An examination of some early Greek texts suggests that the term epikouros requires a more complex definition than just “mercenary”.

From the eleventh to the ninth centuries BC there is very little pictorial pottery in the Aegean. So why does a hydria from a grave at Lefkandi show a pair of confronted archers?

The story of Arion and the dolphin is an entertaining and almost certainly fictitious tale that may, however, have a deeper meaning.

The Lelantine War is the first major military conflict that pitted two alliances of Greek cities against each other. But did it really happen?

Poetic fragments attributed to Archilochus of Paros show him to have been a warrior. But was he also, as is often suggested, a mercenary?

In the 1980s, excavations in Paroikia, the capital of the Cycladic island Paros, revealed the mass cremation burial of dozens of young men. It is believed to be the earliest Greek polyandrion, a grave for war dead.

Most of the objects recovered in archaeological excavations are broken. Sometimes this breakage is intentional. In Early Iron Age Greece, particularly the tenth and ninth centuries, intentionally destroyed weapons were deposited in burials.

A statue group currently in Naples serves as the start of a brief discussion of tyranny in ancient Athens.

The Greek Ares, known to the Romans as Mars, wasn’t so much the god of war as he was the personification of slaughter and strife. Josho Brouwers takes a closer look at this ancient god of bloodlust.

Before the rise of the Persian Empire, the kingdom of Lydia was the most powerful neighbour to the ancient Greeks.