Curated playlist
Ancient history
- Julius CaesarRoman general and dictator (100–44 BC)
- Ancient GreeceGreek civilization from 1200 BC to 600 AD
- Greek mythologyBody of myths originating in ancient Greece
- Alexander the GreatMilitary commander, King of Macedon from 336 to 323 BC
- PlatoPlato wrote that the safest general characterization of European philosophy is that it consists of a series of footnotes to him. That line came from Alfred North Whitehead, not from Plato himself, and it captures something strange about a…
- 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 Aquinas he was simply "The Philosopher". He lived from 384 to 322 BC, and according…
- HerodotusHerodotus called himself, in the opening line of his Histories, a man of Halicarnassus, a Greek port that today lies beneath Bodrum in Turkey. In the 5th century BC that city sat under Persian control, which made the historian himself a…
- 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 institutions whatsoever. Yet from that modest city of Assur, a civilization would…
- 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 low birth. He died on the 22nd of May 337 as the sole ruler of the Roman Empire,…
- 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. Julius Caesar, his great-uncle and Rome's dictator in perpetuity, had been stabbed to…
- 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 never heard: Rasenna, meaning simply "the people". Their heartland, Etruria, gave…
- 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 included sprawling brickworks on the city's outskirts. He would go on to rule the…
- 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. His last words, according to Suetonius, were "Too late! This is fidelity!" It was, of all endings, an…
- SumerSumer is the earliest known civilization, rooted in the historical region of southern Mesopotamia, in what is now south-central Iraq. It emerged during the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Ages, somewhere between the fifth and fourth…
- Achaemenid EmpireThe Achaemenid Empire, at its peak, covered roughly 5.5 million square kilometers, making it the largest empire of its time. It reached from the Balkans and Cyrenaica in the west to the Indus Valley in the east. Inside that span sat…
- 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 world in the 4th century BC opened new roads for Hellenistic travellers. Suddenly,…
- CleopatraCleopatra VII Thea Philopator was the last active Hellenistic pharaoh, and she could speak the Egyptian language when no Ptolemaic ruler before her had bothered to learn it. Her family had governed Egypt for nearly three centuries as…
- StoicismA dog is tied to the back of a cart. If it follows willingly, it moves with ease. If it resists, it is dragged along anyway, going wherever the cart goes. The Stoic philosopher Cleanthes used this image to describe the wicked person,…
- 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 BC. His life and his authorship remain obscure. Ancient Greek society revered him…
- 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 major epic poems from ancient Greece, divided like its companion the Odyssey into 24…
- 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. He should be home. Instead, 108 suitors are camped in his hall, drinking his wine, eating…
- Ancient EgyptAncient Egypt grew up along the lower reaches of the Nile River, in the eastern corner of North Africa. Around 3150 BC, by the conventional chronology, two lands became one when Menes united Upper and Lower Egypt. Most Egyptologists think…
- SpartaSparta sat in a valley ringed by mountains, a cluster of villages so unremarkable in appearance that the historian Thucydides warned future generations they would never believe its power matched its fame. He was right to worry. The city…
- 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 Classical Athens comes secondhand, through the accounts of people who knew him or…
- 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 final years in paranoid seclusion on the island of Capri, presiding over a reign…
- 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 Euphrates, both rising in the Armenian highlands and running down toward the Persian Gulf.…
- Ancient historyAncient history begins with a single technical breakthrough: the development of Sumerian cuneiform script. From that moment, the span of recorded human history stretches roughly 5,000 years. The period runs from 3000 BC to AD 500, covering…
- 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 Tarquinius, son of the king. The outrage that followed swept the monarchy from…
- 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 roaring fire in a sacrificial chamber and made him pledge it as long as he lived.…
- 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. When Eris, the goddess of discord, was excluded from the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, she arrived anyway,…
- 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. Together they amounted to forty-three years of warfare on land and sea, reshaping…
- PhoeniciaThe Phoenicians left behind thousands of inscriptions scattered from Cyprus to Morocco, yet for centuries they were called a lost civilization. They wrote no surviving history of themselves. Almost everything we know comes from the people…
- 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 Macedonia to India. Now they turned on each other to seize pieces of what he had…
- PompeiiPompeii was a city of 10,000 to 20,000 people, alive with bakeries, wine shops, public baths, and the ordinary arguments of everyday life. Then, in 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius buried it under as much as six metres of volcanic ash and pumice, and…
- HatshepsutHatshepsut ruled Egypt for roughly twenty-one years and nine months, and then someone tried to make sure history forgot her entirely. Her statues were smashed and buried in pits. Her name was chiselled from stone walls. The achievements…
- 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 records every one of them as a victory, with a single exception. That exception, the…
- 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 Islamic mosque, a gunpowder magazine, a ruin, and a cause of international…
- 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 his father Sin-Muballit, who abdicated because of failing health, Babylon was a…
- Byzantine EmpireThe Byzantine Empire never called itself Byzantine. Its citizens used the term Roman Empire and called themselves Romans, in Greek Romaioi. Their Islamic contemporaries named their realm the land of the Romans, Bilad al-Rum. The word…
- Ancient RomeAncient Rome began as a cluster of graves and a timber wall. The first burials in the necropolis on the Esquiline Hill appear around 800 BC. A clay and timber wall on the lower Palatine Hill dates to the middle of the 8th century BC. From…
- AthensPindar called it iostephanoi Athanai, the city of the violet crown. Athenians once pinned golden cicadas in their hair, calling themselves cicada-wearers, a sign they had sprung from the earth itself. The recorded history of this place…
- 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 nine distinct cities stacked on top of one another. Each layer is a city that grew…
- Roman EmpireThe Roman Empire was one of the most expansive and enduring political structures the ancient world produced, stretching from Hadrian's Wall in drizzle-soaked northern England to the sun-baked banks of the Euphrates in Syria. At its height…
- 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 spectators on an average day. It is the largest ancient amphitheatre ever built, and the…
- GladiatorA gladiator was an armed combatant who fought for the entertainment of Roman crowds. They faced other gladiators, wild animals, and condemned criminals in violent confrontations. Some entered the arena willingly, gambling their lives and…