148 Fun Facts About Ancient Greece

What form of government in ancient Greek city-states was rule by a select, often wealthy, few?

Oligarchy means rule by the few; in 411 BC, with a long war going badly, a council of Four Hundred wealthy Athenians overthrew the democracy, only to be ousted themselves within months.

Which Olympian god was associated with wine, revelry, and theater?

Dionysus was honoured at Athens' great spring festival, the City Dionysia, where tragedies and comedies were staged in competition, which is how the god of wine also became the god of theatre.

Who is traditionally credited with the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two epic poems at the foundation of ancient Greek literature?

Homer gets the credit, yet the poems grew out of generations of oral performance and were written down only later, and scholars still debate whether one poet composed both.

Which Greek architectural order, the earliest and simplest of the three, has sturdy columns topped by a plain circular capital?

Doric columns have no base and rise straight from the temple floor; the order probably grew out of building in timber, with its triglyphs perhaps copying the ends of wooden beams.

What three-headed dog guarded the entrance to the Underworld in Greek mythology?

Cerberus, in Hesiod's telling, fawned on souls as they arrived but ate any who tried to leave; dragging him up into the daylight was one of the twelve labours of Heracles.

Which empire's far larger invading force did Athens and Plataea crush in 490 BC?

The victory at Marathon, over a force commanded by Datis and Artaphernes, marked a turning point in the Greco-Persian Wars.

The war of 431–404 BC pitted the Delian League against a league headed by which city-state?

Sparta led the Peloponnesian League against Athens' Delian League; Persian gold funded a Spartan fleet that cut Athens' grain route from the Black Sea, and the city surrendered in 404 BC.

Which Athenian philosopher, convicted of impiety and corrupting the youth in 399 BC, was executed by drinking hemlock?

Socrates could have lived: his friend Crito arranged to bribe the guards and get him out of prison, but he refused to defy the city's laws and drank the hemlock.

The Parthenon, the great marble temple crowning the Acropolis, was dedicated to which deity?

Athena, the city's patron goddess, was honoured by the Parthenon, built between 447 and 432 BC on the site of an older temple burned by the Persians in 480 BC; it later became a Christian church.

The ancient Olympic Games, traditionally dated from 776 BC, were held at the sanctuary of Olympia in honour of which god?

Zeus was the honoree, and the games ran every four years; the four-year Olympiad became a unit of time in Greek chronology.

Which Bronze Age culture on Crete, named after a mythical king, built the great palace at Knossos?

The Minoans' modern name, popularised by the archaeologist Arthur Evans, comes from Minos, the legendary king of Crete; after about 1450 BC Mycenaean Greeks from the mainland came to dominate their island.

Which Greek island, known to the ancients as Thera, was torn apart by a huge volcanic eruption around 1600 BC?

Santorini's eruption buried the Bronze Age town of Akrotiri in ash, preserving its houses and wall paintings much as Vesuvius would later preserve Pompeii.

At the ancient Olympic Games, what was the job of the Hellanodikai, officials drawn from the people of Elis?

Judging the contests fell to the Hellanodikai, who also fined cheats; the fines paid for a row of bronze statues beside the stadium entrance, a warning to every athlete walking in.

What prize did an ancient Olympic victor receive?

An olive-leaf wreath was the only prize, which astonished the Persians: told of it, Herodotus says, one of Xerxes' nobles cried out at being led against men who compete for honour, not money.

What Olympic habit did the Greeks feel distinguished them from non-Greeks?

Competing naked was, to the Greeks, a mark of being Greek: the Spartans were said to have been the first to strip for sport, and 'gymnasium' comes from gymnos, meaning naked.

Which brutal ancient Olympic event mixed boxing and wrestling with almost no rules?

Pankration, meaning 'all power', combined boxing and wrestling; only biting and eye-gouging were banned, and the fighter Arrhichion of Phigalia famously won in 564 BC while dying from a chokehold.

From the age of seven, Spartan boys left home for which harsh state training system?

The agoge gave each boy one cloak a year and so little food that he was expected to steal more; a boy caught at it was beaten, not for the theft but for being clumsy enough to get caught.

In ancient Sparta, who were the helots?

Enslaved Greeks who worked the land, the helots were so feared as rebels that each year's new ephors formally declared war on them, so that killing one broke no religious law.

How many kings ruled Sparta at any one time?

Two kings from separate royal houses reigned together; after the pair fell out while leading an army against Athens, Sparta passed a law that only one king at a time could go on campaign.

What was the name of the semi-mythical lawgiver credited with Sparta's constitution?

