Lesche: Ancient Greece, New Ideas – Details, episodes & analysis

Yvona Trnka-Amrhein and John Gibert join me in the Lesche to discuss their editio princeps of a newly-discovered papyrus (P.Phil.Nec. 23) containing lines from two of Euripides' fragmentary plays, Ino and Poluidos.

The publication, in ZPE, is currently only available in print. The ToC for the issue in which it appears is available here.

Information about the conference on 'The New Euripides' held at the Center for Hellenic Studies this past June is available here. Pre-prints based on the speakers' presentations are available here.

During the episode, there's mention of an upcoming (as of the day of this podcast's release) public conference on the new papyrus, which will be held at UC Boulder on Saturday, September 14th. Information about the conference is available here.

About our guests

Yvona Trnka-Amrhein is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado Boulder. She works on Greek literature of the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial periods, literary papyrology, the culture of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, and the reception of Greek narrative literature in Armenian historiography. Her current book project, Portraits of Pharaohs, studies the historical fictions of Greco-Roman Egypt. She co-directs The City of the Baboon Project at Hermopolis Magna in Middle Egypt.

John Gibert is Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado Boulder. He writes mainly on archaic and classical Greek poetry, especially drama. He is the author of Euripides’ Ion (2019) and Change of Mind in Greek Tragedy (1995), and co-author (with Christopher Collard and Martin Cropp) of Euripides: Selected Fragmentary Tragedies II (2004).

Ancient texts

• Euripides, Ino and Poluidos; Medea, Hecuba
• Plato(?), Minos

Also mentioned

• Carrara, L. 2014. L’Indovino Poliido: Eschilo, Le Cretesi, Sofocle, Manteis, Euripide, Poliido (Rome).
• Coo, L. and A. Uhlig, eds. 2019. Aeschylus at Play: Studies in Aeschylean Satyr Drama. BICS 62.2 (special issue).
• Finglass, P. J. and L. Coo, eds. 2020. Female Characters in Fragmentary Greek Tragedy. Cambridge. 
• Johnson, W. A. 2004. Bookrolls and Scribes in Oxyrhynchus. Toronto.
• Luppe, W. and Henry, W. B. (2012) 5131. Tragedy (Euripides, Ino?), The Oxyrhynchus Papyri 78: 19-25.

________________________________

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: leschepodcast@gmail.com
Suggest a book using this form

Welcome to Lesche, a podcast on new books and ideas in the field of Ancient Greek Studies. 

In each episode, we'll be talking to classicists about their latest contributions to the field.

We’re going to start by releasing two episodes each month, on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month. The first episode will debut on Wednesday, September 11.

You can find us on Instagram, @leschepodcast, or send us an email at leschepodcast@gmail.com 

If you have an idea for a new book or topic you think would make for a good conversation, please reach out using this form. 
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For more on the Song of Seikilos see:

• M. L. West, Ancient Greek Music. Oxford, 1992, with modern musical notation on p. 301
• A. D'Angour, "The Song of Seikilos: a Musically Annotated Ancient Greek Poem, in Antigone
• E. Pöhlmann and M. West, Documents of Ancient Greek Music. Oxford, 2001. (The Song of Seikilos is dossier #90)

________________________________

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: leschepodcast@gmail.com
Suggest a book using this form

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

________________________________

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: leschepodcast@gmail.com
Suggest a book using this form

(Spoiler alert! This episode is jam-packed with plot spoilers for THE RETURN.) Homeric scholar Barbara Graziosi joins me in the Lesche to discuss Umberto Pasolini's THE RETURN, a film adaptation of the second half of the Odyssey starring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as Penelope.

About our guest
Barbara Graziosi is Department Chair and Professor of Classical Studies at Princeton, holding the C. Ewing Chair of ancient Greek. Graziosi attended Oxford University (Corpus Christi College B.A. and MSt in Classics) and Cambridge University (Ph.D. in Classics) and taught at Oxford, Reading, and Durham before joining the faculty at Princeton in 2018. She also held various visiting positions in Italy. She has written widely on ancient Greek literature (especially Homer) and its reception, as well as more autobiographical pieces on how we make ancient literature our own. Her latest books are Homer (OUP 2018) and Classics, Love, Revolution: The Legacies of Luigi Settembrini, with Andrea Capra (OUP 2024).

