Lesche: Ancient Greece, New Ideas

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]
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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

Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols joins me in the Lesche to discuss her new book How to Make a Home: An Ancient Guide to Style and Comfort, a curated collection of passages (by Cicero, Juvenal, Ovid, Pliny, Vitruvius, and others) that relate to the design, decor, and ideology of the ancient Roman house and home. The book is part of Princeton University Press's "Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers" series.

Preview the book's Table of Contents here.

Read Yung In Chae's 2020 article (in the Princeton Alumni Weekly) about the "Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers" series.

Ancient authors (selection)

• Bibaculus fragments 1 and 2
• Cicero, Epistulae ad familiares and de Officiis
• Juvenal Satires 3; 8
• Ovid, Metamorphoses 8 (Baucis and Philemon scene)
• Pliny the Younger, epistles. Marden also mentions Christopher Whitton's 2013 "Green and Yellow," Pliny the Younger: Epistles Books II (Cambridge).
• Velleius Paterculus, History of Rome 2.13-14
• Vitruvius, de Architectura (various passages)

Also mentioned

• Studies of the Roman house by scholars including Catherine Edwards, Elaine Gazda, Hérica Valladares, and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill
• Josiah Osgood's books in PUP's "Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers" series

About our guest

Marden Nichols is Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor and Chair of the Classics Department at Georgetown University. She is a scholar of ancient Roman literature, art, and architecture, whose work situates Vitruvius’ De architectura within the literary, cultural, and intellectual contexts of the ancient world. She is the author of Author and Audience in Vitruvius’ “De architectura” (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and translator of How to Make a Home: An Ancient Guide to Style and Comfort, a collection of ancient Roman writings about home design and decoration that has just appeared from Princeton University Press.

________________________________

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

Emily Hauser joins me in the Lesche to discuss the lives of the real Bronze Age women remembered in Homeric epic, the subject of her new book Penelope's Bones: A New History of Homer's World through the Women Written Out Of It (UK title: Mythica). We also discuss the popularity of feminist retellings of Greek myth, and why (it's good) they're not going anywhere anytime soon.

This is the last regular episode of Lesche's first season. We'll be back with a second season on September 10. 

Ancient texts

• Homer, Iliad and Odyssey

Also mentioned

• Beard, Mary, Women & Power: A Manifesto (Norton/Liveright 2017).
• Cline, Eric, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton 2014/revised edn. 2021) and After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations (Princeton 2024).
• Emily Hauser's own Golden Apple Trilogy (Penguin Random House): For the Most Beautiful (2016); For the Winner (2017); For The Immortal (2018).
• Haynes, Natalie, No Friend to This House (Pan Macmillan forthcoming 2025).
• Hewlett, Rosie, Medea (Random House 2024).

About our guest

Dr Emily Hauser is Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter and the Times bestselling author of Mythica: A New History of Homer's World through the Women Written Out Of It (Penelope's Bones in the US). She also wrote a trilogy of novels reworking the women of Greek myth, including For the Most Beautiful (published in 2016). She has a PhD in Classics from Yale and was Junior Fellow at Harvard before returning to the UK.

________________________________

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

Clare Rowan and M.E. (Mairi) Gkikaki join me in the Lesche to discuss the use of monetiform tokens in Greek (and a bit of Roman) antiquity. Clare was the PI on the ERC-funded project "Token Communities of the Ancient Mediterranean." Mairi was a postdoctoral researcher on the project, and her edited volume Tokens in Classical Athens and Beyond was published (open-access) with Liverpool University Press in 2023.

See here for the project's Database of Token Types.

Ancient texts (selection)

• Aristophanes, Ekklesiazousai (Assemblywomen)
• Aristotle, Athenaion Politeia
• Herodotus 6.86 (story of Glaucus)
• IG I3 34, the "Cleinias Decree"
• IG II3 4 76 (mention of tribal token distribution at line 79)
• Philochorus (Atthidographer)
• Plato, Symposium (Aristophanes' speech)

Also mentioned (selection)

• Kroll, J.H. and Mitchel, F.W. 1980, "Clay Tokens Stamped with the Names of Athenian Military Commanders," Hesperia 49, pp. 86–96. 
• Lang, M. 1959, "Allotment by Tokens," Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 8, pp. 80–89. 
• Lang, M. and M. Crosby. 1964, The Athenian Agora X. Weights, Measures and Tokens. ASCSA/Princeton.
• M.I. Rostovtzeff's work on tokens
• Svoronos, I.N. 1900, "Κατάλογος των Μολύβδινων Συμβόλων του Εθνικού Νομισματικού Μουσείου," Journal International d 'Archéologie Numismatique 3, pp. 322-343.
  • See further work by Svoronos on tokens (εἰσιτήρια) in the Journal International d’Archéologie Numismatique. 

