Lesche: Ancient Greece, New Ideas
In Greek antiquity a lesche (λέσχη) was a spot to hang out and chat. Here Brown University professor Johanna Hanink hosts conversations with fellow Hellenists about their latest work in the field.
Episodes
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 Egy...
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 mentio...
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.
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 Le...
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.
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/
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
- Pal...
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 Pres...
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 cul...
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)
- Ad...
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...
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 Cr...
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.
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 Ody...
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)...
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 A...
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, Agains...
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
L...
Andromache Karanika joins me in the Lesche to discuss how we can detect traces of wedding poetics in early Greek literature, especially poetry (hexamter and lyric). Andromache is the author of Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greek Poetry (OUP 2024).
Primary texts
- Iliad, esp. the Teikhoskopeia (Book 3) and the Deception of Zeus (Book 14)
- Odyssey, esp. the start of Book 6
- Homeric Hymn to Demeter
- Sappho 21 (virgin...
James Diggle joins me in the Lesche to discuss the 2021 Cambridge Greek Lexicon (2 vols.) of which he was editor-and-chief. We discuss why it was time for this sort of thing (and why it took 24 years to complete), how to use it, and why it improves on LSJ ... plus, how the team approached translating some of the naughtier words.
Some links
- 'Liddell and Scott' poem by Thomas Hardy (1843)
- Cambridge Greek Lexicon...
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...
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