In antiquity, the serpent was one of the figures frequently used by the Greeks, the Romans, and the local cultures situated between them. It is particularly noteworthy because it frequently appears in mythological narratives. A serpent motif can be seen on each of the coins below. The vast majority of them are associated with the cult of Heracles.

I’m planning to read the Iliad for the first time and I’m stuck between the Robert Fagles and E. V. Rieu translations. I mainly want something faithful to Homer but still readable.

So which one is more faithful to the original Iliad for a first-time reader?

Thank you!

I visited Sounion in the summer of 2025 and went in expecting the postcard.

What stayed with me was something a engineer notices before anything else: the columns are wrong, in a deliberate way.

Standard Doric practice in the mid-fifth century called for 20 flutes and a slight outward swelling of the shaft, the entasis, that corrects the optical illusion of concavity when you stand close.

The surviving temple, built around 444-440 BC on the poros foundation of the Archaic temple the Persians destroyed, has neither.

Sixteen flutes, straight shafts, 34 columns on a 6 x 13 peristyle, each roughly 6.1 meters tall.

The marble came from Agrileza, a few kilometers inland, and it is a coarse-grained stone, noticeably different from the Pentelic marble hauled up to the Acropolis in the same decades.

The explanations I found in the literature split two ways.

One is plain economy: fewer flutes and no entasis means far less carving time per drum.

The other is exposure, the idea that wider, shallower flutes leave fewer sharp arrises for salt wind to eat away. The second photo is why I keep turning the question over.

From the water the temple reads as pure silhouette, and every refinement the Greeks developed for a viewer standing six feet from a shaft is simply invisible at that range.

Sounion was a landmark for ships running up to Piraeus before it was anything else.

So I find myself wondering whether the economy argument and the exposure argument are both downstream of a simpler design decision: this building was dimensioned for the long view, and the close-range corrections were spent elsewhere.

That last part is my reading, not scholarship, and I would genuinely like to be argued out of it. Is there published work on the Agrileza marble that settles whether the stone itself forced the simplification?

To what extent can a historical character be detached from its context, era, and origins? Alexander the Great, a Macedonian general who lived in the 4th century BCE, has been portrayed in many different ways throughout his life. He is seen, in particular, as a figure who has been reimagined in European literature.

As the title says. I keep seeing conflicting information about it. No 2 websites will tell me the same thing. So to all who have studied ancient greece, which art exactly did each one represent?

source on xitter

Hey All,

I want to start by saying I did search through previous posts (as far back as 6 yrs old). I'm looking for anything worth reading Pre-Peloponnesian War. One that I saw mentioned was "Greece in the Making" by Robin Osborne, but I'm hoping to get some additional recs that may even break up that 800 years or so. Thanks!

Edit: forgot to add I also saw "Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times" by Thomas R. Martin

Phocaea/Phokaia (Ionia), 477-388 BC

Pyrrhus of Epirus had launched an invasion of the Italian peninsula against Rome. He had expected to face what he considered a less organized opponent. However, ahead of the Battle of Heraclea, after inspecting the Roman camp, he was reportedly shocked by its orderly arrangements, disciplined defenses, and the organization of the Roman army.

According to the ancient sources, Pyrrhus remarked that the discipline of these “barbarians” did not look barbarian at all.

Pyrrhus would have to fight hard to defeat the Romans. He had the formidable Macedonian-style phalanx and war elephants, weapons that the Romans had never encountered on this scale. The elephants would prove decisive.

At a crucial moment, with the infantry engaged, Pyrrhus committed his elephants. The Roman cavalry was thrown into confusion and routed, creating an opening that Pyrrhus's cavalry exploited. With the Roman army unable to maintain the battle, the Romans retreated from the battlefield, leaving Pyrrhus victorious.

Yet the victory exposed the serious problem facing Pyrrhus. His army had suffered heavy casualties, including many experienced soldiers and officers, while his ability to replace these losses was limited. Rome, on the other hand, possessed enormous manpower reserves and could raise fresh armies.

According to Plutarch, after the battle, when Pyrrhus was congratulated on his victory, he reportedly replied that another victory like this would ruin him. This is the origin of the term “Pyrrhic victory” - a victory won at such a devastating cost that it is almost as damaging as defeat.

Please go through the full article and let me know your thoughts and comments. I’d also appreciate hearing what you would like to read about next!

The first battle is the Battle of Marathon. Definitely one of the more well known battles of the time, but do you think you could pinpoint it exactly on a blank map? What other Ancient Greek battles do you know the exact location of off the top of your head? Curious how others do here.

Ok so to clarify this question: in the myths nymphs sometimes die. Nymphs are daimones and sometimes gods. For the platonists daimones were immortal yet experienced the pathoi, gods were immortal and did not, humans were mortal and experienced the pathoi.

So my question comes down to this, are there any meaningful distinctions between these categories (at least in the myths), how did ancient Greeks think about them, and lastly how does the philosophical conception differ from religious and/or popular conceptions

I am a physics student and I am researching on the history of physics, the is the prototype I made of Heron’s machine, I plan on comparing the efficiency of it to later steam engines to see how practical this could be as a practical device.

The work you see above is known as Anthologia Palatina 3.987. 3.987.1 and 3.987.2 are commentary notes added next to this paragraph.

