Lesche: Ancient Greece, New Ideas

Vincent Azoulay and Paulin Ismard join me in the Lesche to discuss their study of the restoration of democracy in Athens in 403 BC, in which they examine the Athenian civil war through the prism of chorality. A translation of their 2020 book Athènes 403: une histoire chorale (Flammarion, Paris) has just appeared in an English translation by Lorna Coing with the title Athens, 403 BC: A Democracy in Crisis? (Cambridge University Press).

Ancient sources

• Aristophanes, Frogs
• Aristotle, Politics Book 3
• Fragments of poetry by Critias (accessible in Brill’s New Jacoby: 338a; see also this Oxford bibliography)
• IG II2 10, Honors for foriegners who had supported the democracy against the Thirty (401/0). Online here
• Xenophon, Hellenica, esp. 2.4.20-22 (speech of Cleocritus)

Also mentioned

• Anderson, Greg (2018) The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History. Oxford University Press.
• Keesling, Catherine M. (2012) "Syeris, Diakonos of the Priestess Lysimache on the Athenian Acropolis (IG II2 3464)," Hesperia 81: 467-505.
• Loraux, N. (1997) La cité divisée : l'oubli dans la mémoire d'Athènes. Payot: Paris. Translated by Corinne Pache and Jeff Fort as The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens. Zone/Princeton University Press 2002/2006.

About our guests

Vincent Azoulay is Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is a former member of the Institut Universitaire de France and the current director of the international bilingual journal Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales. He has been awarded several prizes, including the Prix du Sénat du Livre d'Histoire (2011). He is the author of several books already translated into English: Pericles of Athens (2014), The Tyrant-Slayers of Ancient Athens (2017) and Xenophon and the Graces of Power (2018).

Paulin Ismard is Professor of Ancient History at Aix-Marseille University. His work focuses on the history of democracy in antiquity and the history of slavery in a comparative perspective. His publications include L'événement Socrate (Flammarion, 2013), Democracy’s Slaves (Harvard, 2017), La cité et ses esclaves. Institution, fictions, expériences (Seuil, 2019), Le miroir d'Œdipe (Seuil 2023), and, with Vincent Azoulay, Athens, 403 BC. A Democracy in Crisis? (Cambridge University Press, 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]
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Lindsey Mazurek joins me in the Lesche to discuss Isis worship during the Roman Empire, and how it intersected with and contributed to constructions of Greek identity.

Ancient texts

• Apuleius, Metamorphoses (esp. Book 11)
• Plutarch, Isis and Osiris

Also mentioned

• Barrett, Caitlin E. (2019) Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens. Oxford.
• Bricault, Laurent (2005) Recueil des inscriptions concernant les cultes isiaques I-III. Paris.
• Brubaker, Rogers (2006) Ethnicity without Groups. Cambridge, Mass.
• Eshleman, Kendra (2012) The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire: Sophists, Philosophers, and Christians. Cambridge. 
• Moyer, Ian (2011) Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism. Cambridge. 
• Vasunia, Phiroze (2001) The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander. Berkeley. 
• Parker, Grant. (2008) The Making of Roman India. Cambridge.
• Walters, Elizabeth J. (1988) Attic Grave Reliefs That Represent Women in the Dress of Isis. Hesperia Supplement 22.
• Whitmarsh, Tim (2001) Greek Literature and the Roman Empire. Oxford.

About our guest

Lindsey Mazurek is an assistant professor in the Department of Classical Studies at Indiana University. Her research focuses on the intersections of ethnicity, religion, migration, and material culture in the Roman provinces, particularly Greece. She is the author of Isis in a Global Empire: Greek Identity Through Egyptian Religion in Roman Greece, which was published with Cambridge University Press in 2022. She also co-directs the Mediterranean Connectivity Initiative, a digital history and archaeology project that examines social ties in Rome's port cities. Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Archaeology, Hesperia, and the Memoirs of the American Academy at Rome.

________________________________

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

Sasha-Mae Eccleston joins me in the Lesche to discuss classicizing and chronopolitics in the contemporary United States. 

