In this episode, we tackle Juvenal, whose sixteen satires influenced libertines, neoclassicists and early Christian moralists alike. Conservative to a fault, Juvenal’s Satires rails against the rapid expansion and transformation of Roman society in the early principate. But where his contemporary Tacitus handled the same material with restraint, Juvenal’s work explodes with vivid and vicious depictions of urban life, including immigration, sexual mores and eating habits. Emily and Tom explore...

The Annals, Tacitus’ study of the emperors from Tiberius to Nero, covers some of the most vivid and ruthless episodes in Roman history. A masterclass in political intrigue (and how not to do it), the Annals features mutiny, senatorial backstabbing, wars on the imperial frontiers, political purges and enormous egos. Emily and Tom explore the many ambiguities that make the Annals rewarding, as well as difficult, reading and discuss Tacitus’ knotty style and approach to history. Non-subscribers...

In his prodigious, prolific and very short career, Lucan was at turns championed, disavowed and finally forced into suicide at 25 by the emperor Nero. His only surviving work is Civil War, an account of the bloody and chaotic power struggle between Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great. In their first episode on Latin literature’s so-called ‘Silver Age’, Tom and Emily dive into this brutal and unforgiving epic poem. They explore Lucan’s slippery relationship to power, his rhetorical virtuosity...

In episode seven, we turn to some of the earliest surviving examples of Roman literature: the raucous, bawdy and sometimes bewildering world of Roman comedy. Plautus and Terence, who would go on to set the tone for centuries of playwrights (and school curricula), came from the margins of Roman society, writing primarily for plebeians and upsetting the conventions they simultaneously established. Plautus’ ‘Menaechmi’ is full of coinages, punning and madcap doubling. Terence’s troubling...

The broad theme of this series, truth and lies, was a favourite subject of Lucian of Samosata, the last of our Greek-language authors. A cosmopolitan and highly cultured Syrian subject of the Roman Empire in the second century CE, Lucian wrote in the classical Greek of fifth-century Athens. His razor-sharp satire was a model for Erasmus, Voltaire and Swift. Emily and Tom share some of their favourite excerpts from ‘A True History’ and other works – with trips to the moon, boundary-pushing...

Plato’s 'Symposium', his philosophical dialogue on love, or eros, was probably written around 380 BCE, but it’s set in 416, during the uneasy truce between Athens and Sparta in the middle of the Peloponnesian War. A symposium was a drinking party, though Socrates and his friends, having had a heavy evening the night before, decide to go easy on the wine and instead take turns making speeches in praise of love – at least until Alcibiades turns up, very late and very drunk. In this episode of...

In the fifth episode of Among the Ancients II we turn to Greek lyric, focusing on Pindar’s victory odes, considered a benchmark for the sublime since antiquity, and the vivid, narrative-driven dithyrambs of Bacchylides. Through close reading, Emily and Tom tease out allusions, lexical flourishes and formal experimentation, and explain the highly contextual nature of these tightly choreographed, public-facing poems. They illustrate how precarious work could be for a praise poet in a world...

Some of the most compelling stories of the Classical world come from Herodotus‘ 'Histories', an account of the Persian Wars and a thousand things besides. Emily and Tom chart a course through Herodotus‘ history-as-epic, discussing how best to understand his approach to history, ethnography and myth. Exploring a work full of surprising, dramatic and frequently funny digressions, this episode illustrates the artfulness and deep structure underpinning the 'Histories', and, despite his obvious...

Supposedly an enslaved man from sixth-century Samos, Aesop might not have ever really existed, but the fables attributed to him remain some of the most widely read examples of classical literature. A fascinating window into the ‘low’ culture of ancient Greece, the Fables and the figure of Aesop appear in the work of authors as diverse as Aristophanes, Plato and Phaedrus, serving new purposes in new contexts. Emily and Tom discuss how Aesop’s fables as we know them came to be, make sense of...

Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones kick off their second season of Among the Ancients with a return to the eighth century BCE, exploring the poems of Homer’s near contemporary, Hesiod, the first western writer to craft a poetic persona. In Works and Days, brilliantly translated by A.E. Stallings, Hesiod weaves his personality into a narrative that encompasses everything from brotherly bickering to cosmic warfare. Emily and Tom unpack this wildly entertaining window into Ancient Greek life, and...

Emily Wilson, celebrated classicist and translator of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, is back to take on another twelve vital works of Greek and Roman literature with the LRB’s Thomas Jones, loosely themed around truth and lies – from from Aesop’s Fables to Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Non-subscribers will only hear extracts from most of the episodes in this series. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other...