About our guests

Clare Rowan is an Associate Professor in the department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick. She specialises in ancient numismatics, in particular ancient tokens, iconography and small change. She was the principal investigator on the European Union Research Council-funded project "Token Communities of the Ancient Mediterranean" (2016-2021).

M.E. Gkikaki is an honorary research fellow at the Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Warwick, where she has been a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow (2018–21) and a team member of the ERC-funded project "Token Communities of the Ancient Mediterranean" (2016–18). She is editor of the volume Tokens in Classical Athens and Beyond (Liverpool University Press 2023). Her monograph Symbola: Athenian Tokens from Classical to Roman Times will soon be appearing with Liverpool University Press. 

________________________________

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

Seth Estrin joins me in the Lesche to discuss Classical Athenian funerary sculpture -- the largest single corpus of classical sculpture -- and his emotion-based readings of it. Seth is the author of Grief Made Marble: Funerary Sculpture in Classical Athens (Yale University Press 2024).

A couple of images that accompany this episode are on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leschepodcast/

If you're interested in hearing more about Athenian funerary practice, check out this Lesche episode on The Athenian Funeral Oration.

Ancient texts

• Aristotle (see esp. Parts of Animals 640b35-641a8 on homonymy)
• Athenian funerary epigrams, as in Tsagalis (see below)
• Athenian tragedy, including Euripides' Alcestis

Also mentioned

• Shear, T. Leslie (2016) Trophies of Victory: Public Building in Periklean Athens. Princeton.
• Tsagalis, Christos (2008) Inscribing Sorrow: Fourth-Century Attic Funerary Epigrams. De Gruyter. 

Also recommended

• Arrington, Nathan (2018) Ashes, Images, and Memories: The Presence of the War Dead in Fifth-Century Athens. Princeton.
• Hunter, Richard (2022) Greek Epitaphic Poetry: A Selection (a "Green and Yellow"). Cambridge.

About our guest

Seth Estrin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, where he specializes in the art, archaeology, and visual culture of ancient Greece. His scholarship and teaching explore the lived experience of art objects—their sensuous properties, their entanglement with felt experiences, and their place in shaping intersubjective encounters and personal histories. His work foregrounds interconnections across subfields of Classics, including those between archaeological, literary, and epigraphical sources.

________________________________

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

Debbie Felton and Carolina López-Ruiz join me to discuss monsters -- and what they mean and represent -- in classical mythology. Debbie is the editor of the new Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth, to which Carolina contributed a chapter on the Sphinx.

Ancient sources

• Apollonius of Rhodes, Medea
• Avianus/Aesop, "The Satyr and the Traveler"
• Euripides, Medea
• Herodotus (esp. 3.38, on the Callatiae)
• Hesiod, Theogony
• Palaephatus, "On Unbelivable Tales" (Περὶ ἀπίστων)
• Plato, Phaedrus
• Theocritus 11 ("The Cyclops")
• This kylix attributed to Douris depicting Jason being eaten by a dragon (Vatican Museums)
• This pithos (scene with winged deities) (Archaeological Museum of Tinos)

Also mentioned

• Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome (1996) Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis. (Debbie specifically mentions Cohen's famous essay in the volume, "Monster Culture: Seven Theses")
• Mittman, Asa Simon and Peter J. Dendle (2013) The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Routledge.
• Various chapters in the Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth

About our guests
Debbie Felton, Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializes in ancient folklore. Her books include Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity, Monsters and Monarchs: Serial Killers in Classical Myth and History and the edited volumes A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in Antiquity and The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth. She has appeared in various media in the U.S. and Europe, including Coast to Coast AM, Weird Tales, and CBS Mornings, and she also runs "The Ancient Monsters Blog" (https://websites.umass.edu/felton).

Carolina López-Ruiz is Professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Classics Department (of which she is also chair) and member of ISAC (Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures). She specializes in ancient Mediterranean mythology, religion, Greek and Near Eastern cultural exchange, and Phoenician culture. Her latest books are Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean (2021) and Greek Mythology: From Creation to First Humans (2025). She co-directs an excavation in the Phoenician site of Cerro del Villar in Malaga, Spain.

________________________________

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