Ancient Greece

The merits of Ancient Greek wisdom…

Soapbox on April 2, 2018, 10:36 am

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In 2014 I retired after forty years of university teaching, first in England and latterly at Queen’s. My subject was – is — ‘ancient’ history, defined in almost all British and Irish universities as the Mediterranean-centred world of the Greeks and the Romans. All very long ago now. In the Greeks’ case (my speciality), several centuries B.C. ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’, says the narrator-protagonist Leo at the opening of The Go-Between. “Classical” Greece …

In praise of… The Antikythera Mechanism

Pete Baker on May 11, 2012, 2:40 pm

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I have noted it before [with videos from Nature], but the Antikythera Mechanism is a pretty wondrous object. And, as the Guardian’s ‘in praise of’ editorial points out, “A BBC4 programme on Thursday night retold the tale.” The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project is worth a look too. Here’s a shorter version of the story And, almost as wondrous, the inevitable Lego version… Pete Baker