Archaeology Odyssey, May/June 2004
Features
Most travelers’ tales from the ancient world have been told by men, so it’s not surprising that their yarns devote special attention to the local women they encounter. The most famous of all those ancient travelers, Homer’s Odysseus, trooped off to Troy in pursuit of Helen of Sparta, lingered nine years on the […]
The most influential Homer scholar of our generation is Gregory Nagy, Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature at Harvard University and director of the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington D.C. Nagy has permanently changed our understanding of the Iliad and the Odyssey. No longer can we think of them as ancient “novels” […]
The artifacts at the Cairo Museum represent the best that ancient Egypt has to offer, including fabulous statues, jewels of glittering gold and precious stones, miles of inscribed and decorated reliefs, the coffins and sarcophagi and mummies of kings, pottery spanning the ages, and countless pieces that are classified as “minor objects” but […]
According to the satirist Juvenal (c. 55–130 C.E.), ancient Rome was a nasty place of piercing noises, rotting food, precariously loaded wagons, sweaty crowds and thick mud (or choking dust, depending on the time of year). And things got even worse after dark, when muggers, hoodlums and drunks reigned in the streets. The […]