IRIS

The BBC has a nifty slide show documenting the very cool hi-tech cleaning of the Parthenon Marbles in Athens, which has removed decades of pollution.

Since the damage to the Athenian reliefs turned out to be less severe than previously thought, the cleaning has fueled the debate over whether the rest of the marbles, (in)famously known […]

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Herodotus and Robert Strassler’s new Landmark Herodotus took center stage yesterday on NPR’s “On Point with Tom Ashbrook” (program available in archive). No word on whether that inveterate Herodotus-hater Plutarch, author of “On the Malice of Herodotus”, was available for comment.

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The end of Plato’s Phaedo gives a detailed account of Socrates’ slow, dignified death by hemlock. Many scholars, however, have rejected Plato’s account, believing that Plato’s version omits the harsh details of the violent death associated with hemlock poisoning. The controversy, however, seems to have been settled by Enid Bloch who, through a thorough investigation […]

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Modern science weighs in on the old debate about which disease afflicted the Athenians at the start of the Peloponnesian War. DNA tests on material extracted from skeletons found in a mass grave dating to 430 BCE point to… Typhoid Fever.
From the Journal of Infectious Diseases:
BACKGROUND: Until now, in the absence of direct microbiological evidence, […]

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