Clare Rowan and M.E (Mairi) Gkikaki join me in the Lesche to discuss the use of monetiform tokens in Greek (and a bit of Roman) antiquity. Clare was the PI on the ERC-funded project "Token Communities of the Ancient Mediterranean." Mairi was a postdoctoral researcher on the project, and her edited volume Tokens in Classical Athens and Beyond was published (open-access) with Liverpool University Press in 2023.

See here for the project's Database of Token Types.

Ancient texts (selection)

• Aristophanes, Ekklesiazousai (Assemblywomen)
• Aristotle, Athenaion Politeia
• Herodotus 6.86 (story of Glaucus)
• IG I3 34, the "Cleinias Decree"
• IG II3 4 76 (mention of tribal token distribution at line 79)
• Philochorus (Atthidographer)
• Plato, Symposium (Aristophanes' speech)

Also mentioned (selection)

• Kroll, J.H. and Mitchel, F.W. 1980, "Clay Tokens Stamped with the Names of Athenian Military Commanders," Hesperia 49, pp. 86–96.
• Lang, M. 1959, "Allotment by Tokens," Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 8, pp. 80–89.
• Lang, M. and M. Crosby. 1964, The Athenian Agora X. Weights, Measures and Tokens. ASCSA/Princeton.
• M.I. Rostovtzeff's work on tokens
• Svoronos, I.N. 1900, "Κατάλογος των Μολύβδινων Συμβόλων του Εθνικού Νομισματικού Μουσείου," Journal International d 'Archéologie Numismatique 3, pp. 322-343.
  • See further work by Svoronos on tokens (εἰσιτήρια) in the Journal International d’Archéologie Numismatique.

About our guests

Clare Rowan is an Associate Professor in the department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick. She specialises in ancient numismatics, in particular ancient tokens, iconography and small change. She was the principal investigator on the European Union Research Council-funded project "Token Communities of the Ancient Mediterranean" (2016-2021).

M.E. Gkikaki is an honorary research fellow at the Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Warwick, where she has been a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow (2018–21) and a team member of the ERC-funded project "Token Communities of the Ancient Mediterranean" (2016–18). She is editor of the volume Tokens in Classical Athens and Beyond (Liverpool University Press 2023). Her monograph Symbola: Athenian Tokens from Classical to Roman Times will soon be appearing with Liverpool University Press.

________________________________

Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
Email: leschepodcast@gmail.com
Suggest a book using this form

Seth Estrin joins me in the Lesche to discuss Classical Athenian funerary sculpture -- the largest single corpus of classical sculpture -- and his emotion-based readings of it. Seth is the author of Grief Made Marble: Funerary Sculpture in Classical Athens (Yale University Press 2024).

A couple of images that accompany this episode are on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leschepodcast/

If you're interested in hearing more about Athenian funerary practice, check out this Lesche episode on The Athenian Funeral Oration.

Ancient texts

• Aristotle (see esp. Parts of Animals 640b35-641a8 on homonymy)
• Athenian funerary epigrams, as in Tsagalis (see below)
• Athenian tragedy, including Euripides' Alcestis

Also mentioned

• Shear, T. Leslie (2016) Trophies of Victory: Public Building in Periklean Athens. Princeton.
• Tsagalis, Christos (2008) Inscribing Sorrow: Fourth-Century Attic Funerary Epigrams. De Gruyter.

Also recommended

• Arrington, Nathan (2018) Ashes, Images, and Memories: The Presence of the War Dead in Fifth-Century Athens. Princeton.
• Hunter, Richard (2022) Greek Epitaphic Poetry: A Selection (a "Green and Yellow"). Cambridge.

About our guest

Seth Estrin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, where he specializes in the art, archaeology, and visual culture of ancient Greece. His scholarship and teaching explore the lived experience of art objects—their sensuous properties, their entanglement with felt experiences, and their place in shaping intersubjective encounters and personal histories. His work foregrounds interconnections across subfields of Classics, including those between archaeological, literary, and epigraphical sources.

________________________________

Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
Email: leschepodcast@gmail.com
Suggest a book using this form

Debbie Felton and Carolina López-Ruiz join me to discuss monsters -- and what they mean and represent -- in classical mythology. Debbie is the editor of the new Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth, to which Carolina contributed a chapter on the Sphinx.

Ancient sources

• Apollonius of Rhodes, Medea
• Avianus/Aesop, "The Satyr and the Traveler"
• Euripides, Medea
• Herodotus (esp. 3.38, on the Callatiae)
• Hesiod, Theogony
• Palaephatus, "On Unbelivable Tales" (Περὶ ἀπίστων)
• Plato, Phaedrus
• Theocritus 11 ("The Cyclops")
• This kylix attributed to Douris depicting Jason being eaten by a dragon (Vatican Museums)
• This pithos (scene with winged deities) (Archaeological Museum of Tinos)

Also mentioned

• Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome (1996) Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis. (Debbie specifically mentions Cohen's famous essay in the volume, "Monster Culture: Seven Theses")
• Mittman, Asa Simon and Peter J. Dendle (2013) The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Routledge.
• Various chapters in the Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth

About our guests
Debbie Felton, Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializes in ancient folklore. Her books include Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity, Monsters and Monarchs: Serial Killers in Classical Myth and History and the edited volumes A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in Antiquity and The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth. She has appeared in various media in the U.S. and Europe, including Coast to Coast AM, Weird Tales, and CBS Mornings, and she also runs "The Ancient Monsters Blog" (https://websites.umass.edu/felton).