Lycurgus was credited with the Great Rhetra and with Sparta's common messes, yet Plutarch opens his biography by admitting that nothing can be said about him that is not disputed.

Which Athenian general led the victory at Marathon in 490 BC?

Miltiades pressed for an attack and, in Herodotus' account, left the Greek centre thin to strengthen the wings, which then closed on the Persians; tradition counts 6,400 Persian dead against 192 Athenians.

Per Herodotus, where was Pheidippides actually sent from Athens before the battle of Marathon?

Sparta, to ask for help, was his goal, and he covered about 240 km in two days; the Spartans waited for the full moon and arrived too late, and the dash from Marathon to Athens is a later legend.

Who betrayed the Greeks at Thermopylae by showing the Persians a mountain path around the pass?

Ephialtes hoped for a rich reward from Xerxes, but the Greeks put a price on his head and he fled; Herodotus says he was killed years later in an unrelated quarrel, and Sparta honoured his killer all the same.

What does 'Thermopylae' mean, describing the pass where Leonidas made his stand?

Hot gates is the literal meaning, from the sulphurous hot springs beside the narrow coastal pass; ordered to hand over his weapons there, Leonidas reputedly replied 'Molon labe' — come and take them.

Which Athenian statesman effectively commanded the Greek fleet at Salamis in 480 BC?

Themistocles sent his servant Sicinnus to tell Xerxes the Greeks were about to flee, luring the Persian fleet into the narrow straits; the king watched the disaster from a seat on the slopes of Mount Aigaleo.

Which queen fought for Persia at Salamis and escaped an Athenian pursuer by ramming one of her own side?

Artemisia of Halicarnassus, a Carian queen commanding five ships for Xerxes, rammed an allied Calyndian vessel to shake off her pursuer; Herodotus has Xerxes remark that his men had become women and his women men.

Which type of Greek warship, pulled by 170 oarsmen, made up the fleet that Athens sent to Salamis?

Trireme: its 170 rowers sat in three tiers, one man to an oar, and when a full-size replica was launched in 1987 a volunteer crew drove it at about nine knots.

In an Athenian ostracism, citizens voted by scratching a rival's name onto what?

A potsherd, or ostrakon, gave ostracism its name; the man named on the most sherds had ten days to leave Athens for ten years, though he kept his property and his citizenship.

Why, in Plutarch's anecdote, did an illiterate Athenian vote to ostracise Aristides?

Sick of hearing him called 'the Just', the man said; not recognising Aristides, he asked him to write the name on his ballot, and Aristides silently wrote it and handed it back.

Hoplites fought in which tight, overlapping-shield formation?

The phalanx packed hoplites shoulder to shoulder, each shield covering the next man's unguarded right side, so the whole line tended to drift rightwards as men edged behind their neighbour's shield.

How did Pericles, the statesman who led Athens into its long war with Sparta, die in 429 BC?

Of plague: the epidemic broke out after he gathered the country people inside the city walls to sit out Spartan invasions, and before it killed him it had taken both his legitimate sons.

Which woman from Miletus was the partner of Pericles and a favourite target of Athens' comic playwrights?

Aspasia was blamed on the comic stage for her partner's wars, with Aristophanes joking that one began over women kidnapped from her household; Plato instead shows her teaching rhetoric.

The maxims carved at the entrance to Apollo's temple at Delphi included 'Know thyself' and which other famous phrase?

Nothing in excess stood beside 'Know thyself'; in Plato's telling, the Seven Sages met at Delphi and dedicated the sayings to Apollo as the first fruits of their wisdom.

Delphi lies on the slopes of which mountain?

Parnassus rises above Delphi, where pilgrims and the priestess herself washed in the Castalian spring before a consultation; held sacred to Apollo and the Muses, the mountain became a byword for poetry.

Who is traditionally credited as the first actor in Greek tragedy, back in the sixth century BC?

Thespis is credited with stepping out of the chorus to speak as a character, and with winning Athens' first recorded prize for tragedy; actors are still called thespians after him.

In an ancient Greek theatre, what was the orchestra?

The chorus's dancing place took its name from orkheisthai, 'to dance'; the musicians of a modern orchestra inherited the word from the part of the theatre where they came to sit.

The Antikythera mechanism, recovered from a shipwreck in 1901, is the oldest known what?

An analogue computer: turning a hand crank drove bronze gearwheels that tracked the Sun and Moon and forecast eclipses, and nothing as intricate is known from the next thousand years and more.

What was Archimedes doing, by legend, when he shouted 'Eureka'?

Stepping into a bath, Archimedes saw the water rise and realised displacement could measure the volume of King Hiero's crown; the story goes that he ran home naked, shouting that he had found it.

