On Listening (de Audiendo) 45e-f (Euripides training a chorus; a chorus member bursts out laughing)
• Antiphon 6 (On the Chorus Boy: I don't mention it by name, but this is the speech regarding the death of a choreute by performance enhancing drugs)

Modern works

• Azoulay, Vincent and Paulin Ismard. 2020. Athènes 403: une histoire chorale. Paris / 2025. Athenes 403 BC: A Democracy in Crisis, trans. Lorna Coing. Cambridge.
• Carlson, Marvin. 2003. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor.
• Diggle, James. 1970. Euripides: Phaethon. Cambridge.
• duBois, Page. 2022. Democratic Swarms: Ancient Comedy and the Politics of the People. Chicago. 
• Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (on choral powerlessness/inertness)
• Halliwell, Stephen. 1998. Aristotle's Poetics. Bristol/Chicago.
• Jackson, Lucy. 2019. The Chorus of Drama in the Fourth Century BCE. Cambridge.
• Sansone, David. 2016. "The Size of the Tragic Chorus," Phoenix 70: 233-54.
• Uhlig, Anna. 2019. Theatrical Reenactment in Pindar and Aeschylus. 2019.

About our guest

Rosa Andújar is Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She has published widely on Greek drama in its fifth-century Athenian context as well as on its modern global reception, particularly across the Americas. She is the author of Playing the Chorus in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 2025) and the editor of The Greek Trilogy of Luis Alfaro (Methuen Drama, 2020), which won the 2020 London Hellenic 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

Michael Satlow joins me in the Lesche to discuss his new book An Enchanted World: The Shared Religious Landscape of Late Antiquity, which will be published on February 3 by Princeton University Press. 

Resources

"Lived Religion Project" at the University of Erfurt's Max Weber Institute 

If you're new to Late Antiquity, the foundational work is Peter Brown's 1971 The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750. It's been reissued in various editions, including a 2024 illustrated one from Thames & Hudson (relatively affordable!).

I mention Philogelos joke 203 in the episode introduction. 

About our guest

Michael Satlow is Professor of Judaic Studies and Religious Studies at Brown University. A historian of religion in antiquity, his work explores how Jews, Christians, and others experienced the sacred in everyday life. His new book, An Enchanted World, draws on inscriptions and material culture to reveal a shared religious landscape in Late Antiquity, one filled with gods, angels, demons, and divine presence. 

________________________________

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

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

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

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