Carolina López-Ruiz is Professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Classics Department (of which she is also chair) and member of ISAC (Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures). She specializes in ancient Mediterranean mythology, religion, Greek and Near Eastern cultural exchange, and Phoenician culture. Her latest books are Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean (2021) and Greek Mythology: From Creation to First Humans (2025). She co-directs an excavation in the Phoenician site of Cerro del Villar in Malaga, Spain.

________________________________

Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
Email: leschepodcast@gmail.com
Suggest a book using this form

Vincent Azoulay and Paulin Ismard join me in the Lesche to discuss their study of the restoration of democracy in Athens in 403 BC, in which they examine the Athenian civil war through the prism of chorality. A translation of their 2020 book Athènes 403: une histoire chorale (Flammarion, Paris) has just appeared in an English translation by Lorna Coing with the title Athens, 403 BC: A Democracy in Crisis? (Cambridge University Press).

Ancient sources

• Aristophanes, Frogs
• Aristotle, Politics Book 3
• Fragments of poetry by Critias (accessible in Brill’s New Jacoby: 338a; see also this Oxford bibliography)
• IG II2 10, Honors for foriegners who had supported the democracy against the Thirty (401/0). Online here
• Xenophon, Hellenica, esp. 2.4.20-22 (speech of Cleocritus)

Also mentioned

• Anderson, Greg (2018) The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History. Oxford University Press.
• Keesling, Catherine M. (2012) "Syeris, Diakonos of the Priestess Lysimache on the Athenian Acropolis (IG II2 3464)," Hesperia 81: 467-505.
• Loraux, N. (1997) La cité divisée : l'oubli dans la mémoire d'Athènes. Payot: Paris. Translated by Corinne Pache and Jeff Fort as The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens. Zone/Princeton University Press 2002/2006.

About our guests

Vincent Azoulay is Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is a former member of the Institut Universitaire de France and the current director of the international bilingual journal Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales. He has been awarded several prizes, including the Prix du Sénat du Livre d'Histoire (2011). He is the author of several books already translated into English: Pericles of Athens (2014), The Tyrant-Slayers of Ancient Athens (2017) and Xenophon and the Graces of Power (2018).

Paulin Ismard is Professor of Ancient History at Aix-Marseille University. His work focuses on the history of democracy in antiquity and the history of slavery in a comparative perspective. His publications include L'événement Socrate (Flammarion, 2013), Democracy’s Slaves (Harvard, 2017), La cité et ses esclaves. Institution, fictions, expériences (Seuil, 2019), Le miroir d'Œdipe (Seuil 2023), and, with Vincent Azoulay, Athens, 403 BC. A Democracy in Crisis? (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

________________________________

Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
Email: leschepodcast@gmail.com
Suggest a book using this form

Lindsey Mazurek joins me in the Lesche to discuss Isis worship during the Roman Empire, and how it intersected with and contributed to constructions of Greek identity.

Ancient texts

• Apuleius, Metamorphoses (esp. Book 11)
• Plutarch, Isis and Osiris

Also mentioned

• Barrett, Caitlin E. (2019) Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens. Oxford.
• Bricault, Laurent (2005) Recueil des inscriptions concernant les cultes isiaques I-III. Paris.
• Brubaker, Rogers (2006) Ethnicity without Groups. Cambridge, Mass.
• Eshleman, Kendra (2012) The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire: Sophists, Philosophers, and Christians. Cambridge.
• Moyer, Ian (2011) Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism. Cambridge.
• Vasunia, Phiroze (2001) The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander. Berkeley.
• Parker, Grant. (2008) The Making of Roman India. Cambridge.
• Walters, Elizabeth J. (1988) Attic Grave Reliefs That Represent Women in the Dress of Isis. Hesperia Supplement 22.
• Whitmarsh, Tim (2001) Greek Literature and the Roman Empire. Oxford.

About our guest

Lindsey Mazurek is an assistant professor in the Department of Classical Studies at Indiana University. Her research focuses on the intersections of ethnicity, religion, migration, and material culture in the Roman provinces, particularly Greece. She is the author of Isis in a Global Empire: Greek Identity Through Egyptian Religion in Roman Greece, which was published with Cambridge University Press in 2022. She also co-directs the Mediterranean Connectivity Initiative, a digital history and archaeology project that examines social ties in Rome's port cities. Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Archaeology, Hesperia, and the Memoirs of the American Academy at Rome.

________________________________

Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
Email: leschepodcast@gmail.com
Suggest a book using this form

Sasha-Mae Eccleston joins me in the Lesche to discuss classicizing and chronopolitics in the contemporary United States.

And yes, we talk about that Virgil quotation.