What did Archimedes boast he could do with a lever and a place to stand?

'Move the Earth' completes the boast, recorded by Pappus of Alexandria, which sums up the lever's power; Archimedes also bracketed pi between 3 10/71 and 3 1/7 and built an iron claw to wreck Roman ships.

Diogenes the Cynic famously lived in Athens in what?

A large ceramic jar, a pithos beside the Metroon in the agora, was his home; he carried a lit lamp by day 'looking for a man' and told Alexander to step out of his sunlight.

What did Diogenes bring to Plato's school to mock his definition of man?

A plucked chicken: Plato had defined man as a featherless biped, so Diogenes carried the bird into his lecture room announcing 'Here is Plato's man', after which 'with broad nails' was added to the definition.

Which philosopher did Philip II hire to tutor the young Alexander the Great at the Temple of the Nymphs at Mieza?

Aristotle took the job for a remarkable fee: Philip rebuilt the philosopher's home town of Stagira, which his own army had destroyed, and brought back its exiled and enslaved citizens.

Who was Alexander the Great's mother, a princess of Epirus?

Olympias, daughter of King Neoptolemus I of Epirus, married Philip II in 357 BC and bore Alexander the next year; after his death she fought for her grandson's succession and was executed by Cassander in 316 BC.

Alexander broke Persian power at Issus and at which decisive 331 BC battle?

Gaugamela, fought near Arbela in northern Mesopotamia in October 331 BC, saw Darius III flee the field again; Issus in 333 BC had already cost him his family, captured in the Persian camp.

Philip II of Macedon was stabbed to death by one of his own bodyguards in 336 BC during which celebration?

His daughter's wedding at Aegae was the occasion: Philip walked into the theatre without his guards to show he needed none, and the bodyguard Pausanias ran up and stabbed him.

Xerxes bridged which strait with boats to invade Greece in 480 BC?

The Hellespont (Dardanelles) was bridged twice with boats; when a storm wrecked the first bridges Herodotus says Xerxes had the water whipped 300 times and branded, then crossed his army over seven days.

Which epitaph was carved for Leonidas' men at Thermopylae?

'Go tell the Spartans we lie here' asks a passing stranger to carry word home that the dead had obeyed their orders to the last; tradition credits the couplet to the poet Simonides.

What was fitted to the prow of a Greek warship to hole enemies?

A bronze beak sheathed the prow at the waterline to punch holes in enemy hulls; ramming decided the battle of Salamis, where the crowded Persian fleet could not manoeuvre in the narrow straits.

Pericles' citizenship law of 451 BC limited Athenian citizenship to men with what?

Two Athenian parents became the rule in 451 BC, and the law later caught its own author: his son by a foreign-born partner was no citizen until the Assembly voted a special exemption.

Which rocky hill beside the Acropolis gave its name to Athens' ancient homicide court?

The Areopagus, the 'Hill of Ares', gave its name to the council of former archons that tried homicide there; in one tradition the first defendant was Ares himself, tried by the gods for killing a son of Poseidon.

Which Athenian lawgiver's 'shaking off of burdens' cancelled debts and freed citizens enslaved for debt in the 590s BC?

Solon called his reform the seisachtheia; when friends he had told in advance borrowed heavily to buy land, he cleared his own name by cancelling the large debts that were owed to him.

Who reorganised Athenians into ten tribes in 508 BC and is called the father of Athenian democracy?

Cleisthenes, in 508/507 BC, replaced the four old clan-based tribes with ten tribes based on where people lived, breaking the power networks that had enabled tyranny and giving each tribe fifty seats on the new Council of 500.

Which Roman orator gave Herodotus the title 'The Father of History'?

Cicero gave Herodotus the title; Herodotus was born in a Greek city under Persian rule, which made the chronicler of the Persian Wars a subject of the Great King by birth.

Why did critics of the polymath Eratosthenes mockingly nickname him 'Beta'?

He came second in every field, the joke went — hence 'Beta', the second letter; yet the Alexandrian librarian came close to the true circumference of the Earth using the Sun's shadows at Syene and Alexandria.

By one Roman account, what killed the tragedian Aeschylus?

A tortoise dropped by an eagle killed him, in the tale told by Valerius Maximus: the bird took his head for a rock on which to crack the shell; he died at Gela in Sicily around 456 BC.

The Colossus of Rhodes, a statue of the sun god Helios, was toppled by what within decades of being built?

An earthquake snapped the Colossus at the knees; warned off by an oracle, the Rhodians turned down the king of Egypt's offer to pay for rebuilding it, and the wreck lay where it fell for centuries.

