
The heroine Atalanta
In ancient Greek mythology, there is a dearth of stories centred on female heroines. An important exception is the fearless Atalanta.

Cimmerians and Scythians
Herodotus reconsidered
In the distant past, when Assyria still reigned supreme, two tribes of nomadic horsemen wreaked havoc across Asia. They were known as the Cimmerians and the Scythians.

Aristeia and philotimia
Two key concepts of the ancient Greek world
In this article, we explore two important concepts of the warrior ethos that was at the heart of ancient Greek culture.

Romantic love in Homer
Some material in a doctoral thesis never makes the final cut, but can instead be turned into articles. An example is a peer-reviewed article that I wrote about romantic love in the Homeric epics.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
An artist inspired by Classical mythology
Artists of the (early) modern era have helped shape our ideas about what the ancient world looked like. One of them was the Italian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.

The movie Troy (2004)
Roel Konijnendijk, Matthew Lloyd, and Josho Brouwers talk about the sword-and-sandal film Troy (2004), directed by Wolfgang Petersen.

Epic love story
Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles
Miller’s debut novel, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2012, teases out the subtext in Achilles and Patroclus’ relationship to craft a compelling love story.

Aeneas before Virgil
Early Greek sources about the Trojan hero
The Trojan hero Aeneas, made famous by Virgil’s epic poem, has been the subject of ancient texts and art going as far back as Homer.

Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) was inspired by a myriad of different world cultures. In her twentieth novel, Lavinia, she took as inspiration Virgil’s epic poem the Aeneid.

Enhancing the gods
Pheidias and the Siphnian Frieze
The sculptor Pheidias, responsible for the reliefs of the Parthenon in Athens, may have been inspired by the Siphnian Treasury in Delphi.