Ancient texts
Homer's Iliad and Odyssey

Also mentioned
Emily Wilson's discussions of the murder of the "disloyal" enslaved women in Odysseus' household -- and the sexual politics of translation. See, e.g., Wilson's New Yorker article: "A translator's reckoning with the female characters of the Odyssey" (Dec. 18, 2017).

________________________________

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: leschepodcast@gmail.com
Suggest a book using this form

Emma Greensmith and Tim Whitmarsh join me in the Lesche to discuss how Imperial Greek epic fits into our understanding of Ancient Greek epic as a whole. Emma has just edited the Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Epic, and she was also a member of the research project Greek Epic of the Roman Empire: A Cultural History, which Tim directed.

About our guests
Emma Greensmith is Associate Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St John’s College.  She is the editor of Omnibus and an associate editor for the Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic. She specialises in imperial Greek literature, particularly epic poetics and religious culture. Her 2020 book, The Resurrection of Homer in Imperial Greek Epic, offers a new reading of the role of epic and the reception of Homer in the Graeco-Roman world. She has written many articles on ancient Greek literature and has co-edited a volume on ‘Writing Homer Under Rome’ (2022). She works on several public engagement initiatives with the charity Classics for All, and recently filmed a documentary on Homer’s Odyssey and its cultural legacy.

Tim Whitmarsh FBA is Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Trinity College. A specialist in the literature, culture and religion of ancient Greece, he is the author of 10 books, including Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (Knopf 2015), and over 100 academic articles. He has contributed to newspapers such as The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books, and to BBC radio and TV.

Ancient texts
Homer's Iliad and Odyssey
Triphiodorus, Sack of Troy
Quintus of Smyrna, Posthomerica
Anon., Vision of Dorotheus
Nonnus, Dionysiaca
Eudocia, Homeric Centones
Colluthus, Abduction of Helen

Also mentioned
Jasper Griffin, "Greek Epic," in the Cambridge Companion to the Epic (Cambridge 2010). 

________________________________

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: leschepodcast@gmail.com
Suggest a book using this form

Emily Wilson, acclaimed translator, joins me in the Lesche to discuss the challenges and pleasures of translating the Iliad.

We discuss the Greek of two passages in detail: Book 6 lines 482-502 and Book 22 lines 199-204 (lines as in the OCT).

Ancient texts

• Homer's Iliad and Odyssey
• Plato, Hippias Minor
• Longinus, On the Sublime (ch. 9)  

Also mentioned

• Karen Emmerich, Literary Translation and the Making of Originals. Bloomsbury 2017. 
• "Munro's Law", i.e., D. B. Munro's observation that there is no overlap in the content of the Iliad and the Odyssey (more info here).
• Norton Anthology of World Literature, Vol. A (5th ed.)
• Johanna's review of Emily's translation of the Iliad for Slate (here)

About our guest

Emily Wilson is Department Chair and Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, holding the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities. Wilson attended Oxford University (Balliol College B.A. in Classics and Corpus Christi College M.Phil. in Renaissance English Literature) and Yale University (Ph.D. in Classics and Comparative Literature). She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow.

Emily's substack
Emily on Blue Sky

________________________________

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: leschepodcast@gmail.com
Suggest a book using this form

David M. Pritchard joins me in the Lesche to discuss what appears to have been, in Nicole Loraux's famous words, a "very Athenian invention": the epitaphios logos, or funeral oration given over the war dead at their public burial. Both the Athenian funeral oration and the legacy of Nicole Loraux's pioneering study of it are the subjects of David's new edited volume The Athenian Funeral Oration: After Nicole Loraux.  

About our guest

David M. Pritchard is Associate Professor of Greek History at the University of Queensland in Australia. He is well known internationally for researching the symbiosis between war, democracy and culture in classical Athens. He has held some fifteen fellowships in Australia, Europe and the US. Associate Professor Pritchard speaks on radio and regularly writes for newspapers around the world.

Ancient texts

Athenian funeral orations 

• "Historical” texts: Thucydides 2.34-46, Demosthenes 60, Hyperides' Funeral Oration
• "Literary" examples:  Gorgias' fragmentary funeral oration, Lysias 2, Plato's Menexenus, Isocrates' Panegyricus

Also mentioned

• Cornelius Castoriadis, L'institution imaginaire de la société (Paris 1975).
• Nicole Loraux, L'invention d'Athènes: Histoire de l'oraison funèbre dans la "cité classique" (Paris 1981 [1st ed.]; 1993 [2nd abridged ed.), translated into English by Alan Sheridan as The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City (HUP 1986/reprint PUP 2006)
• Nicole Loraux, Les enfants d'Athéna. Idées athéniennes sur la citoyenneté et la division des sexes (Paris 1984), translated into English by Caroline Levine as The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and Division Between the Sexes (PUP 1993).

