Ancient Greece

Irene Coltman Brown begins this series on the historian as philosopher by taking a look at the Greek historian known as the Father of History.

Charlemagne may have been the first Holy Roman Emperor but what did he do to dispel the 'Dark Ages'? Mary Alberi looks at the work of his leading court intellectual, Alcuin, and how his hopes for a 'New Athens' in the Aachen palace school promoted the Carolingian Renaissance.

Rebel without a cause? Paul Cartledge probes whether the chequered career of one of fifth-century Athens' most famous sons reveals more about conflicting codes of loyalty than just the machinations of a turncoat.

The symbols, slogans, ideas and architecture of the Founding Fathers were saturated in the world of Ancient Greece and Rome.

'You are what you eat' was as relevant an observation for the ancients as for more modern thinkers, argues Helen King

N.E.R. Fisher surveys the historiographical treatments of these ancient democratic states, in this month's Reading History.

There is evidence, argues Adrian Tronson, to suggest that the 13th-century Mali empire, and its ruler Sundiata, were strongly influenced by the life of Alexander the Great, 356-323 BC, an influence that was to be capitalised on in the late 1950s.

'A people's prospects are affected by its image of its past' - Arnold Toynbee presents an exclusive extract from his book on the Greek sense of the past, The Greeks and Their Heritages.

Neither the Greeks nor the Romans paid much attention to the achievements or customs of the peoples that they conquered. As Jenny Morris shows here, in the case of their Jewish subjects this indifference caused problems that had both religious and political repercussions.