Josephine Quinn

My first visit​ to the British Museum was on a date, and under duress. My objection wasn’t to elite cultural institutions or stolen goods, but to visiting a museum about Britain. I was studying classics to get away from all that. I can still remember the bewilderment of walking into those first long galleries with their five-legged bulls and giant stone kings. I saw the Rosetta Stone...

Sometime​ in the late 160s CE, the Roman doctor Galen suffered a great misfortune: the loss of almost all his slaves to a disease he called (in Greek) ‘the protracted plague’ – a term used for any major epidemic. In a treatise discovered in a Thessaloniki monastery in 2005, Galen boasts that he was not at all moved by this tragedy, nor indeed by one far worse in 192, when a...

Christian evangelicals​ in the United States sometimes like to identify the ancient Persian emperor Cyrus the Great with Donald Trump. Both are vessels for God’s plan on earth. This may seem surprising: Trump is no more obviously Christian than Cyrus, who died half a millennium before Christ was born, and neither would score highly on a morality test. But, it turns out, the leakier...

Howls​ of rage greeted the new concrete paths that were laid over the notoriously treacherous rock of the Acropolis last year. Increasing the numbers the site can handle arguably brings visitors closer to the experience of visiting it in the fifth century BCE. At the height of the glory of classical Athens, built on empire and slavery, the sacred area would have been bustling with people....

Alaric’s initial target in the winter of 408 was not the city of Rome itself but its harbour, where he mounted a shipping blockade that caused months of food shortages. When Roman ambassadors asked what it would take to get him to open the port, his answer was not citizenship but five thousand pounds of gold, thirty thousand pounds of silver, four thousand silk tunics, three thousand scarlet cloaks (no boots or trousers for him) and three thousand pounds of pepper, a delicacy imported from India to treat eye disorders as well as to season food. Alaric then negotiated with Emperor Honorius himself, but citizenship still wasn’t on the agenda: he requested another position in the imperial administration, food and ‘permission to live on Roman land’ for himself and his followers.