Μάθησις ΣτοιχείωνMathesis Stoicheion
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The Painted StoaΣτοὰ Ποικίλη

A colonnade on the Athenian Agora hung with great paintings of battles and myths. Zeno taught there, and his followers were named Stoics after it. Stories, pictures and argument in one place.

On the wall today · The strangeThe Antikythera mechanismIn 1901, divers working a shipwreck off the small island of Antikythera brought up bronze and marble statues, glass and pottery, and a shapeless lump of corroded bronze and wood. A year later someone noticed a gearwheel inside it. More than a century of study, lately with X-ray scanning, has shown that it was a hand-cranked machine that modelled the movements of the sun and moon, predicted eclipses and counted the years to the next Olympic Games. Nothing remotely like it survives from the ancient world.Read the entry →A corroded, greenish lump of bronze in which the outline of a large toothed wheel with four spokes can still be seen.

  1. People and power

    Kings, tyrants, generals and the women the sources could not ignore.

  2. Democracy

    How Athens ruled itself: the Assembly, the lot, the courts, ostracism, and its failures.

  3. Education

    Learning to read, to fight, to argue: from the schoolroom to the Academy.

  4. Daily life

    Food, wine, clothes, houses, money, medicine, sport and the theatre.

  5. Religion and belief

    The gods as the Greeks worshipped them: sacrifice, oracles, mysteries, magic and the dead.

  6. The beautiful

    Poetry, painted statues, vases and the passages worth learning Greek for.

  7. The weird

    Marvels, taboos, odd lives and odder deaths, and what is likely true.

  8. The strange

    Unsolved mysteries, lost wonders and the things archaeology cannot yet explain.

  9. The dark side

    Slavery, war, plague and cruelty, told factually, without sensation and without apology.

  10. Archaeology

    How we know: excavation, dating, pottery, great sites and finds, and the problems.

  11. Language

    Where Greek came from, how it was written, and what became of it.

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μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρίʼ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγεʼ ἔθηκε

Greek text size
20 px
Line spacing
1.8

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