Curated category
Ancient history
- Julius CaesarListen to Julius Caesar before the knives, the pirate captive turned general who bet everything on crossing one small, forbidden river.
- Ancient GreeceAncient Greece was never one country. It was a loose collection of several hundred culturally and linguistically related city-states, scattered across the…
- Greek mythologyWe hand these to children, then spend a lifetime learning they were never for children. Listen to the stories that still explain us to ourselves.
- Alexander the GreatListen to Alexander the Great, the boy who tamed an impossible horse and conquered most of the known world before he turned thirty-three.
- PlatoPlato wrote that the safest general characterization of European philosophy is that it consists of a series of footnotes to him.
- AristotleAncient Greek scholars gave Aristotle a name reserved for one man: among medieval Muslim scholars he was "The First Teacher", and to Christians like Thomas…
- HerodotusHerodotus called himself, in the opening line of his Histories, a man of Halicarnassus, a Greek port that today lies beneath Bodrum in Turkey.
- AssyriaAssyria began as a city so small that, under its earliest independent rulers, fewer than 10,000 people lived within its walls and it possessed no military…
- Constantine the GreatConstantine the Great was born on the 27th of February 272 in Naissus, a provincial city in what is now Serbia, to a Roman army officer and a Greek woman of…
- AugustusOn the 8th of May 44 BC, a teenager named Gaius Octavius accepted a dead man's will and, with it, the most dangerous inheritance in the Roman world.
- Etruscan civilizationEtruscan civilization flourished in ancient Italy centuries before Rome became an empire, yet the people who built it called themselves by a name most have…
- Marcus AureliusMarcus Aurelius was born in Rome on the 26th of April 121, in the grand villa on the Caelian Hill that his mother had inherited along with a fortune that…
- NeroNero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus died on the 9th of June AD 68 with a private secretary's hand helping him drive a blade home.
- SumerSumer is the earliest known civilization, rooted in the historical region of southern Mesopotamia, in what is now south-central Iraq.
- Achaemenid EmpireThe Achaemenid Empire, at its peak, covered roughly 5.5 million square kilometers, making it the largest empire of its time.
- Seven Wonders of the Ancient WorldThe Seven Wonders of the Ancient World began not as a monument to the past, but as a travel guide. Alexander the Great's conquest of much of the western…
- CleopatraShe spoke nine languages and gambled a kingdom against Rome. Listen to the story of Cleopatra, the last pharaoh, past two thousand years of legend.
- StoicismListen to the story of Stoicism, the practical craft a slave, an emperor, and an exile built for staying steady. Follow the thread from Epictetus to now.
- HomerHomer is credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, yet no one can say for certain that he ever lived. He was possibly born around the 8th century…
- IliadThe Iliad opens with a single Greek word, wrath, and that word decides where the next 15,693 lines are going. Attributed to Homer, the Iliad is one of two…
- OdysseyThe Odyssey opens not at the beginning of its hero's journey, but ten years into it. Odysseus, king of Ithaca, has already survived the Trojan War.
- Ancient EgyptCleopatra lived closer to the moon landing than to the pyramids. Listen to the story of ancient Egypt across three thousand years.
- SpartaSparta sat in a valley ringed by mountains, a cluster of villages so unremarkable in appearance that the historian Thucydides warned future generations they…
- SocratesSocrates wrote nothing down. Not a single text, not a stray fragment, survives in his own hand. Everything known about the ancient Greek philosopher from…
- CaligulaCaligula, the third Roman emperor, came to power in AD 37 at age 24, welcomed by a city delirious with relief. Tiberius, his grim predecessor, had spent his…
- MesopotamiaMesopotamia means the land between rivers, taken from the Greek words mesos for middle and potamos for river. The two rivers are the Tigris and the…
- Ancient historyAncient history begins with a single technical breakthrough: the development of Sumerian cuneiform script. From that moment, the span of recorded human…
- Roman RepublicThe Roman Republic began with an act of violence and ended with one. In 509 BC, according to Roman tradition, a noblewoman named Lucretia was raped by Sextus…
- HannibalHannibal swore an oath as a boy that he would never be a friend of Rome. According to the tradition recorded by Polybius, his father Hamilcar held him over a…
- Trojan WarThe Trojan War began, according to Greek mythology, not with an army or a fleet, but with a wedding invitation that was never sent.
- Punic WarsThe Punic Wars were three conflicts between the Roman Republic and the Carthaginian Empire, fought across the western Mediterranean between 264 and 146 BC.
- PhoeniciaThe Phoenicians left behind thousands of inscriptions scattered from Cyprus to Morocco, yet for centuries they were called a lost civilization.
- Hellenistic GreeceHellenistic Greece began the moment Alexander the Great died in 323 BC, leaving behind an empire with no clear heir. His generals had marched beside him from…
- PompeiiListen to Pompeii as the ordinary Roman town it was before Vesuvius buried it: its bakeries, its graffiti, and the people the ash kept for us.
- HatshepsutHatshepsut ruled Egypt for roughly twenty-one years and nine months, and then someone tried to make sure history forgot her entirely.
- Ramesses IIRamesses II ruled Egypt for sixty-six years, the longest recorded reign of any pharaoh. He fought no fewer than fifteen military campaigns, and the source…
- ParthenonThe Parthenon has stood on the Athenian Acropolis for more than two and a half millennia, and in that time it has been a pagan temple, a Christian church, an…
- HammurabiHammurabi was the sixth Amorite king of Babylon, and he ruled a city that almost nobody expected to matter. When he inherited the throne around 1792 BC from…
- Byzantine EmpireThe Byzantine Empire never called itself Byzantine. Its citizens used the term Roman Empire and called themselves Romans, in Greek Romaioi.
- Ancient RomeAncient Rome was never just marble and togas. Listen to how a swamp town became an empire, then follow the thread to Caesar and Augustus.
- AthensPindar called it iostephanoi Athanai, the city of the violet crown. Athenians once pinned golden cicadas in their hair, calling themselves cicada-wearers, a…
- TroyTroy sits in present-day Çanakkale, Turkey, where the same patch of earth has been occupied, destroyed, and rebuilt so many times that archaeologists count…
- Roman EmpireListen to the Roman Empire as more than emperors: the roads, the graffiti, and the slow unbraiding of a state that ran from Scotland to the Sahara.
- ColosseumThe Colosseum stands in the centre of Rome, an elliptical shell of travertine limestone and volcanic rock that once roared with the sounds of 65,000…
- GladiatorA gladiator was an armed combatant who fought for the entertainment of Roman crowds. They faced other gladiators, wild animals, and condemned criminals in…