Lesche: Ancient Greece, New Ideas

Scott Lawin Arcenas joins me in the Lesche to discuss his new book, Political Violence in Ancient Greece: Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches to Stasis, 500-301 BCE (Cambridge University Press 2026).
Ancient texts (select)
Homer, Odyssey and Iliad
Alcaeus
Solon
Herodotus, esp. the account of the stasis in Chios
Thucydides, esp. the account of the stasis at Corcyra (Book 3)   
Xenophon, Hellenika, esp. the account of stasis in Elis
Aeneas Tacticus, Stratagems
[Aristotle], Athenaion Politeia
Modern bibliography mentioned
Carawan, Edwin. 2013. The Athenian Amnesty and Reconstructing the Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Driscoll, Eric. 2016. “Stasis and Reconciliation: Politics and Law in Fourth-Century Greece.” Chiron 46: 119–155.
Gehrke, Hans-Joachim. 1985. Stasis: Untersuchungen zu den inneren Kriegen in den griechischen Staaten des 5. und 4. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. München: C. H. Beck.
Gray, Benjamin. 2013. “Justice or Harmony? Reconciliation after Stasis at Dikaia and the Fourth-Century BC Polis.” Revue des Études Anciennes 115 (2): 369–401.
Hansen, Mogens H., and Thomas H. Nielsen, eds. 2004. An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Loraux, Nicole. 2002. The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens. New York: Zone Books. (Originally published 1997 as La cité divisée: L’oubli dans la mémoire d’Athènes. Paris: Payot & Rivages).
Ma, John. 2024. Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Simonton, Matt. 2026. Ancient Greek Democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wees, Hans van. 2008. “‘Stasis, Destroyer of Men’: Mass, Elite, Political Violence and Security in Archaic Greece.” In Sécurité Collective et Ordre Public Dans Les Sociétés Anciennes, edited by Hans van Wees, Cédric Brélaz, and Pierre Ducrey, 1–39. Genève: Fondation Hardt.
About our guest
Scott Lawin Arcenas is a historian and classicist who specializes in the history of democracy and political violence. His first book, Political Violence in Ancient Greece: Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches to Stasis, 500-301 BCE (Cambridge University Press) reveals the nature, frequency, and intensity of political violence in fifth- and fourth-century Greek city-states. He holds degrees from Princeton, Cambridge, and Stanford and is currently an associate professor of history and classics at the University of Montana.
________________________________

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: [email protected]
Suggest a book using this form

Content warning: This episode contains detailed descriptions of childbirth complications -- including maternal and infant mortality -- and of how such complications were handled by ancient midwives and physicians. There are graphic references to surgical procedures.
Tara Mulder joins me in the Lesche to discuss her brand new book, A Womb of One's Own: Lost Histories of Childbirth in Ancient Rome (University of California Press 2026). 
You can read a Q&A with Tara on the UC Press blog here. 
Tara's personal website: taramulder.com
Ancient texts/authors
Hippocratic corpus
Galen of Pergamon
Soranus of Ephesus
Agrippina the Younger's lost memoirs
Modern scholarship
Bonell Freidin, Anna. 2024. Birthing Romans: Childbearing and Its Risks in Ancient Rome. University of Michigan Press. 
Hug, Angela. 2023. Fertility Ideology and the Cultural Politics of Reproduction at Rome. Brill. 
About our guest
Tara Mulder is assistant professor of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with an affiliation in Gender and Women's Studies. She is the editor of the forthcoming volume, A Cultural History of Pregnancy and Childbirth in Antiquity. As the daughter of a home birth midwife, she has assisted in over two dozen births. More of her writing on pregnancy, childbirth, abortion, medicine, gender, and sexuality in antiquity can be found at taramulder.com. 
________________________________

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: [email protected]
Suggest a book using this form

Eric Csapo and Peter Wilson join me in the Lesche to discuss their three-volume A Social and Economic History of the Theatre to 300 BC (Cambridge University Press). 
Volume 1, The Theatre Festivals of Athens: Documents with Translation and Commentary, appeared earlier this year. Volume 2, Theatre Beyond Athens: Documents with Translation and Commentary, came out in 2020. Volume 3, on theater personnel and individuals associated with the theater, is in the works.
Ancient texts (many are mentioned)
Aristophanes, Acharnians (Dicaeopolis' celebration of a private "rural" Dionysia)
Several ancient plays!
Plato, Ion and Laws 
Inscriptional records for dramatic festivals (IG II2 2318-2325; see Millis and Olson's 2012 edition). These include the "Fasti" (IG II2 2318).
Modern works
Boeckh, A. 1817 Die Staatshaushaltung der Athener (The Public Economy of Athens). Berlin.
Csapo, E. and N. Wilson. 1995. The Context of Ancient Drama. Ann Arbor.
Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens. First published 1953; 2nd edn. 1968; revised edn. by J. Gould and D. M. Lewis (1988).
About our guests
Eric Csapo is Emeritus Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick and Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney. He is co-author of The Context of Ancient Drama (1995), Theories of Mythology (2005), and Actors and Icons of the Ancient Theatre (2010), as well as co-editor of various volumes on ancient theatre history.

