Lesche: Ancient Greece, New Ideas

Piero Boitani joins me in the Lesche to discuss his new book Timaeus in Paradise: Metaphors and Beauty from Plato to Dante and Beyond (Princeton University Press 2025). 

Ancient texts

• Hebrew Bible, Genesis
• Plato: Timaeus, Phaedrus, Symposium, Apology
• Aristotle: Nicomachaean Ethics
• Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
• Ovid, Metamorphoses
• Philo of Alexandria, On the Creation (de Opificio mundi: treatise on the Genesis creation narrative)
• New Testa...

Inger Kuin joins me in the Lesche to discuss her new book Diogenes: The Rebellious Life and Revolutionary Philosophy of the Original Cynic (Basic Books 2025). 

Ancient sources

• Aristotle, Politics 1.3-7 (on 'natural' slavery)
• Diogenes Laertius, 2.6, Life of Diogenes
• Plutarch, Life of Alexander 14 (on the 'get out of my sun' episode)
• Xenophon, Anabasis 5-6 (on Sinope, Diogenes' birthplace)
• Other Diogenes testim...

Tatiana Bur joins me in the Lesche to discuss her new book Technologies of the Marvellous in Ancient Greek Religion (Cambridge University Press 2025). 

Ancient texts

• Homer, Iliad 18 (on Hephaestus and his self-moving tripods) 
• Many Athenian tragedies and comedies that made use of the μηχανή or κράδη (in comedy)
• Aristotle, Poetics (on the theatrical ‘crane’/μηχανή) 
• The Aristotelian/Peripatetic work Mechanical Questions (Μηχανικά)
• Phi...

Mary Beard, Classics editor at the Times Literary Supplement, and Clifford Ando, senior editor of the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, join me in the Lesche to discuss the state of Classics reviewing today. 

• How do the TLS and BMCR assign appropriate reviewers? 
• What makes for a good review? 
• What's the line between critique and nastiness? 
• Why are reviews these days so often lacking in susbtantive criticism? 
• What do editors wish r...

Harvard University historian Paul Kosmin joins me in the Lesche to discuss his recent book The Ancient Shore (Harvard University Press 2024), winner of the American Historical Association's 2025 Prize in History Prior to CE 1000. 

Works mentioned

• Agatharchides of Cnidus, On the Erythraean Sea (2nd C. BC)
• Philip de Loutherbourg, "Shipwreck" (painting, 1793).
• Demuth, Bathsheba. 2019. Floating Coast: An Environmental Hi...

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 Annan...

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...

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.” Harp...

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.

Preview the book&apos...

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.

See here for...

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 ab...

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...