We’re almost at the end of the list of the twelve Olympian gods of ancient Greece. We’ve covered almost all the famous ones by now, but in the ones that remain we see perhaps a gap in between what the Greeks saw as important, and what we see as important today. We have covered the
The Crusades are perhaps the defining idea of medieval Europe. Over more than four centuries they redefined its history, set it on a new course with a common, foreign enemy against whom the Christian countries could find common cause. They changed Europe forever. Countries rose and fell in the shadow of these religious wars, Christian
There were twelve “core” gods of the ancient Greek pantheon. In the first of these articles we looked at the Big Three, that is Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, and in the second we looked at the main goddesses. Now we get into the really interesting stuff: the specialists. The greater gods may have had responsibilities,
For centuries, after the Romans left, Britain was ruled by the seven kings of the Heptarchy. This was a time of rival realms and rival claimants, a time of petty kingdoms and tribute extracted at the point of a sword. This was a time where might made right, where the most powerful of the kings
The Bronze Age Collapse was, definitively, the end of the Bronze Age. By the time the ancient civilizations had picked up the pieces and rediscovered how to write and interact with each other again they had an entirely new and exciting discovery to work with: iron. Iron can be made into harder and more durable
It is the 24th of January, AD 41. The 28-year-old Emperor of the Roman Empire, a favorite mascot of the army who had ascended unchallenged to the throne only four years earlier has just been stabbed to death in the tunnels under his own palace, by his own guards. In the century leading up to