________________________________

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: leschepodcast@gmail.com
Suggest a book using this form

Rachel Kousser joins me in the Lesche to discuss Alexander III of Macedon's post-Persepolis campaigns in Asia (330-323 BCE), the subject of her recent book Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great.

About our guest

Rachel Kousser writes and teaches about Alexander the Great, the destruction of monuments in ancient Greece, and the representation of gender and power in the Mediterranean world. For her work, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Getty Research Institute, and the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts. She’s published articles in Art Bulletin, American Journal of Archaeology, and Res: Archaeology and Aesthetics, as well as two books with Cambridge University Press. Rachel is currently the chair of the Classics Program at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and a professor of ancient art and archaeology at Brooklyn College. She has a B.A. in Classics and Art History from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Classical Art and Archaeology from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.

 Ancient texts

• Polybius, Histories
• Diodorus, Bibliotheca
• Curtius, Historiae Alexandri Magni
• Plutarch, Life of Alexander
• Arrian, Anabasis Alexandri

Also mentioned

• Brooke Allen, "Alexander the Great: Or the Terrible?" The Hudson Review, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Summer, 2005), pp. 220-230.
• Pierre Briant, The First European: A History of Alexander in the Age of Empire (translated from the French by Nicholas Elliott), Harvard 2017.
• Michael Kulikowski, "A Very Bad Man: Julius Caesar, Génocidaire." London Review of Books, 18 June 2020.
• Alexander scholarship by W. W. Tarn, Ernst Badian, and Brian Bosworth.

________________________________

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: leschepodcast@gmail.com
Suggest a book using this form

Ferdia Lennon joins me in the Lesche to discuss his award-winning and bestselling novel, Glorious Exploits (UK Penguin Fig Tree/US Macmillan 2024), which is set in Syracuse in the aftermath of the Athenian invasion of Sicily during the Peloponnesian War.

About our guest

Ferdia Lennon was born and raised in Dublin. He holds a BA in History and Classics from University College Dublin and an MA in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia. Glorious Exploits is his first novel. It was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as a Book at Bedtime, was a Sunday Times bestseller and the winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2024. After spending many years in Paris, he now lives in Norwich with his wife and son.

 Ancient texts

• Plutarch, Life of Nicias
• Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
• Euripides, various tragedies
• Aristophanes, various comedies

Also mentioned

• Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit)
• Karl Ove Knausgaard, Inadvertent
• Mary Renault’s historical novels

Further reading

• Kathryn G. Bosher, Greek Theater in Ancient Sicily. Cambridge 2021.
• Kathryn G. Bosher, ed., Theater outside Athens: Drama in Greek Sicily and South Italy. Cambridge 2012.
• Emily Greenwood, "Thucydides on the Sicilian Expedition," in S. Forsdyke, E. Foster, and R. Balot, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Thucydides. Oxford 2017.

________________________________

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: leschepodcast@gmail.com
Suggest a book using this form

Charlie Covell joins me in the Lesche to discuss their hit Netflix show KAOS, a modern, dark dramedic take on Ancient Greek mythology. The show, set in something like modern-day Crete (and on Olympus and in Hades), interweaves stories of Prometheus, the Olympian gods, Orpheus and Eurydice, Minos/Ariadne/Theseus/the Minotaur, and Caeneis.

Special thanks on this one to Mike Farah & Jess Sze.
 

About our guest

British creator-writer Charlie Covell (pronouns: they/them) recently created the Netflix original series “Kaos” starring Jeff Goldblum, Janet McTeer, Nabhaan Rizwan, David Thewlis, and Debi Mazar, among others. The 8-episode debuted on August 29, 2024. 
  
Previously, Charlie wrote the hit series “The End of The F***ing World” for Channel 4 in the UK (also available on Netflix). The series was praised for its writing, execution and subject matter, and has gone on to win a BAFTA TV Award, Peabody Award, and Royal Television Society Award. Charlie was also individually nominated for a British Screenwriters Award, BAFTA TV Craft Award, Royal Television Society Award, and Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award. Charlie was also part of BAFTA’s prestigious Breakthrough Brits program and previously named one of Screen International’s Stars of Tomorrow.

________________________________

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: leschepodcast@gmail.com
Suggest a book using this form