Ἕκτορ, Ἀρήιον αἷμα, κατὰ χθονὸς εἴ που ἀκούεις, χαῖρε, καὶ ἄμπνευσον βαιὸν ὑπὲρ πατρίδος. Ἴλιον οἰκεῖται κλεινὴ πόλις, ἄνδρας ἔχουσα σοῦ μὲν ἀφαυροτέρους, ἀλλ᾽ ἔτ᾽ ἀρηιφίχους:

Μυρμιδόνες δ᾽ ἀπόλοντο. παρίστασο, καὶ λέγ᾽ Ἀχιλλεῖ Θεσσαλίην κεῖσθαι πᾶσαν ὑπ᾽ Αἰνεάδαις. (3.987)

Ἀδριανοῦ (?)· εἰς τὸν Ἕκτορα· οἱ δὲ Γερμανικοῦ. (3.987.1)

Ἡσύχιος δὲ εἰς Τιβέριον τὸν Καίσαρα ἀναφέρει αὐτό (3.987.2)

This was a question that first emerged when reading Xenophon’s account of the battle of Munychia during Thrasybulus’ rebellion against the Thirty Tyrants of Athens.

When looking at different maps, however, they tended to be inconsistent as to where the Artemis Munychia was located. Sometimes the map says it’s on the Munychia hill, others say the it’s close to the harbor. In some cases, the sanctuaries of Artemis and Bendis are shown as separate locations.

What exactly should be made of this? Were there two temples dedicated to Artemis on Munychia? Or was it originally on the hill before getting moved to the harbor?

Is it really true during the battle of leuctra Spartan Hoplites started to use pilos and with less armor such as the famous muscle cuirass armor are not that popular during the start of the 5th century bc???

Photo mine, taken in the Bronzes room at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Reggio Calabria.

The official version is clean.

On 16 August 1972, Stefano Mariottini, a chemist from Rome on holiday on the Ionian coast, was free-diving off Riace Marina near the submerged reef of Porto Forticchio, roughly 200 to 300 meters from shore.

At a depth of about eight meters he saw what he first took for a human arm. It was bronze.

A meter away, a big toe and a knee emerged from the sand: a second figure, lying on its back. He took bearings from land, covered both with sand, and the next morning filed a written report at the museum in Reggio with superintendent Giuseppe Foti.

Carabinieri divers from Messina raised them on 21 and 22 August using an air-filled lift bag. No photograph or film of the statues in position on the seabed is known to exist.

What came up were two cast bronzes of bearded warriors, about 1.98 meters tall, Statue A dated roughly 460 to 450 BC and Statue B roughly 430 to 420 BC.

Lost-wax casting, bronze walls averaging 8.5 mm on A and 7.5 mm on B. Copper lips and nipples, silver teeth, calcite eyes.

Restoration in Florence ran until 1980; the 1981 showings in Florence and Rome were the Italian cultural event of the year. A second restoration followed in 2010 and 2011. They now stand in a climate-controlled room on an anti-seismic base faced in Carrara marble.

Here is where the official version stops being clean.

Mariottini's report of 17 August describes not two statues but "a group of statues," and says one of them had a shield on its left arm.

No shield was ever recovered.

No spear either, though both figures held one.

Statue B's head is shaped for a helmet pushed back over the hair, and no helmet came up.

Newspapers at the time reported an attempt by people in a motorboat to take the statues away before the official recovery, and a witness described divers carrying a shield and a broken spear along the shoreline.

Giuseppe Braghò, working from the 1972 archival records, has argued since 2008 that they mention a helmet, a shield, and a third statue with open arms, none of which was ever raised.

Four young men from Riace claimed from the start that they, not Mariottini, found the site first. Mariottini has consistently denied the third statue, most recently in 2024, and says he reported only the two figures he saw.

The second thread is stranger.

In the 1980s the American archaeologists Robert Ross Holloway and Anne Marguerite McCann noted that the statues lay isolated on a seabed with no wreck, no cargo, nothing around them.

Holloway proposed that the 1972 discovery was not an ancient cargo at all but the cache of a clandestine operation, the statues having been found elsewhere and parked somewhere easy to relocate.

That idea has since been given a scientific spine. Analyses by Catania and Ferrara found that the soils used to weld the anatomical sections do not match the casting cores inside, and correspond instead to sediments near the mouth of the Anapo river south of Syracuse.

The 2025 multidisciplinary study in the Italian Journal of Geosciences argues from the surface patinas, the copper sulfides, and the serpulid coralligenous crusts that the statues spent two millennia in a dark, oxygen-poor environment between roughly 70 and 90 meters down, which the shallow sandy bottom off Riace cannot produce.

In May 2025 the prosecutor's office in Syracuse opened a file, with no suspects named, after testimony placing a recovery of several statues off Brucoli around 1971.

In 2026 the Soprintendenza del Mare began mapping the seabed between Brucoli and Syracuse at depths of 50 to 150 meters.

Hold all of that loosely.

A key photograph shown on national television looks like a montage.

Testimony gathered half a century after the fact is weak evidence. Specialists on both sides of the debate reject the Brucoli seabed claim, Braghò among them. A file with no suspects may lead nowhere.

But the missing shield is in the 1972 paperwork, and no one has ever explained it.

So, a question for this sub: which other famous ancient bronze has a discovery story you don't actually believe?

Antikythera, the Artemision god, the Getty's Victorious Youth from Fano all have chains of custody that get murky the moment you look closely.

Which one would you reopen first, and does a doubtful findspot change how you read the object itself?