Who burned down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in 356 BC, reputedly seeking fame?

Herostratus was executed and the Ephesians banned mention of his name, which survived anyway; tradition says the fire fell on the night Alexander the Great was born in 356 BC, and 'herostratic fame' means notoriety sought at any cost.

Which Theban commander led the army that broke Spartan power at Leuctra in 371 BC?

Epaminondas massed his left wing fifty shields deep against the Spartan right, where King Cleombrotus was killed; a smaller Boeotian army had beaten the Spartans in open battle and ended their name for invincibility.

Which elite Theban unit of 300 men was destroyed by Philip II of Macedon's army at Chaeronea in 338 BC?

The Sacred Band was said to be made up of 150 pairs of lovers; Plutarch says Philip wept over their bodies, and the stone Lion of Chaeronea still stands above a mass grave of 254 men.

Which Spartan general's arrival in Sicily doomed Athens' expedition of 415–413 BC?

Gylippus slipped into Syracuse in 414 BC as the Athenian siege wall was nearly complete, rallied the defenders and trapped the invaders; the defeat that followed in 413 BC cost Athens most of its fleet and army.

What did Xenophon's Ten Thousand famously shout when they finally sighted the Black Sea?

'Thalatta! Thalatta!' means 'The sea! The sea!': for mercenaries stranded deep in Persia since their paymaster Cyrus fell at Cunaxa in 401 BC, salt water meant Greek cities and a way home.

Which Spartan admiral wiped out the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami in 405 BC?

Lysander, bankrolled by the Persian prince Cyrus, caught the Athenian fleet unprepared on the beach at Aegospotami and took nearly all of it; unable to bring in grain by sea, Athens surrendered the following year.

Whoever undid the Gordian Knot was prophesied to rule what?

All of Asia was the prize Arrian and Curtius say the oracle promised: the knot of cornel bark tied an ox-cart in Gordium, and Alexander, in the best-known version, simply cut it with his sword in 333 BC.

Why, in Plutarch's tale, could no one but young Alexander calm the horse Bucephalus?

It feared its own shadow: Alexander turned its head toward the sun so that the shadow fell behind it; when the horse died in 326 BC, after his last great battle, he founded a city named in its honour.

Which Indian king did Alexander defeat at the Hydaspes in 326 BC, then reinstate as satrap?

Porus, whose war elephants anchored his line, was beaten after Alexander crossed the monsoon-swollen Hydaspes upstream by night; asked how he wished to be treated, Porus answered 'like a king', and kept his realm as satrap.

Which archaeologist dug the famous shaft graves at Mycenae in 1876?

Heinrich Schliemann, fresh from digging at Troy, opened the shaft graves of Grave Circle A in 1876; the gold 'Mask of Agamemnon' came from that dig, though the burials are about three centuries older than any Trojan War.

Who deciphered Linear B, the script of Mycenaean Greek, in 1952?

Michael Ventris, an architect and self-taught linguist, announced on BBC radio in 1952 that Linear B recorded an early form of Greek, building on Alice Kober's grids; John Chadwick then helped him publish the decipherment.

In later Greek tradition, the sprawling palace at Knossos was remembered as what?

The Labyrinth, lair of the bull-headed monster killed by Theseus, was placed by the Greeks at Knossos; the archaeologist Arthur Evans suggested that the palace's own tangle of rooms inspired the myth.

What had Athenians planned to do with their Laurion silver windfall of 483 BC before it went on warships instead?

'Share it among citizens' was the plan, at ten drachmas a head, until the Assembly was persuaded to build warships instead; three years later those ships met the Persian invasion.

What was the kleroterion, a stone slab slotted with citizens' name tokens, used for in democratic Athens?

Picking jurors by lot: citizens slotted their name tokens into the stone, and black or white dice dropped down a tube decided which rows served that day, so that nobody could know a jury in advance.

Which island, the birthplace of Pythagoras, did Pericles besiege for nine months after it revolted in 440 BC?

Samos held out for nine months; on surrender it had to pull down its walls, hand over its fleet and pay back the cost of the war in instalments.

Athens' Long Walls formed a protected corridor from the city to which harbour?

Piraeus was tied to Athens by the Long Walls, which kept the city supplied by sea whenever an enemy held the countryside; after the surrender of 404 BC they were pulled down to the music of flute-girls.

Which plant, sacred to Apollo, did the Pythia use in her rites before she prophesied at Delphi?

Laurel was Apollo's own plant: the Pythia burned its leaves and held a sprig as she took her seat; the sanctuary also sits over two geological faults, and some researchers think gases from them brought on her trance.

