From Mycenaean Frescoes to Hellenistic Sculpture: Women’s Research in the Early Years of the ABSA
The first volume of the Annual of the British School at Athens was published in 1895, almost a decade after the foundation of the School in 1886.…

The first volume of the Annual of the British School at Athens was published in 1895, almost a decade after the foundation of the School in 1886.…

In the mid-1st century BCE, a freighter laden with Greek art was sailing westward in the Mediterranean when it crashed and rapidly foundered, taking some of its crew and passengers down with it.…

Aristotle is certainly one of the most foundational, influential, and therefore heavily commented on and thoroughly studied figures in the history of philosophy.…

Classical Review has recently expanded its standard work of publishing reviews and notices of single books to include also longer pieces covering more – and more varied – material.…

Can babies have honour? Can they be recognised as agents? And can they take part in dynamics of recognition? If we consider ancient Greek sources, both literary and philosophical, we can get a positive answer to these questions – an answer that strikingly converges with what developmental scientists tell us about babies’ psychology.…

Parthenon Ancient Greece Acropolis Athens Archaeology 3D CGI Reconstruction Athena Temple Greek

Once upon a time in Paphos, so tells Plutarch (Mor. 340d), Alexander the Great decided that the reigning king was unjust and wicked, and removed him from his throne.…

Last year, the editors of Classical Review announced that we would begin reviewing digital projects. This move recognises both the importance of digital resources for how we study and teach the ancient world, and the important roles that scholars of antiquity have played in the development of the digital humanities ecosystem.…

Classical Review publishes hundreds of reviews every year. The books reviewed in our journal run the full range of topics related to antiquity and its reception; and the reviewers who write them are similarly diverse in their approaches.…

Classical Review’s latest Profile, Greek Tragedy and Performance by Rosa Andújar (King’s College London) has just been published and is free to read.…

This text is identified as my own by the name placed above it, which seems sensible enough. Marking ownership was one of the earliest uses to which the ancient Greeks put their alphabet—which was to spawn among others the alphabet in which this text is written—but they had a strikingly different way of doing so. ‘I am the kylix of Korax’, declares an eighth-century BCE wine-drinking cup from Rhodes; ‘I am the lekythos of Tataie—whosoever steals me will go blind’, threatens a seventh-century oil flask from Cumae; ‘I am the remembrance of Ergotimos’, announces a shelf of Attic rock from the sixth century.

Two thousand four hundred years ago, a seven-year-old girl in Athens, whose parents had died, was taken by her legal guardian to the island of Lemnos.…

Napoleon once said that ‘there are only two powers in the world, the sword and the spirit’ and that ‘in the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit.’ The results of this study, which delves into the etymology and phraseology of Greek terms belonging to the semantic sphere of power, agree with the Emperor’s perspective.

Codex Climaci Rescriptus is worth knowing about. It is the only surviving Greek witness to Hipparchus’s previously lost star catalogue, is over seven centuries earlier than the next surviving witness of Eratosthenes, and is the earliest witness to parts of Aratus’s Phaenomena.…

The Journal of Hellenic Studies is making some key improvements which will better support authors and readers. Most importantly, from 17 August 2022, contributions to the journal should be submitted using the new online submission system on the Cambridge Core website.…

When only four words of a poet’s entire output in a specific genre survive to the present day, is there really anything of substance that we can say about this poetry on the basis of such slender remains?…

Portable braziers, frequently made of clay utensils and appearing in different shapes (Fig. 1:a), are associated with the process of cooking. They were popular across the Mediterranean from the Early Hellenistic to the Early Roman periods.

Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica breaks off at a crucial and tantalising moment on the island of Peuce at the mouth of the Hister (Danube). With Medea’s assistance, Jason has managed to obtain the golden fleece and the Argonauts have departed Colchis for Greece with Medea in tow.

From 1906 through 1910, archaeologists from the British School at Athens (BSA) conducted excavations at the well-known sanctuary of Artemis Orthia in Sparta (see Dawkins 1929).…

Lexica are the workhorses of Classical Studies. They’re the tomes that come most easily to mind when we joke that we spend our days ‘looking things up’. And so, the launch of a new lexicon for Ancient Greek is an event to be noticed.

