Much of what we think we know about Sappho is apocryphal, conjecture, invented, or wrong, maybe even her name. (Sappho calls herself Psappho.) Yet somehow we feel we know her, that she is speaking directly to us across chasms of time, language, geography, and alphabets. And this is only from one,…

The Parthenon represents, for many, a golden age in human achievement: the 5th-century b.c. Greek flowering of democracy, sciences, and the arts. But what if its chief ornament, the Parthenon frieze, turned out to be not an embodiment of reason and proportion—of stillness at the heart of motion,…

A collection of wacky facts, bizarre nuggets of history, anecdotes, lists, jokes, rumors, and gossip, all organized into such chapters as “Food and Drink,” “Women,” “Animals,” “Mathematics,” “Athens,” “Sparta,” “Prophecy,” and so on, A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities embraces the weirdness that was…

Athens: A History