Which king attacked Cyrus after an oracle promised that the war would 'destroy a great empire', then lost his own?

Croesus of Lydia crossed the Halys to attack Cyrus the Great around 547 BC and the empire he destroyed was his own; Herodotus tells the tale, and 'rich as Croesus' preserves his reputation for fabulous wealth.

Cynisca, a Spartan princess and the first woman to win at the Olympics, won in what?

Chariot racing: the prize went to the owner, not the driver, so Cynisca's four-horse team won without her entering the stadium; her brother Agesilaus reportedly put her up to it to show that such wins took only wealth.

What was a symposium in ancient Greece?

A drinking party: guests reclined on couches while the wine went round with music and talk, and Plato set a whole dialogue at one; only later did the word come to mean a learned conference.

What filled the painted amphorae handed to winners at Athens' Panathenaic Games?

Olive oil filled the jars because it came from Athens' sacred trees: officials collected a share from every farm where one grew, and the city handed it out by the jarful to its champions.

Adapted from Phoenician, the Greek alphabet was the first to systematically write what?

Vowels: Phoenician letters marked only consonants, so the Greeks turned signs for sounds they did not use, such as aleph, into vowels like alpha, creating the first full alphabet around the 8th century BC.

Who founded Stoicism in the Athenian agora around 300 BC?

Zeno of Citium, a Cypriot merchant shipwrecked at Athens, began teaching around 300 BC in the Stoa Poikile, the 'painted porch' colonnade, which gave the school its name; Chrysippus later systematised his ideas.

Epicurus taught his followers in Athens at a school known as what?

The Garden, bought by Epicurus around 306 BC, took in women and slaves alongside citizens; despite what 'epicurean' has come to mean, he and his followers lived on plain bread and water.

Which early Greek philosopher is said to have predicted the solar eclipse that stopped a battle in 585 BC?

Thales gets the credit from Herodotus, who says day turned to night in mid-battle and the two armies were so shaken that they stopped fighting and made peace.

Which ancient Greek astronomer proposed the first known Sun-centred model of the universe?

Aristarchus put the Sun at the centre with the Earth circling it some 1,800 years before Copernicus; his own account is lost, and the idea survives because Archimedes described it in The Sand Reckoner.

What was the Archimedes' screw designed to do?

Raise water: turning the helix inside its casing lifted water for irrigation and for pumping out ships' bilges, and the device, traditionally credited to Archimedes, is still used in pumps today.

Which Roman general sacked Corinth in 146 BC, bringing Greece under Roman rule?

On his orders the city was burned, the men killed and the women and children enslaved; the rest of Greece submitted soon after.

Which ancient Olympic event included the discus throw and the long jump?

The pentathlon combined the discus and the long jump with the javelin, a sprint and wrestling, all in one day; jumpers swung hand weights called halteres to carry themselves further.

Aesop, the fabulist, is traditionally described as having been what?

A slave, by tradition, in the 6th century BC; the ancient Aesop Romance makes him so quick-witted that he talks his way to freedom and ends up advising kings.

The colossal statue that stood inside the Parthenon was panelled in which two materials?

Gold and ivory plates covered a wooden core, and the gold was made to lift off; when its sculptor was accused of pocketing some, the plates could simply be removed and weighed.

Agents of which British earl removed about half the Parthenon sculptures in 1801–1812?

Lord Elgin was British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which then ruled Athens; he had the sculptures cut down and shipped home, and in 1816 sold them to the government for the British Museum.

Which Athenian general fled sacrilege charges in 415 BC and went to advise the Spartans?

Alcibiades, recalled to face charges over the mutilation of the Herms and profaning the Mysteries, jumped ship to Sparta, later switched to the Persians, and was assassinated in Phrygia in 404 BC, reportedly at Spartan instigation.

Which Athenian general, exiled for failing to save Amphipolis in 424 BC, spent his exile writing the history of the Peloponnesian War?

Thucydides spent twenty years in exile, and says himself that it gave him the leisure to watch events from both sides, the Peloponnesian side especially.

In Aristophanes' comedy 'Lysistrata', how do the women of Greece try to end the war?

A sex strike, led by Lysistrata, who also has the older women seize the Acropolis and the war treasury; the comedy was first staged in 411 BC, two years after the Sicilian disaster.

In Euripides' tragedy, whom does Medea kill to punish Jason for abandoning her?

Her own children die by her hand after she has poisoned Jason's new bride and King Creon; she then escapes unpunished, carried off in a chariot sent by her grandfather, the sun god.

Euclid, the 'father of geometry', wrote which foundational treatise around 300 BC?

