Ancient Greece

The brazen bull of Phalaris, tyrant of Akragas: what Pindar, Polybius, Diodorus and Lucian said, the inventor Perillos, and how historians weigh the legend.

How Athenian direct democracy differed from the Roman Republic: Assembly and lot vs consuls, Senate and tribunes, who could vote, how each ended, and legacy.

Athens is remembered as the birthplace of democracy, but the actual system bore little resemblance to modern representative government — and its inclusiveness was far narrower than the word “democracy” implies today.

Homer’s Iliad describes a decade-long siege sparked by a stolen queen and fought by gods and heroes — but archaeology at the actual site of Troy tells a more complicated, and in some ways more interesting, story.

Spartan boys were removed from their families at age seven and enrolled in the agoge, a state-run training system so demanding it became shorthand across the ancient world for extreme discipline and physical hardship.

For centuries, kings, generals, and ordinary citizens across the Greek world traveled to a single mountainside temple to hear the words of a woman believed to speak for the god Apollo himself — the Pythia, priestess of the Oracle at…

By the time he died at 32, Alexander had conquered an empire stretching from Greece to India — a stretch of relentless campaigning that reshaped the ancient world faster than any conquest before or since.

Less than 50 years after Athens and Sparta fought side by side against Persia, they spent nearly three decades tearing each other apart in a war that left both cities permanently weakened and reshaped the entire Greek world.

In 490 BCE, a Persian invasion force landed at Marathon, roughly 25 miles from Athens, expecting an easy conquest. What happened instead became one of history’s most studied upsets — a heavily outnumbered Athenian army broke the Persian line and…