A funerary krater from the Geometric Dipylon cemetery in Athens includes a battle scene with some interesting and unusual features, suggesting a story of weapons and women captured through a raid.

There are a lot of bad takes with respect to what warfare was like in the Late Bronze Age Aegean. In this article, Josho Brouwers offers a comprehensive overview of Mycenaean warfare.

Aaron Beek reviews Michael Taylor’s Soldiers and Silver (2020), a revision of his 2015 PhD dissertation, Finance, Manpower, and the Rise of Rome. Despite some quibbles, Taylor has succeeded at clarifying an often-unclear topic with some fine scholarship.

Compared to Homer’s Iliad, the Odyssey appears to be set in a world at peace. But despite the epic taking place far from the Trojan battlefield, violence still plays an important role.

In the Iliad, Paris challenges the Greeks to a duel to settle the Trojan War once and for all. Menelaus accepts, but before he can kill Paris, the Trojan prince is rescued by the goddess Aphrodite. Still, why wasn’t Menelaus proclaimed the winner?

Someone on Reddit’s AskHistorians wondered if bows were unpopular in ancient Greece. An uncritical reading of the ancient sources might, at first glance, suggests that this was indeed the case, but nothing could be further from the truth.

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.

A red-figure vessel currently in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York depicts a line of spearmen riding dolphins. What is this object and how should we interpret the scene that decorates it?

Sparta’s perennial appeal to readers is shown by the sheer number of publications focused on this polis. Dr Andrew Bayliss has written the most recent monograph on the subject, offering an up-to-date introduction to the Spartan scholarship.

The newest entry into the Total War series of strategy games is inspired by the Trojan War. While the game looks beautiful, it’s not something that I have enjoyed playing.