Our understanding of ethnic diversity within the classical world owes much to how museums have curated their Greco-Roman antiquities. These collections were strongly influenced by the interests and values of the original collectors themselves, many of whom were antiquarians living and working in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This article raises the question of whether their traditions have had an impact on how we understand and curate Black bodies in Greco-Roman galleries today.

Why would nineteenth-century abolitionists be attracted to the work of slave-owning leaders in ancient Greece and Rome? The answer shows us how using difficult histories can help fuel moral movements.

In this three-part series, Daniel looks at the Athenian symposium from three different perspectives to fully understand what really went on at ancient Greek house parties. This first part will explore the personal gains from attending a symposium.

The most studied aspect of the ancient world is its political history. Whether it’s a critical narrative of Roman history or a detailed look at the structure of the polis, politics are central. But how we understand politics and its ostensibly substantive equivalent, the state, is no less subjective than any other aspect of historical analysis. However, this subjectivity is often overlooked.

Following the assault of the Capitol Building in Washington DC last week, comparisons with past events have been made that are generally facile and fruitless. Instead, we should seek to explain how violence worked in the past to understand and change the present.

In 399 BC, the philosopher Socrates was sentenced to die by drinking hemlock. But why did the Athenians decide to punish the famed philosopher so severely?

A spectacular cremation burial of a woman and a foetus on the Areopagus of Athens has prompted much speculation about Early Iron Age Athenian society and the role of women and children within it.

When it comes to the history of warfare in the Late Bronze Age Aegean, an important find is the bronze panoply recovered by Swedish archaeologists from a tomb at Dendra in 1960.

During the Early Iron Age, people dwelled among the ruins of the palace at Knossos in what we may refer to as a “landscape of memory”, one imbued with the collective memories of a bygone era.

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.