Few men have lost as great a battle yet been so celebrated for it as has Leonidas of Sparta.

It was the summer of 480 BCE and a vast Persian army was on the march with a single goal: subduing all of Greece. The only path they could possibly take into Greece proper went…

Cleon was an Athenian politician who lived in the fifth century BCE. He was the first prominent politician in Athens to come out of a merchant class, his father owning a successful tanning business.

Cleon first came to attention in the scene of Athenian politics in the 430s BCE as an outspoken opponent…

In the Anglophone world there are few people who have not heard of Hippocrates, the man we call ‘the father of medicine’. Many doctors still swear variations of the Hippocratic Oath, a pledge of good medical practice and physician ethics.

Hippocrates was probably born around 460 BCE, but otherwise very little is known about…

Some time between 460 and 395 BCE lived an Athenian by the name of Thucydides who came to be dubbed the father of political realism and history as a science.

Thucydides was an influential man – a politician and general of the Athenian army. But when, in 423 BCE, he failed to protect a…

Few people are quoted or paraphrased as often as Heraclitus. He even made it into a Disney song.

Heraclitus was born a lesser royal in the city of Ephesus in modern Turkey, which at that time was culturally Greek but conquered by the Persian Empire. Exactly the the year is uncertain, but based on…