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, whispered in his ear ‘the secret of his birth’, revealing that he was in fact the son of a god, […]

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 wasn’t just the feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming . . . […]

‘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 certainly not fair now. We live in an age of groundbreaking classical scholar ship, when historians of the ancient world […]