Instant Classics

What did Roman emperors really look like?

The Bayeux Tapestry: Britain’s Lost Latin masterpiece

The Bayeux Tapestry functions as a narrative object that transcends its role as a historical record of the 1066 Norman Conquest. While often viewed as propaganda, the embroidery displays even-handedness, depicting both Norman and Anglo-Saxon figures with nuance. The Latin captions, though laconic, reveal a multicultura...

Classic Chats: Daniel Mendelsohn on translating the Odyssey

The Odyssey serves as a foundational text for exploring human mortality, family dynamics, and the nature of adaptation in contemporary culture. Daniel Mendelsohn, a classicist and translator, explains how his memoir An Odyssey—which chronicles a seminar he taught alongside his father—directly informed his own translati...

How Homer’s Odyssey Conquered the English-speaking World

Homer’s Odyssey functions as a foundational, endlessly generative text that continues to shape English literature through diverse reinterpretations. Modern authors like Margaret Atwood and Madeline Miller reclaim the narrative by centering female perspectives, exposing the underlying ideologies of the original epic. Be...

How Homer's Odyssey Conquered the Ancient World

Homer’s Odyssey serves as a foundational, flexible framework that ancient Greek and Roman authors continuously adapted, subverted, and reinterpreted to suit their own cultural contexts. Rather than viewing these works as mere derivative copies, they function as an ongoing literary dialogue where writers like Apollonius...

The Vestal Virgins - just how virginal were they?

The Vestal Virgins of ancient Rome served as critical guardians of the city's perpetual sacred flame, with their personal chastity functioning as a barometer for the state's security. Any breach of this vow, termed incestum, triggered severe penalties, including being buried alive, a fate that permeated the Roman cultu...

Classic Chats: Robert Harris on ‘Agrippa’

Marcus Agrippa, the enigmatic Roman statesman and military commander, serves as the central subject of Robert Harris’s latest historical novel, Agrippa. The narrative explores the complex, lifelong partnership between Agrippa and Augustus, challenging the historical erasure of Agrippa’s contributions to the rise of the...

Marcus Agrippa: Power behind the throne

Marcus Agrippa functioned as the indispensable architect of Augustus’s regime, effectively serving as the "Chief Operating Officer" to the emperor’s "CEO." While Augustus claimed the glory of Rome’s transition to one-man rule, Agrippa masterminded critical military victories, including the decisive Battle of Actium, an...

BONUS Emily Wilson on translating the Odyssey

Translating Homer’s The Odyssey requires balancing technical fidelity with the need for narrative momentum and accessibility. Emily Wilson, a prominent translator of the epic, emphasizes that choosing a rigid verse form, specifically iambic pentameter, provides the necessary propulsive rhythm that many prose or free-ve...

Classic Chats: Charlotte Higgins on Ukrainian Lessons

The ongoing war in Ukraine forces a profound re-evaluation of the role of culture, where art and literature serve as essential tools for documenting history and processing collective trauma. Reporting from the front lines, Charlotte Higgins details how Ukrainian artists and writers navigate the existential threat of er...

BONUS: Which Translation of the Odyssey should I read?

Classical Beach Reads

Summer reading lists benefit from the wit and subversion found in ancient Greek and Roman literature. Herodotus’s The Histories offers a chatty, anthropological perspective on the Persian Wars, while Lucian’s Selected Dialogues provides biting, laugh-out-loud satire that anticipates modern science fiction. Ovid’s Heroi...

Classic Chats: Count Binface (Bonus episode)

Modern democratic systems find an unlikely mirror in the ancient world through the candidacy of Count Binface, an intergalactic figure contesting the Clacton by-election. This dialogue bridges classical history and contemporary politics, examining how Athenian and Roman traditions inform current electoral processes. Bi...

Classic Chats: Tom Hiddleston on Pompeii

Pompeii serves as a lens for examining human behavior during catastrophe, particularly through the new docudrama Pompeii: Out of Time. Actor Tom Hiddleston, a former Classics student at Cambridge, joins Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins to discuss the shift in focus from the eruption’s destruction to the survivors' choi...

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey 3: The Pedants Revolt

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey adaptation shifts Homer’s epic from a narrative of heroic tradition into a modern moral critique of war and guilt. By framing Odysseus’s journey through a Judeo-Christian lens, the film replaces the original’s complex, wily trickster with a character burdened by the psychological consequence...

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey 2: Instant Verdict

Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of The Odyssey presents a visually ambitious but dour interpretation of Homer’s epic. While the non-linear, flashback-heavy narrative structure effectively mirrors the poem's complex storytelling, the film struggles with character depth, particularly regarding the protagonist’s legen...

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey 1: What you need to know before you go

Homer’s The Odyssey remains a foundational work of literature, currently gaining renewed attention due to an upcoming film adaptation by Christopher Nolan. The poem, composed of 24 books, follows the non-linear, complex journey of Odysseus as he attempts to return home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. Central themes inc...

USA 250: “I’m Spartacus!”

American Roman cinema functions as a mirror for modern political anxieties, using the ancient world to navigate contemporary American identity. Spartacus (1960) serves as a critique of McCarthy-era institutional persecution, where the iconic line of solidarity challenges the era's forced betrayals. Conversely, Ridley S...

USA 250: Building a new Rome

Washington D.C. utilizes classical architecture to project power and legitimacy, intentionally branding the capital as a modern iteration of Rome. This aesthetic choice creates a historical paradox, as the city mimics imperial forms that contradict the Republican ideals the American founders originally championed. Thom...

USA 250: President Jackson and the Emperor’s Tomb

Washington D.C. hides significant classical antiquities that reveal deep-seated tensions in American political identity. A building block from the Parthenon, embedded within the Washington Monument, serves as a tangible link between Athenian democracy and the American experiment. Similarly, a Roman sarcophagus—erroneou...