Lucretius

Natalie narrates Jason and the Argonauts' epic quest to find the Golden Fleece. Killer women, bronze giants, talking crows and a skeleton army all feature in the great poem by Apollonius. No wonder the equally epic 1963 film of the story credited him as a screen writer.'Rockstar ...  Show more

The Greek mathematician and philosopher has vanished from history because she was a woman. Natalie reveals the evidence of her brilliance in 4th century Alexandria and openly envies her philosopher's cloak. Islam Issa and Adam Rutherford join to tell her story.'Rockstar mythologi ...  Show more

Naomi Alderman's tale is of Lucretius, author of a 2000 year old poem that theorised about atoms and the natural world. Written in the first century BCE, during a chaotic and frightening time when the Roman Republic was collapsing, Lucretius encouraged people to feel free through ...  Show more

Liv reads Lucian's True History, translated by Francis Hickes. In a satirical novel of epic proportions, Lucian invents a world featuring rivers of wine and trips (and resulting wars!) to the moon and the sun.This is not a standard narrative story episode, it's a reading of an an ...  Show more

Liv reads Lucian's True History, translated by Francis Hickes. In a satirical novel of epic proportions, on the Island of the Blessed Lucian meets (and gossips about) all the most famous men of myth and history. Then, who's in Tartarus anyway?This is not a standard narrative stor ...  Show more

In episode seven, we turn to some of the earliest surviving examples of Roman literature: the raucous, bawdy and sometimes bewildering world of Roman comedy. Plautus and Terence, who would go on to set the tone for centuries of playwrights (and school curricula), came from the ma ...  Show more