Peter Wilson is William Ritchie Professor of Classics at the University of Sydney and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He is the author of The Athenian Institution of the Khoregia: the Chorus, the City and the Stage (2000) and the editor or co-editor of The Greek Theatre in the Fourth Century (2014), Dithyramb in Context (2013), Music and the Muses: the Culture of ‘Mousike’ in the Classical Athenian City (2004) and Greek Theatre and Festivals: Documentary Studies (2007).
________________________________

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: [email protected]
Suggest a book using this form

Bill Beck joins me in the Lesche to discuss his new translation of the vetera scholia to Iliad Book 1-2: The Ancient Scholia to Homer's Iliad: A Translation, Volume 1 (Cambridge 2025). The book is the first in a series dedicated to translation of the Iliadic scholia.
For an episode on the Iliad itself, and its translation, see Lesche episode 1.6, "Translating the Iliad, with Emily Wilson" (by far the most popular Lesche episode ever!).
Ancient works
Homer's Iliad (and Odyssey)
The various scholia traditions
"Mythographus Homericus"
Modern bibliography & references
Dickey, E. 2007. Ancient Greek scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica, and Grammatical Treatises, from their Beginnings to the Byzantine Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Erbse, H. 1969-1988. Scholia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem (Scholia vetera). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Nünlist, R. 2011. The Ancient Critic at Work: Terms and Concepts of Literary Criticism in Greek Scholia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
van Thiel, H. 2014. Scholia D in Iliadem. Cologne: Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek.
Wolf, F. A. 1795. Prolegomena to Study of Homer. See Anthony Grafton's 2016 translation (the original is in Latin), published by Princeton University Press.
About our guest
Bill Beck is an Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at Indiana University. His research focuses on Archaic Greek epic and ancient Homeric scholarship. He is the co-editor of The Ancient Scholia to Homer’s Iliad: Exegesis and Interpretation (Oxford, 2021) and the author of The Ancient Scholia to Homer’s Iliad: A Translation, Volume 1 (Cambridge, 2025). He is currently completing a monograph on the Iliad’s representation of the first nine years of the Trojan War, provisionally entitled Ten Years in Troy, Fifty-One Days at Ilios: The Iliad and the Trojan War.
N.B. The podcast Bill recommends at the end of the episode is called Totalus Rankium.
________________________________

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: [email protected]
Suggest a book using this form

Art historian Verity Platt joins me in the Lesche to discuss her much-anticipated new book Epistemic Impressions: Making and Mediating Classical Art and Text (Oxford 2026).
On May 11, the Queen Mary University of London Imagination Research Network will be hosting a "launch symposium" to celebrate the book's publication. Information and tickets are available here.
The novel that Verity recommends at the end of the podcast is When the Museum is Closed, by Emi Yagi. Read an excerpt here, in Yuki Tejima's translation.
Ancient sources
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, various treatises (see Verity's Ch. 5) for the term archetypon (and 'style' as charaktēr)
Herodotus 3.40-43, on the "seal" of Polycrates
Mesomedes 9, "Ekphrasis of a sponge" (see here on Mesomedes, a Hadrianic-era poet)
Philostratus, for using languge relating to "impressions" and typoi
Plato's, esp. Republic, Phaedrus, Timaeus and on mimesis
Pliny the Elder, Natural History book 35 (103 on the story of Protogenes and the sponge)
Posidippus, various epigrams, esp. AB 13-15 (Verity reads AB 14)
Theophrastus, On Stones
Modern bibliography/references
The work of Charles Sanders Peirce (American scientist, mathematician and semiotician) on the "index" and "indexical reference"
Platt, V. J.  2016. ‘The Artist as Anecdote: Creating Creators in Ancient Texts and Modern Art History’. In J. Hanink and R. Fletcher, (eds). 2016. Creative Lives in Classical Antiquity: Poets, Artists, and Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 274–304.
Pollitt, J. J.  1974. The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History, and Terminology. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Stoichita, V. I. 1997. A Short History of the Shadow. London: Reaktion Books.
Image: Joseph Wright's "The Corinthian Maid" (oil on canvas, 1782-84), in the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.).
About our guest
Verity Platt is a professor of Classics and History of Art at Cornell University, where she is also co-curator of the plaster cast collection and directs the Humanities Scholar Program for undergraduates. She is the author of Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature, and Religion (Oxford 2011), and the newly published Epistemic Impressions: Making and Mediating Classical Art and Text (Oxford 2026). She is also an editor of the Classical Receptions Journal.
________________________________

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: [email protected]
Suggest a book using this form