In his tome Histories, written around 440 BC, the Greek chronicler Herodotus relates the juicy tale of Helen of Troy escaping with her lover Paris (also known as Alexandrus) to a city on the Egyptian coast. Read more
The sea has great destructive power, but it can also preserve. A new exhibition of 2,000-year-old artefacts retrieved in 1900 from a shipwreck near the Greek island of Antikythera includes some breathtakingly pristine treasures — such as a bowl made of delicate coils of turquoise, yellow and purple glass, and a miniature golden figure of Eros hanging from an earring set with garnets, an emerald and 20 tiny pearls. Read more
Consider the honeybee. Not as an automaton in a honey factory, but as a remarkable social insect and pollinator indissolubly tied to food security — and to the artistic imagination. So asks the poet John Burnside in his incisive essay on the bee in culture in this week’s Books and Arts. Read more