The Elements gathered Greek geometry into thirteen books of definitions, postulates and proofs, from Pythagoras' theorem to the five regular solids; it served as the standard textbook for more than two thousand years.

Which sculptor made both the colossal statue inside the Parthenon and the seated god at Olympia that ranked among the Seven Wonders?

Phidias made the seated god at Olympia so large that, as the geographer Strabo put it, he would have taken the roof off his own temple if he had ever stood up.

At which battle in 479 BC did a Spartan-led Greek army kill the Persian commander Mardonius and end the invasion?

Plataea: Mardonius had been left behind with the army when Xerxes went home; Herodotus has him fighting on a white horse among his picked men until he was cut down, at which the Persians broke and fled.

Which lifelong friend of Alexander the Great died suddenly at Ecbatana in 324 BC, plunging the king into extravagant mourning?

Hephaestion fell ill with a fever after days of feasting and died soon after; Alexander is said to have had the doctor put to death, cut off his own hair and ordered a colossal funeral at Babylon.

Which bird appeared on the reverse of Athens' famous silver tetradrachm?

An owl: the coins were nicknamed 'owls' and became the trusted trade money of the Mediterranean, and the same bird, copied from a fifth-century BC piece, now sits on Greece's one-euro coin.

Which of Alexander's generals founded the dynasty that ruled Egypt until 30 BC?

Ptolemy, son of Lagus, hijacked Alexander's funeral cortege to Egypt and took the royal title in 305 BC; his line ended with Cleopatra VII's death in 30 BC, when Egypt became a Roman province.

Which island power, first described by Plato, was said to have sunk beneath the sea in a single day?

Atlantis appears only in Plato's dialogues Timaeus and Critias, as a mighty naval empire set against an idealised ancient Athens. Every later mention of the island traces back to those two works.

The marble statues of ancient Greece look bare white today, but how were they originally finished?

Painted in many colours, Greek statues look pale now only because the original pigments have worn away. Traces on well-preserved pieces let archaeologists reconstruct how vivid they once were.

What were the Ottomans storing in the Parthenon when a Venetian mortar round blew it apart in 1687?

Gunpowder turned the Parthenon into a bomb when a Venetian shell fired from the Hill of Philopappos hit the magazine. The Ottomans had ignored a warning: an earlier powder explosion had already badly damaged the nearby Propylaea.

What did ancient Greeks call all non-Greek speakers, a word mimicking how foreign speech sounded to them?

Barbarians were so called, Greek writers said, because foreign languages sounded like meaningless 'bar bar' noises. The label covered everyone from Egyptians to Phoenicians, however sophisticated.

Which thinker behind a famous right-triangle theorem reportedly forbade his followers to eat beans?

Pythagoras ran his school at Croton more like a religious order, with fava beans and some meats off the menu. Ancient biographers even had him talk a bull out of eating beans.

Athenians voting to banish a politician by ostracism scratched his name on what, giving the practice its name?

Broken pottery was the scrap paper of Athens, and a shard was an ostrakon, hence 'ostracism'. A cache of 190 found dumped in a well hints at organised campaigns to sway the vote.

Which last queen of Hellenistic Egypt was the only ruler of her Greek dynasty known to have learned Egyptian?

Cleopatra grew up speaking Greek, like every ruler of her house since one of Alexander's generals seized Egypt. Her predecessors governed as Greek monarchs and refused to learn the native language.

The Pharos of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was what kind of building?

A lighthouse at least 100 metres tall, the Pharos guided ships into Alexandria from the third century BC. Its name became the everyday word for one in French (phare) and in Italian and Spanish (faro).

Which goddess is the headless winged marble figure found on the island of Samothrace in 1863?

Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, has lost her head and arms but still strides forward on a base shaped like a ship's bow. The marble was carved around 200–190 BC.

Which physician from the island of Kos gives his name to the oath of ethics still associated with new doctors?

Hippocrates argued that diseases have natural causes rather than being punishments sent by the gods. The oath that carries his name may actually have been written after his death.

The Venus de Milo, an armless marble goddess dug up on a Greek island in 1820, stands in which museum?

The Louvre has shown the statue since 1821, the year after it was found on the island of Milos. She is thought to be Aphrodite, carved in Parian marble and standing more than two metres tall.

Which god, said to have killed the serpent Python at Delphi, spoke through the oracle there?

Apollo took over the site after slaying Python, and Delphi's older name, Pytho, gave his priestess her title. She went on being consulted until the late fourth century AD.

Which god's marble temple, built in the 440s BC, still crowns Cape Sounion at the southern tip of Attica?