And yes, we talk about that Virgil quotation.

Ancient texts

• Homer, Iliad 
• Euripides & Seneca, Medea
• Virgil, Aeneid 9.447 (nulla dies umquam memori uos eximet aeuo)

Also mentioned (selection)

Modern creative works

• Eric Fischl, "Tumbling Woman" (2001) (sculpture)
• Ben Lerner, Angle of Yaw (2006)
• Adrienne Rich, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems, 2007-2010 (2011), esp. "Reading the Iliad as if it were the first time" and "Don't flinch"
• Juliana Spahr, The Connection between Everything with Lungs: Poems (2005)
• Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016)
• Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (2011)

Op/eds

• Caroline Alexander, "Out of Context," New York Times, April 6, 2011.
• Tom Brokaw, "Two Dates Which Will Live in Infamy," San Diego Union-Tribune, December 7, 2001.

Academic works

• Scholarship in Temporality Studies by Elizabeth Freeman and Sarah Sharma.
• Greenwood, Emily. "Reception Studies: The Cultural Mobility of Classics," Daedalus 145.2 (2016): 41-9.
• Haley, Shelley P. "Self-Definition, Community, and Resistance: Euripides' 'Medea' and Toni Morrison's 'Beloved'," Thamyris 2.2 (1995): 177-206.
• Van Schepen, Randall. "Falling/Failing 9/11: Eric Fischl's Tumbling Woman Debacle," Aurora: The Journal of the History of ART 9 (2008): 116-43.
• Wright, Matthew. "Making Medea Medea." In Female Characters in Fragmentary Greek Tragedy, ed. P. J. Finglass and Lyndasy Coo, 216-243. Cambridge 2020.

About our guest

Sasha-Mae Eccleston is currently the John Rowe Workman Assistant Professor of Classics where she is affiliated with the Initiative for Environmental Humanities, the Department of comparative literature, and the Department of Africana studies. She  directs the fellowship in critical classical studies for PhDs and/or MFAs. She is cofounder of the scholarly society Eos and of Racing the Classics, a field-wide initiative for early career researchers and doctoral candidates in Classics.

________________________________

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

Buckle your seatbelt and prepare to clutch your pearls! Walter Scheidel joins me in the Lesche to discuss his case for globalizing the study of ancient history -- and for killing off Classics as we know it. Scheidel is the author of What is Ancient History?, a new manifesto published by Princeton University Press.

Mentioned

• Sheldon Pollock, "Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World," Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 4, The Fate of Disciplines, edd. James Chandler and Arnold I. Davidson (Summer 2009), pp. 931-961
• The Herodotus Helpline
• Eidolon articles about reshaping the field of Classics

About our guest

Walter Scheidel is Dickason Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics and History at Stanford University. His research ranges from ancient social and economic history and premodern historical demography to the comparative and transdisciplinary world history of inequality, state formation, and human welfare. He has written, edited and co-edited some 21 books and published more than 260 papers and reviews. His latest book, What is Ancient History, is out now with 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

Scarlett Kingsley joins me in the Lesche to discuss Herodotus' place in the intellectual milieu of the fifth century, the subject of her book Herodotus and the Presocratics: Inquiry and Intellectual Culture in the Fifth Century BCE.

If you enjoy this episode, you might also like Episode 11 on The Sophists, with Josh Billings and Christopher Moore.

Ancient texts

• Herodotus, Histories (especially the meeting between Solon and Croesus at 1.30-33, and the Constitutional Debate set in Persia at 3.80-82)
• Aristophanes, Clouds
• Euripides, Phoenissae
• Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
• Hippias, Synagoge (non-extant)
• Dissoi logoi
• Scattered references to many fifth-century thinkers

Also mentioned

• Dewald, C. (1987) "Narrative Surface and Authorial Voice in Herodotus' Histories," Arethusa 20: 147-68.
• Diels, H. and W. Kranz (1951-52), Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, griechisch und deutsch (6 vols.). Berlin.
• Laks, A. and G. Most (2016), Early Greek Philosophy (9 vols.). Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA and London. 
• Carolyn Miller's work on genre
• Nestle, W. (1908) Herodots Verhältnis zur Philosophie und Sophistik. Stuttgart.
• Thomas, R. (2002) Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion. Cambridge.

