Plague of Athens

Fifty thousand years ago, Neanderthal artists in Ice Age Europe painted symbols and handprints deep inside caves, leaving behind some of the oldest known art on the continent. These discoveries are transforming how we understand our closest human relatives.Today, Tristan Hughes i ...  Show more

In 73 BC, a gladiator escaped slavery and launched a rebellion that shook the Roman Republic to its core. His name was Spartacus, and his uprising became one of the greatest threats Rome had ever faced from within.Tristan Hughes is joined by Ben Kane to explore the dramatic story ...  Show more

In 430 BC, in the midst of the Peloponnesian War, the powerful city-state of Athens was struck down by a disastrous plague. Athenians fell sick with a dizzying array of symptoms, from fevers and vomiting to painful pustules that broke out all over people's bodies. In total it ...

From a plague in Athens during the Peloponnesian War in 430 BCE, to another in 540 that wiped out half the population of the Roman empire, down through the Black Death in the Middle Ages and on through the 1918 flu epidemic (which killed between 50 and 100 million people) and ...

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Pericles (495-429BC), the statesman who dominated the politics of Athens for thirty years, the so-called Age of Pericles, when the city’s cultural life flowered, its democracy strengthened as its empire grew, and the Acropolis was adorned with the ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the plague that broke out in Constantinople 541AD, in the reign of Emperor Justinian. According to the historian Procopius, writing in Byzantium at the time, this was a plague by which the whole human race came near to being destroyed, embracing th ...  Show more