John Ma joins me in the Lesche to discuss the longue durée of the Greek polis. John is the author of the new, monumental, and much anticipated book Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity (Princeton 2024).

Happy Holidays!

About our guest
John Ma was born in New York of Chinese parents. He grew up in Geneva, where he studied Greek and Latin at school and outside school. He went on to study Classics, then ancient history at Oxford. He has taught ancient history in Classics Departments at Princeton, Oxford, and Columbia. Ma is deeply interested in studying Greek history, especially in the Hellenistic period, using documentary and material sources.

Ancient texts

• Archaic poetry
• Aristotle, Politics
• Xenophon, Hellenica
• And many more...

Also mentioned
Too many to list! But I'll note: 

• Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton 1989).
• Mogens Herman Hansen and Thomas Heine Nelson, An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Greek Poleis (Oxford 2004).
• Mogens Herman Hansen, Polis: An Introduction to the Ancient Greek City-State (OUP 2006)
• The Polis Inventory App

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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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