About our guest

Scarlett Kingsley is an Associate Professor of Classics at Agnes Scott College. Her research explores the intersections of early Greek historiography and philosophy, with a particular focus on Herodotus, Thucydides, and the Presocratics. Her first monograph, Herodotus and the Presocratics: Inquiry and Intellectual Culture in the Fifth Century, was supported by a Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship. She is also the co-editor, with G. Monti and T. Rood, of The Authoritative Historian: Tradition and Innovation in Ancient Historiography (CUP, 2022). She is currently co-writing a book with Tim Rood entitled Land, Wealth, and Empire in Herodotus: Reading the End of the Histories (forthcoming, OUP).

________________________________

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 Mendelsohn joins me in the Lesche to discuss his new translation of Homer's Odyssey, out on April 9 with the University of Chicago Press. 

Daniel Mendelsohn's website

Ancient texts

Homer, Iliad and Odyssey

Also mentioned

• Previous translations of the Odyssey by Richmond Lattimore, Robert Fitzgerald, and Emily Wilson (and Alexander Pope); also Caroline Alexander's Iliad.
• Previous books by Daniel Mendelsohn: An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and an Epic (Knopf 2017), The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (Harper 2006), The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (Knopf Doubleday 2009), and Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate (University of Virginia Press, 2020)
• The Homeric scholarship of Jenny Strauss Clay, see, e.g., The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in the Odyssey. Princeton University Press, 1983. (Reprint, Rowman and Littlefield, 1996)
• Anne Parry, Blameless Aegisthus: A study of αμύμων and other Homeric epithets. Leiden 1973.
• Johanna's 2017 Eidolon essay on Daniel's An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, "'Ithaca Gave to You the Beautiful Journey': Classics, An Odyssey, and a Conversation with Daniel Mendelsohn" 

About our guest

Daniel Mendelsohn, an award-winning memoirist, translator, and essayist, writes frequently for the New Yorker and New York Review of Books, where he is the Editor-at-large. His books include the international bestsellers "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million" and "An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic," as well as a translation of the poetry of Constantine Cavafy. His translation of Homer's Odyssey will be published in April, 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

Alex Knodell, co-director of the Small Cycladic Islands Project (SCIP), joins me in the Lesche to reflect on this amazing six-season survey project, which wrapped up last summer. 

Alex's co-directors on the project were Demetrios Athanasoulis (Ephorate of Antiquities of the Cyclades) and Žarko Tankosić (University of Bergen).

Works mentioned

• SCIP publications
• Christy Constantakopoulou, The Dance of the Islands (Cambridge 2007). NB: Christy was a featured guest on the second(!) episode of Lesche ("Subject Communities of the Athenian Empire," with Leah Lazar)
• The Mazi Archaeological Project (MAP)
• Scott M Fitzpatrick, Victor D Thompson, Aaron S Poteate, Matthew F Napolitano, Jon M Erlandson, "Marginalization of the margins: The importance of smaller islands in human prehistory," The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 11 (2016): 155-70
• Excavations on Daskalio: see this 2018 Guardian article on the findings of the Cambridge Keros Project.

About our guest

Alex Knodell is currently the chair of the classics department and director of the archaeology program at Carleton College, where he teaches classes on Mediterranean archaeology, global prehistory, and archaeological method and theory. His research revolves around the broad themes of landscape and interaction within and between ancient societies, especially in the ancient Greek world. He is especially interested in late prehistory and early history, which is the subject of his book, Societies in Transition in Early Greece: An Archaeological History (University of California Press, open access). Since 2019, he has codirected the Small Cycladic Islands Project with his colleagues Demetris Athanasoulis of the Ephorate of Antiquities of the Cyclades and Zarko Tankosic of the University of Bergen.

