They had crossed most of Persia, climbed snowbound mountains and fought tribes that hurled stones at them from the cliffs. What left them most exposed, only a few days from the sea, was a honeycomb. There was no ambush and no enemy army, just a handful of beehives, some hungry soldiers and a flowering plant […]

On the road into the stadium at Olympia, at the foot of Mount Cronius, ancient Greek athletes passed a stone platform with steps cut through it. A row of bronze statues of Zeus, the god the Games were held to honour, stood beside it. None of them celebrated a victory. Each had been paid for […]

When we think of Greek colonization, we think of Athens, Corinth or the cities of Euboea, which scattered new settlements across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Sparta hardly looked abroad at all. It founded a single colony, about 700 kilometres (435 miles) away in a straight line, across the Ionian Sea. And it did […]

For years, a small fragment of papyrus lay unnoticed in the collections of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo. No one had looked closely at it until, in early 2026, Belgian papyrologist Nathan Carlig of the University of Liège realized what he had in front of him: a previously unknown fragment of the […]

In Greek mythology, Delphi was considered the omphalos or navel of the world, the womb of the goddess Gaia (in fact, that is what the original name means, and it is believed that dolphins are named after it because of their womb-like shape), and although it was the possession of Apollo, it had previously been […]

To this Greek philosopher, follower of Pythagoras and teacher of Heraclitus, to whom he instilled the idea that the arché or principle of all things was fire, are attributed—disputably—the discovery of irrational numbers, the construction of a dodecahedron inscribed in a sphere, and several works on acoustics. He also founded a mathematical section in the […]

A study published in the journal Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies proposes a radically new reading of the Parthenon frieze, the famous 160-meter-long sculpture that surrounded the temple dedicated to Athena on the Acropolis of Athens. According to its author, Ellie Mackin Roberts, of the universities of Bristol and Leeds, the frieze was […]