Entries

A. E. Stallings

An excerpt from Hesiod’s Works and Days, translated by A. E. Stallings

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So Perses, you be heedful of what’s right; Don’t nurture Arrogance—she’s a disaster For lowly mortals; she will overmaster Even noble men and crush them with her load Once they encounter troubles. The better road Is the one bypassing Arrogance to wend To Justice; Justice triumphs in the end. The fool learns this the hard … Read more

Winners of 2018 Runciman Award

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    At a ceremony held at the London Hellenic Centre on 14 June, in the presence of HRH Prince Michael of Kent GCVO, President and Chief Patron of the Anglo-Hellenic League, Dr John Penney, chairman of the award judges, announced the judges’ decision that the winners of the Runciman Award this year were:- Matthew … Read more

Rachel Kousser

An excerpt from The Afterlives of Greek Sculpture: Interaction, Transformation, and Destruction by Rachel Kousser

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In the five centuries between the Persian wars and the death of Cleopatra, the Greeks not only created some of the ancient world’s best known monumental sculptures, but also gave them complex and at times contentious afterlives. As visual and written sources attest, the Greeks washed, perfumed, and polished statues; they poured libations upon them … Read more

Bettany Hughes

An excerpt from Bettany Hughes’s entry, Istanbul: a Tale of Three Cities

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INTRODUCTION

Though all other cities have their periods of government and are subject
to the decays of time, Constantinople alone seems to claim a kind of
immortality and will continue to be a city as long as humanity shall live
either to inhabit or rebuild it. Pierre Gilles, ad 1550

On 4 February 1939 the BBC transmitted an audio-recording of W. B. Yeats’s poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. This was the broadcaster’s tribute to the firebrand Irishman who had died seven days before. Crackling and hissing, the clipped, RP Queen’s English hangs somewhere between the sublime and the sinister, the recording itself a broken reminder of what the great city of Byzantium had and has become.

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