Poseidon mattered to a city that lived by sea trade and its navy, and his clifftop temple could be seen by ships nearing Attica. An older temple on the spot was probably destroyed in the invasion of 480 BC.

Which hero of the Iliad gives his name to the thick tendon at the back of the human ankle?

Achilles lent his name to the tendon in 1693, thanks to the Flemish anatomist Philip Verheyen. Later legend made one heel the warrior's only vulnerable spot.

Which mythical strongman, set twelve labours as penance, did the kings of Macedon claim as an ancestor?

Heracles was the forefather claimed by the Argead dynasty, through his great-great-grandson Temenus of Argos. Philip II and Alexander the Great both belonged to that royal house.

Which letter comes last in the 24-letter classical Greek alphabet?

Omega was renamed 'big O' to distinguish it from omicron, 'small O', once the two letters had come to sound alike. The capital's shape began as an omicron opened up at the side.

Which English word comes from the Greek for 'wanderers', after lights that drifted against the fixed stars?

Planet comes from planetai, 'wanderers', because those lights moved across the sky while the other stars kept their patterns. Comet, by contrast, is from the Greek for 'long-haired'.

Which legendary besieged city is generally identified with the mound of Hisarlik in north-west Turkey?

Troy lay beneath Hisarlik, which joined UNESCO's World Heritage list in 1998. Hittite records of a city called Wilusa in the same corner of Anatolia suggest the legend had a real setting.

In which city did Alexander the Great die in 323 BC, aged 32, in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II?

Babylon was where Alexander spent 12 to 14 days with a worsening fever before he died. Malaria and poisoning are among the many causes proposed since.

Which Greek word for a drinking party, where men reclined on couches after dinner, now means an academic conference?

Symposium literally means 'drinking together': after the meal, guests reclined on couches for music, recitals and conversation. The sense of a meeting on a set subject dates only from 1784.

Which Athenian playwright wrote Oedipus Rex and Antigone and is credited with adding a third actor to tragedy?

Sophocles wrote more than 120 plays, yet only seven survive complete. He was also a public figure, elected in 441 BC as one of the ten generals of Athens.

Which early Athenian lawgiver punished even minor thefts with death, making his name a byword for harsh rules?

Draco gave Athens its first written code around 621 BC, replacing oral law and the blood feud with rules enforced by a court. Stealing a cabbage was said to be enough to earn execution.

Which king of Epirus beat Rome at such cost in 279 BC that ruinous wins still carry his name?

Pyrrhus won at Asculum but lost most of his commanders, and reportedly said one more such victory would utterly undo him. Rome could replace its dead far more easily than he could.

What struck Athens in 430 BC as people crowded inside its walls, killing about a quarter of the population?

A plague killed an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 Athenians and came back twice in the next four years. The historian Thucydides survived it and left a detailed account of the symptoms.

Which French port began around 600 BC as Massalia, a colony founded by Greek settlers from Phocaea?

Marseille is the oldest city in France, and the Romans kept its Greek name as Massilia. It stayed independent until Julius Caesar's forces besieged it in 49 BC.

Which legendary king, famed for killing the Minotaur, was credited with uniting the villages of Attica under Athens?

Theseus was credited with the synoikismos, the 'dwelling together' that merged Attica's communities into one Athenian state. As the unifying king he was also said to have built a palace on the Acropolis.

Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier in 212 BC during the capture of which Sicilian city, his home?

Syracuse fell after a siege, and the soldier struck despite orders that Archimedes should not be harmed. In Livy's version he was drawing figures in the dust and went unrecognised.

Which Greek colony, settled from Megara on the Bosporus in the 7th century BC, later became Constantinople?

Byzantium took its name, legend said, from Byzas, leader of the Megarian colonists. It stayed mainly Greek-speaking until the Ottoman conquest of 1453.

Which Greek god of medicine carried a staff with a single snake coiled around it, still a symbol of healing?

Asclepius and his snake-entwined rod are often mistaken for the caduceus of Hermes. Myth said the centaur Chiron taught him the art of medicine.

Plato's school outside Athens, set up in the 380s BC in a grove tied to a legendary hero, was called what?

The Academy took its name from the site, Akademia, which tradition linked to a hero called Akademos. A revived version lasted until the emperor Justinian closed it in AD 529.

Greek schoolchildren practised writing by scratching letters with a stylus into wooden tablets coated in what?

Wax made a reusable notebook: a flat blade on the other end of the stylus smoothed the surface clean. The Greeks probably took up folding tablets of this kind in the mid-8th century BC.

A gold funeral mask found at Mycenae in 1876 was named after which legendary king, brother of Menelaus?