________________________________

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

Christopher Metcalf joins me in the Lesche to discuss his new book Three Myths of Kingship in Early Greece and the Ancient Near East, as well as the potential that Ancient Near Eastern texts and literary traditions have to shed light on early Greek ones -- and vice versa.

Ancient texts

• Gilgamesh
• The Hebrew Bible
• Various Sumerian and Akkadian texts about Sargon, Dumuzi/Tammuz, and Inanna
• Iliad, esp. Book 1
• Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite
• Herodotus Book 1, esp. on Gyges and Cyrus the Great
• Ctesias, Persika
• Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
• Euripides, Ion

The BM text on Inanna that Christopher edited is:

Marie-Christine Ludwig and Christopher Metcalf (2017), "The Song of Innana and Išme-Dagan: An Edition of BM 23820+23831,"  Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und vorderasiatische Archäologie 107: 1-21.

Also mentioned

• Works by Jean Bottéro
• The Electronic Babylonian Library
• George, Andrew (2003) The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts. Oxford.
• West, M. L. (1997) The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry. Oxford.
• Worthington, M. (2010)  Complete Babylonian Beginner to Intermediate Course: A Comprehensive Guide to Reading and Understanding Babylonian, with Original Texts (Teach Yourself).

About our guest

Christopher Metcalf is Associate Professor in Classical Literature at the University of Oxford. He is interested in the languages, literatures and religions of early Greece and the ancient Near East. He grew up in continental Europe, and came to the UK to study first Classics and then Ancient Near Eastern languages. In his research he enjoys combining detailed philological work, such as text editions, with larger-scale comparative studies of literary and religious aspects of the ancient world. He is the author of The Gods Rich in Praise in Early Greek and Mesopotamian Religious Poetry (2015), Gods and Mortals in Early Greek and Near Eastern Mythology (2021), and now Three Myths of Kingship in Early Greek and the Ancient Near East (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

Carol Atack joins me in the Lesche to discuss Plato's civic entanglements (and disenchantments) with his native Athens. Carol is the author of a new biography of Plato titled Plato: A Civic Life (Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press 2024). The book is the second in a new series, Great Lives of the Ancient World, edited by Paul Cartledge. 

Ancient texts

• Plato: lots and lots
• Xenophon's Socratic works
• Isocrates, Against the sophists

About our guest

Carol Atack is a fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. Her books include Plato: A Civic Life (2024), Xenophon (Greece and Rome New Surveys in the Classics, 2024), and The Discourse of Kingship in Classical Greece (2019), based on her doctoral research. She has published many articles and chapters on classical Greek political thought and its modern reception, on topics ranging from free speech through utopian thought to radical contemporary readings of Greek political thought. She is currently working on a monograph on the temporality of Plato’s dialogues.

________________________________

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

Josh Billings and Christopher Moore join me in the Lesche to discuss the fifth-century BCE 'sophists', the subject of their new edited volume The Cambridge Companion to the Sophists.

Works and fragments of the 'sophists' are most easily accessible in:

André​ Laks, Glenn W. Most, Early Greek Philosophy. 9 volumes. Loeb Classical Library, 524-532​. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2016.

Primary texts

Lots, but especially

• Works of the Presocratic philosophers
• Gorgias, Encomium of Helen and Defense of Palamedes
• Works of Plato
• Thucydides, History of the Peloponnnesian War
• Plays of Euripides

Also mentioned

• Kerferd, G.B., 1981, The Sophistic Movement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

About our Guests

Josh Billings is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His research centers on ancient Greek literature and philosophy and modern intellectual history, with a particular concentration on tragedy. He is the author of Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy (Princeton 2014) and The Philosophical Stage: Drama and Dialectic in Classical Athens (Princeton 2021).

Christopher Moore is a Professor of Philosophy and Classics at Penn State University. He has published three monographs focusing on topics in classical philosophy, principally on the form taken by early debates about eventually-canonical philosophical topics (self-knowledge, virtue, philosophy itself). He is currently completing a book on intellectual culture in the fifth century BCE.

________________________________

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