The Journal of Roman Studies has now lasted sixteen years longer than the Julio-Claudian dynasty, and is showing no particular signs of incipient senectitude.…

What’s a sign? What’s in a sign? In the paper ‘Imagining Cretan scripts: the influence of visual motifs on the creation of script-signs in Bronze Age Crete’, Dr Ester Salgarella explores the processes of sign creation and their transmission among the scripts of Bronze Age Crete (ca.…

2500 years ago this year a massive Persian force descended into Greece. How massive we cannot say. Ancient figures for Persian numbers are wildly exaggerated from the very start.…

Not far from the Tower of London, to the east of the Tower Hill, stands one of the best surviving sections of London’s city walls, still preserved up to a height of about 10 metres. The lowest courses of this part of the wall, up to about 4 m, is the original Roman Landward Wall with later medieval additions above.

It may seem obvious to state that slavery existed within the Roman Empire. Afterall, there is a large corpus of epigraphic and literary evidence outlining the role of enslaved people during this period.…

War always has a high price, paid by people and their land. The land has no value without its secure human being.…

What is the Beautiful? In Plato’s Hippias Major, Socrates and the sophist Hippias set out to answer this question. Along the way, they evaluate such answers as ‘the appropriate’, ‘the beneficial’, ‘gold’, and even ‘burying your parents’.…

In popular imagination, the Roman Empire was an agent of law and peace in the ancient world. However, Rome had a brutal side, with the death penalty used for a wide range of crimes.

It was an amazing moment in 1990 in the course of the Historic England (HE) excavations at Stanwick Roman villa, when David Neal uncovered the first piece of sculpted stone, reused as a quoin in the north-eastern corner of the fourth-century villa building.…

A fair-haired, bull-necked, poetry-loving ruler, with an eye for interior design, pathetically desperate for his subjects’ affection, sexually incontinent, lazy and slapdash in his handling of public affairs, prone to showing off his knowledge of Greek in public, and later to be remembered as the most disastrous political leader his country had ever produced – why have the Roman Society and the British Museum chosen this year of all years to commemorate the emperor Nero?…

Questions on the extent of multiculturalism in Britain’s (Roman) past have never been more relevant. Thanks to the evidence of inscriptions and the recent scientific analysis of human skeletal remains we know that Romano-British cities were home to significant minorities of people with foreign origins from across the Roman empire and beyond, but what can the more everyday evidence of pottery tell us?…

A new blog from Professor Lin Foxhall looking at domestic interactions in the ancient world.

Lin Foxhall chats to Cambridge about her new editorship and hopes for the Journal's future.

Classical Review welcomes new Reviews Editor Greta Hawes

I would love to have a dinner with Philo of Alexandria even though we would be more likely to disagree on most issues.…

I probably should be naming some mighty and mysterious genius, one of the great philosophers I study or a mostly-lost tragic poet, but it would feel wrong somehow.…

In discussing the interconnections of action and character (ethos) in tragedy, Aristotle praises the Greek painter Polygnotos for his “fine depiction of character” (Poetics 1450a27), contrasting his work with that of Zeuxis, who, famous for his realism, does not depict character.…

“The Türkmen-Karahöyük Intensive Survey Project (TISP), led by James Osborne (University of Chicago), was begun in 2019 and determined that the site might not just be big, but among the very largest sites in Anatolia during the Late Bronze and Iron Ages…” One of the paradoxes of archaeology is that, although understanding of the past is usually achieved only after years of painstaking work, once in a blue moon something may be found that instantly changes one’s theories or suddenly leads to completely new research avenues.…

Pity me, pitiable in many ways, I who am crying out, weeping like a girl, and no one can say he saw this man do such a thing before, but though racked with torments I never would lament!…

“Staying Here may be our only option during the current pandemic, but it would be too simple to declare this the only right answer for all time.”…

'On collaboration and a new analysis of Sappho' - Patricia Rosenmeyer and Giuliana Ragusa describe their research, 'A DELICATE BRIDEGROOM: HABROSUNĒ IN SAPPHO, FR. 115V'.

As a subscriber to Anatolian Studies for forty years, I am a loyal reader and very familiar with the academic literature and specialist studies about the antiquities of Turkey, but by any standards the 2016 volume of the journal must count as one of the best ever.

Meet the editors of the Papers of the British School at Rome as they discuss how they represent the journal and pick out their favourite articles.

Hilary Cool, Barbican Research Associates, reflects on how she tackled the topic of her forthcoming article in Papers of the British School at Rome which is due to be published later this year.…