Meet the Author: Paul Cartledge
A video of Professor Paul Cartledge talking about his new book Ancient Greece: A History in Eleven Cities.
The Battle of Thermopylae and 300
By Paul Cartledge
In 2006 the Frank Miller-Zack Snyder bluescreen epic ‘300’ was a box office smash. The Battle of Thermopylae – fought between a massive Persian invading army and a very much smaller Greek force led by King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans in a narrow pass at the height of summer 480 BC – had never been visualised quite like that before.
Ancient Greece: Mycenae
An excerpt from Paul Cartledge’s Ancient Greece.
No peace for a Cambridge Classics don
Professor Paul Cartledge on the cities of Ancient Greece.
Four Very Short Introductions podcast episodes on the Classical world
Did “Ancient Greece” exist? Are all Epicureans decadent dandies? What do we really know about Alexander the Great? Explore the people, places, and philosophies of the Classical world through these four podcast episodes from the expert authors of our Very Short Introductions series.
Top ten OUPblog posts of 2014 by the numbers
We’re kicking off the new year with a retrospective on our previous one. What was drawing readers to the OUPblog in 2014? Apparently, a passion for philosophy and a passion for lists. Here’s our top posts published in the last year, in descending order, as judged by the total number of pageviews they attracted.
Post-Hay Festival blues
By Kate Farquhar-Thomson
Despite the wet and muddy conditions that met me at Hay, and stayed with me throughout the week, the enthusiasm of the crowd never dwindled. Nothing, it seems, keeps a book lover away from their passion to hear, meet, and have their book signed by their favourite author.
Looking forward to the Hay Festival 2014
By Kate Farquhar-Thomson
Every year since I can remember, I find myself in England’s famous book town for the excellent Hay Festival. Now in its 27th year the eponymous book festival can be found nestling under canvass for 11 days in the Black Mountains of the Brecon Beacons National Park.
A year of reading with OUP authors
We surveyed a few of Oxford University Press’s authors to see what they thought were the best books of 2013…
Images to remember the Battle of Plataea
In 479 BCE, ancient city-state rivals, the Spartans and Athenians, joined in alliance against Persia, 50 years before the infamous Peloponnesian War. Together, they took the Oath of Plataea, revealing deep-seated anxieties about how the defeat would be remembered in history… and to whom the credit would fall.
And the lot fell on… sortition in Ancient Greek democratic theory & practice
Some four decades ago the late Sir Moses Finley, then Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge University, published a powerful series of lectures entitled Democracy Ancient and Modern (1973, republished in an augmented second edition, 1985). He himself had personally suffered the atrocious deficit of democracy that afflicted his native United States in the 1950s, forcing him into permanent exile, but my chief reason for citing his book here, apart from out of continuing intellectual respect, is that its title could equally well have been Democracy Ancient Versus Modern.
Five things 300: Rise of an Empire gets wrong
Let’s be clear of one thing right from the word go: this is not in any useful sense a historical movie. It references a couple of major historical events but is not interested in ‘getting them right’. It uses historical characters but abuses them for its own dramatic, largely techno-visual ends.