Ancient texts

• Homer, Iliad
• Euripides & Seneca, Medea
• Virgil, Aeneid 9.447 (nulla dies umquam memori uos eximet aeuo)

Also mentioned (selection)

Modern creative works

• Eric Fischl, "Tumbling Woman" (2001) (sculpture)
• Ben Lerner, Angle of Yaw (2006)
• Adrienne Rich, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems, 2007-2010 (2011), esp. "Reading the Iliad as if it were the first time" and "Don't flinch"
• Juliana Spahr, The Connection between Everything with Lungs: Poems (2005)
• Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016)
• Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (2011)

Op/eds

• Caroline Alexander, "Out of Context," New York Times, April 6, 2011.
• Tom Brokaw, "Two Dates Which Will Live in Infamy," San Diego Union-Tribune, December 7, 2001.

Academic works

• Scholarship in Temporality Studies by Elizabeth Freeman and Sarah Sharma.
• Greenwood, Emily. "Reception Studies: The Cultural Mobility of Classics," Daedalus 145.2 (2016): 41-9.
• Haley, Shelley P. "Self-Definition, Community, and Resistance: Euripides' 'Medea' and Toni Morrison's 'Beloved'," Thamyris 2.2 (1995): 177-206.
• Van Schepen, Randall. "Falling/Failing 9/11: Eric Fischl's Tumbling Woman Debacle," Aurora: The Journal of the History of ART 9 (2008): 116-43.
• Wright, Matthew. "Making Medea Medea." In Female Characters in Fragmentary Greek Tragedy, ed. P. J. Finglass and Lyndasy Coo, 216-243. Cambridge 2020.

About our guest

Sasha-Mae Eccleston is currently the John Rowe Workman Assistant Professor of Classics where she is affiliated with the Initiative for Environmental Humanities, the Department of comparative literature, and the Department of Africana studies. She directs the fellowship in critical classical studies for PhDs and/or MFAs. She is cofounder of the scholarly society Eos and of Racing the Classics, a field-wide initiative for early career researchers and doctoral candidates in Classics.

________________________________

Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
Email: leschepodcast@gmail.com
Suggest a book using this form

Buckle your seatbelt and prepare to clutch your pearls! Walter Scheidel joins me in the Lesche to discuss his case for globalizing the study of ancient history -- and for killing off Classics as we know it. Scheidel is the author of What is Ancient History?, a new manifesto published by Princeton University Press.

Mentioned

• Sheldon Pollock, "Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World," Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 4, The Fate of Disciplines, edd. James Chandler and Arnold I. Davidson (Summer 2009), pp. 931-961
• The Herodotus Helpline
• Eidolon articles about reshaping the field of Classics

About our guest

Walter Scheidel is Dickason Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics and History at Stanford University. His research ranges from ancient social and economic history and premodern historical demography to the comparative and transdisciplinary world history of inequality, state formation, and human welfare. He has written, edited and co-edited some 21 books and published more than 260 papers and reviews. His latest book, What is Ancient History, is out now with Princeton University Press.

________________________________

Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
Email: leschepodcast@gmail.com
Suggest a book using this form

Scarlett Kingsley joins me in the Lesche to discuss Herodotus' place in the intellectual milieu of the fifth century, the subject of her book Herodotus and the Presocratics: Inquiry and Intellectual Culture in the Fifth Century BCE.

If you enjoy this episode, you might also like Episode 11 on The Sophists, with Josh Billings and Christopher Moore.

Ancient texts

• Herodotus, Histories (especially the meeting between Solon and Croesus at 1.30-33, and the Constitutional Debate set in Persia at 3.80-82)
• Aristophanes, Clouds
• Euripides, Phoenissae
• Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
• Hippias, Synagoge (non-extant)
• Dissoi logoi
• Scattered references to many fifth-century thinkers

Also mentioned

• Dewald, C. (1987) "Narrative Surface and Authorial Voice in Herodotus' Histories," Arethusa 20: 147-68.
• Diels, H. and W. Kranz (1951-52), Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, griechisch und deutsch (6 vols.). Berlin.
• Laks, A. and G. Most (2016), Early Greek Philosophy (9 vols.). Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA and London.
• Carolyn Miller's work on genre
• Nestle, W. (1908) Herodots Verhältnis zur Philosophie und Sophistik. Stuttgart.
• Thomas, R. (2002) Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion. Cambridge.

About our guest

Scarlett Kingsley is an Associate Professor of Classics at Agnes Scott College. Her research explores the intersections of early Greek historiography and philosophy, with a particular focus on Herodotus, Thucydides, and the Presocratics. Her first monograph, Herodotus and the Presocratics: Inquiry and Intellectual Culture in the Fifth Century, was supported by a Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship. She is also the co-editor, with G. Monti and T. Rood, of The Authoritative Historian: Tradition and Innovation in Ancient Historiography (CUP, 2022). She is currently co-writing a book with Tim Rood entitled Land, Wealth, and Empire in Herodotus: Reading the End of the Histories (forthcoming, OUP).

________________________________

Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
Email: leschepodcast@gmail.com
Suggest a book using this form