This page lists all of the articles that have been published on this website in reverse chronological order, so with the newest material listed first.

Bad Ancient
Fact-checking claims about the ancient world
After some preparation, we are extremely happy to announce the launch of Bad Ancient, a new website dedicated to fact-checking claims about the ancient world.

Death on Paros
The twelfth-century destruction of Koukounaries
The century following the collapse of the Mycenaean Palaces in Greece is marked by successive destructions, but also revival. The Cycladic Islands of Naxos and Paros offer a compelling case study of these times.

Dancing figures from Ayia Irini
Clay sculptures of the Bronze Age
In a shrine at Ayia Irini, a site on the island of Kea (ancient Keos), excavators have found a large number of clay sculptures that date back to the Late Bronze Age.

The Lion of Kea
An Archaic enigma
A great stone monument dated to the Archaic period (ca. 600 BC), the Lion of Kea is an impressive early Greek monument. But it is almost entirely ignored in the history of Greek art.

Why abandon the phalanx?
Problems from Rome
Did the hilly terrain of Italy force the Romans to abandon the hoplite phalanx? Did they even use the phalanx to begin with? In this article, we suggest “no” to both of those questions.

A neglected warrior
A new book on Pyrrhus
Rome fought many wars in its rise to Mediterranean dominance. One of the most important has been neglected in modern scholarship, in part because we have few sources for it. But Patrick Alan Kent has written a new book about the war with Pyrrhus.

The cult of ignorance
Towards the social approval of learning
We don’t often editorialize, but an opinion piece written by science-fiction author Isaac Asimov back in 1980 – in which he tackled the false notion that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge” – is again eerily relevant today.

The birthplace of Zeus?
The Psychro Cave in Crete
High in the Dicte mountain range along the Lasithi Plateau in Crete is the Psychro Cave, which may have been the place where, according to myth, the great god Zeus was raised.

The culture of ancient scholarship
A book review
The scholastic lifestyle is not a development of the modern world. It was a characteristic of the ancient world, and deserving of a detailed look. This article reviews a new book that studies how scholars operated in the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

The Chigi Vase
Ceci n’est pas une phalange
A jug made in Corinth but unearthed in an Etruscan tomb features an image that has been widely interpreted as representing hoplites fighting in phalanx formation. But a closer examination of this artefact casts serious doubts on this view.