greece

Alexander the Great, it goes without saying, was a man not much given to modesty. In 334 BC, as he was preparing to embark on his invasion of Asia, his mother, the sinister witch-queen Olympias, […]

In the aftermath of 11 September, the Cambridge don Mary Beard became notorious for comments published in the London Review of Books. “When the shock had faded,” she wrote, “more hard-headed reaction set in. This […]

‘All those who write about Alexander,” grumbled the Roman geographer Strabo, “prefer the marvelous to the true.” Such a criticism was not entirely accurate even when he made it 2,000 years ago, and it is […]