The Empress Messalina has received more than her fair share of attention in popular culture, mostly likely due to her scandalous reputation in the ancient sources. What is often overlooked is that she was also a political force in Rome’s first imperial dynasty.

In this recent book (2020) in Routledge’s Themes in Archaeology series, Rachel J. Crellin examines archaeological approaches to change, why those used in the past have been insufficient, and outlines a new approach.

The ancient Greek symposium was a drinking party in which the participants engaged in a number of activities. In this article, Daniel Woon focuses on cultural aspects of the symposium.

How should readers of Virgil’s Aeneid interpret the relationship between the Trojan soldiers Nisus and Euryalus? Harrison Voss argues that the pair is best understood as a depiction of the “ideal” pederastic relationship described in Plato’s Symposium.

Assassin’s Creed: Origins is a game developed and published by Ubisoft that is set in Ptolemaic Egypt around the time of Cleopatra’s accession to the throne, with the player controlling Bayek of Siwa.

The ancient Greeks had very strong views on tattoos, but that did not stop them from trying to understand other tattoo cultures. Their relationship with tattooing was affected by their interaction with these other societies.

To the Greeks, a tattoo was a mark of disgrace and enslavement. Their word for it, stigma, today embodies this disdain and has certainly influenced European social views on tattooing for many centuries.

What does it mean to be ruled by the “best” and how can an ideal system of government go wrong? Eugenia Russell discusses the intricacies of Aristotle’s model of political power.

About 8 km south of Rethymno, along the road to Spili, lies the well-signposted archaeological site of Armenoi. It is a cemetery with more than 200 chamber tombs dated to the Late Bronze Age.

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.