Agamemnon was the name its finder chose, convinced he had uncovered the king's own body. The mask is now dated to around the 16th century BC, 300 to 400 years before the war of legend.

Which philosopher from Ephesus, nicknamed 'the Obscure', taught that no one steps into the same river twice?

Heraclitus saw constant change as the nature of things, a view summed up as 'everything flows'. His gloomy reputation later earned him another label, 'the weeping philosopher'.

Milo of Croton, a six-time Olympic wrestling champion, was said to have trained by carrying what on his back each day?

A growing calf, carried daily, had become a four-year-old cow by the time the Games came round. The story ends with Milo carrying it the length of the stadium, then killing, roasting and eating it.

What are the six sculpted female figures that stand in for columns on a porch of the Erechtheion in Athens called?

Caryatids literally means 'maidens of Karyai', a town in the Peloponnese. One of the six was removed from the porch and ended up in the British Museum.

Which poet, who tended sheep near Mount Helicon in Boeotia, wrote the Theogony and Works and Days?

Hesiod says the Muses handed him a staff on Mount Helicon while he was pasturing sheep. Works and Days also airs a lawsuit with his brother Perses over their inheritance.

The omphalos, a carved stone kept at Delphi, marked what the Greeks believed that sanctuary to be?

The centre of the world was fixed, in myth, by two eagles released from its opposite ends that crossed paths above Delphi. Omphalos is simply the Greek word for 'navel'.

Which Athenian orator, said to have practised with pebbles in his mouth, denounced Philip II in the Philippics?

Demosthenes also recited verses while running to build up his breath, Plutarch says. His speeches against the Macedonian king gave English the word 'philippic' for any bitter denunciation.

Into which volcano did the philosopher Empedocles leap, according to legend, hoping to be thought a god?

Mount Etna gave the game away, the story goes, by throwing back one of his sandals. Empedocles is better known for teaching that all matter is a blend of four basic 'roots'.

Unmarried girls ran their own footrace at Olympia in a separate festival honouring which goddess?

Hera had a festival with a single event, a sprint one sixth shorter than the men's. A group of sixteen women organised it and wove the goddess a new robe.

Alexander the Great built a causeway through the sea in 332 BC to storm which Phoenician island city?

Tyre sat on an island about a kilometre offshore, with walls at the very edge of the sea. Taking it cost Alexander a siege of seven months.

Parchment takes its name from which Hellenistic city in modern Turkey, a thriving hub of its production?

Pergamon so dominated the trade that a legend grew up claiming parchment was invented there after a rival city monopolised papyrus. The tale is almost certainly false: parchment was in use long before.

Which Greek colony in southern Italy grew so notorious for luxury that its name still describes a pleasure-seeker?

Sybaris gave English the word 'sybarite' thanks to its famous feasts and excesses. The party ended around 510 BC, when the neighbouring city of Croton destroyed it.

The aeolipile, a spinning sphere described by Hero of Alexandria in the first century AD, was driven by what?

Steam escaping in jets spun the sphere, which makes it the first recorded steam engine. It stayed a curiosity, though, and was never a practical source of power.

Which tool did Greek athletes use to scrape sweat, dirt and body oil from their skin after exercise?

A strigil was a curved metal blade with a handle, used mainly by male athletes. Examples turn up in tombs, sometimes beside the bottle of oil that went with them.

Boustrophedon, an early Greek way of writing that reverses direction every line, is named after which animal's turning?

An ox ploughing turns at the end of each furrow and heads back the other way, exactly as the lines do. Even the letters were written in reverse, mirror-style, on the returning lines.

Which tyrant seized power in Athens three times in the sixth century BC and is remembered for helping poor farmers?

Pisistratus ruled in the late 560s, the early 550s and then from 546 BC until his death. To Greeks of his day a tyrant was simply a ruler who took power unconstitutionally, not necessarily a cruel one.

What did Athenians call a resident foreigner, a citizen of another polis who paid a special tax to live in Athens?

A metic could stay indefinitely but needed a citizen sponsor and had no political rights. The tax, the metoikion, came to twelve drachmas a year for a man and his household.

Which secret rites, held yearly near Athens for Demeter and Persephone, promised initiates a reward in the afterlife?

The Eleusinian Mysteries, based at the sanctuary of Eleusis, were the most famous secret rites of ancient Greece. For initiates, Persephone's return symbolised life renewing itself from generation to generation.

Which fourth-century BC sculptor carved the Aphrodite of Knidos, famed as the first life-size female nude in Greek art?

Praxiteles reportedly carved a clothed version too, which the people of Kos chose, leaving the nude to Knidos. The Knidians later refused to sell it even to have the city's enormous debt paid off.