Lesche: Ancient Greece, New Ideas

Nilo Otero joins me in the Lesche to discuss his work as First Assistant Director on Christopher Nolan's 2026 film The Odyssey. 
Works mentioned
Translations of The Odyssey by Richmond Lattimore, Robert Fagles, Peter Green, and Robert Fitzgerald.
“Postscript," in The Odyssey. Trans. by Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (1967): pp. 467-510. 
On the difficulty -- for translators and filmmakers alike -- of envisioning the axe-setup in the "Contest of the Bow" see:
Winkler, Martin M. (2024) Classical Antiquity and the Cinematic Imagination. Cambridge. (Ch. 11 "Arrow and Axes in the Odyssey; or, The Case of the Insoluble Enigma")
About our guest
Nilo Otero is a first assistant director known for managing major Hollywood productions. Otero studied English literature, and Classics, at Cornell University, where he was also an All-American Fencer. After graduating, he entered the film industry and completed the Directors Guild of America training program. Otero served as first assistant director on films such as Seven and The Last Samurai, before becoming a frequent collaborator with Christopher Nolan on blockbusters including Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Oppenheimer and, most recently, The Odyssey. 
________________________________

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

Naoise Mac Sweeney joins me in the Lesche to discuss her ERC-funded multi-year project "Migration and the Making of the Ancient Greek World" (MIGMAG). Read more about the project here.
The first major output is a volume titled Local Migration and the Making of the Ancient Greek World (c.1200-550 BCE), edited by MIGMAG team members Naoíse Mac Sweeney, Jana Mokrišová, and Francesco Quondam. 
Naoise refers briefly to Euripides' tragedy Ion in the episode. 
The book she recommends at the end of the episode is Richard Powers' 2018 novel The Overstory.
About our guest
Naoíse Mac Sweeney is Professor of Classical Archaeology (Greek) at the University of Vienna. Her work focuses on the construction of identity and cultural interaction in the Iron Age to Classical Greek world, with a particular focus on Anatolia. A subsidiary strand of her research considers the intersection of modern politics and reception. She is the author of books including Community Identity and Archaeology (2011), Foundation Myths and Politics in Ancient Ionia (2013), Troy: Myth, City, Icon (2018) and, most recently, The West: A New History of an Old Idea (2023).

________________________________

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

Mirjam E. Kotwick joins me in the Lesche to discuss her new book The Ancient Interpretation of Dreams: Early Greek Hermeneutics and Its Sources, which is hot off the (Princeton University) press.
For more on Katerina Evangelatou's 2015 production of Rhesus, as part of the Epidaurus-Athens Theatre Festival, see this article by Scott Andrew Cally in Didascalia.
Ancient works 
Homer, Odyssey: Penelope's dream in Book 19
Aeschylus, Libation Bearers (Clytemnestra's dream)
Aristophanes, Wasps
Dissoi Logoi
Antiphon's lost work on dream interpretation
Hippocratic Corpus de Victu / On Regimen
Derveni Papyrus
Aristotle, On Dreams and On Divination in Sleep
Artemidorus, Oneirokritika
Modern works
Billings, Joshua, and Moore, Christopher (eds.). 2023. The Cambridge Companion to the Sophists. Cambridge University Press.
Ford, Andrew. 2003. The Origins of Criticism: Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in Classical Greece. Princeton University Press (mentioned for concept of "critical scenes")
About our guest
Mirjam E. Kotwick is Associate Professor of Classics at Princeton University. She has published articles and monographs on Greek philosophy and literature and their textual traditions, including Alexander of Aphrodisias and the Text of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Der Papyrus von Derveni. Her most recent book is The Ancient Interpretation of Dreams: Early Greek Hermeneutics and Its Sources (Princeton University Press, 2026). 
________________________________

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

Daniel Schillinger joins me in the Lesche to discuss his new book Luckless: The Idea of Luck in Ancient Greek Thought, which recently appeared with Oxford University Press.
Find out more about Daniel's work here: https://www.danielschillinger.com/
Ancient authors and texts
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
Euripides, Trojan Women (and Hippolytus)
Thucydides
Aristotle, Physics, Nicomachean Ethics, Poetics (Daniel's book also contains a chapter on the Eudemian Ethics)
Other works/authors
Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy; The Prince
Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy
Arlene Saxenhouse, work on tragedy (see esp. her 1988 "The tyranny of reason in the world of the polis, in The American Political Science Review 82: 1261-1275)
H.P. Stahl, Thucydides: Man's Place in History
Leo Strauss, On Thucydides' War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians," chapter in The City and Man
Bernard Williams, Moral Luck
Adam Parry's scholarship on Thucydides
And others: Arendt, Freud, Kant, Nietzsche, Rawls...
About our Guest
Daniel Schillinger is a Lecturer in Political Science at Yale University, where he teaches in the Directed Studies Program and offers seminars on Greek political thought. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Yale Center for Civic Thought and a recipient of the Lux et Veritas teaching prize.
________________________________

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

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