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What does it mean to be great? There have been many that have come through the sands of time proclaiming their own greatness. We see it in the news every day - leaders, heroes, tyrants, and even reality star presidential candidates claim that they are great. But what about Alexander the Great?

Spartacus is the world’s most famous slave, and one of the most notorious figures of Ancient Rome. A slave enamored of freedom and willing to fight and die for it, he became especially popular in the years following the Enlightenment, after which he was widely viewed as a poignant champion of liberty in the 18th and 19th centuries. As a result, he became a symbol during struggles like the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the American Civil War, and the struggle for emancipation.

Imagine how different your life would be if you knew how to develop the resilience to deal with tough times, whilst effortlessly getting on the path to peace of mind. Stoicism is a timeless ancient philosophy which can teach you just that. Unlike many religious and new age thinking methods, Stoic teachings provide a clear road map on exactly “How” to think, not simply “What” to think. Thus giving its practitioners a way to better deal with the misfortunes and hardships they face.

There are few mythological characters that require less of an introduction than Hercules. His labors are known and have been reimagined by cultures far beyond their Greek beginnings, and he continues to influence modern culture in more ways than any other ancient Greek hero.

The reasons for so little being known about Thebes and its contributions to ancient Greek civilization are complex, but the fact that it was totally destroyed by Alexander the Great is certainly one. Unlike Athens and Sparta, there are no magnificent structures still extant - indeed, the scale of the destruction meted out to Thebes was so great, that very few artifacts of any kind have been discovered that enable a full picture of life in the city. With the very notable exception of Pindar, Thebes did not produce significant numbers of philosophers or playwrights.

It seems to be a normal, modern-day practice to reduce all the gods of the ancient pantheons to their most basic abstract concepts: Ares represents war; Demeter, agriculture; Aphrodite, love; and so on. In the process, these characters lose any personality with which they might have been imbued over millennia of stories

Este mito nos cuenta la historia del hermoso Narciso atrapado por su propio reflejo y de la dulce Eco condenada para toda la eternidad a repetir las últimas palabras que escuche. Démeter y PerséfoneLa inocente Pérsofene es raptada por Hades, el dios del Inframundo, pero su madre Démeter, diosa de la tierra, intervendrá para traerla consigo y salvar a los hombres.

El héroe Teseo, para salvar a los atenienses de una grave condena, debe partir de inmediato hacia Micenas donde deberá enfrentar dos grandes pruebas: vencer al Minotauro y escapar del laberinto.

The story of Atlantis has captured the minds and hearts of historians, scientists, artists, and writers for millennia, and yet it never ceases to amaze people when told that the only literary evidence that exists comes from a single fourth century BCE author. The Athenian philosopher Plato, famous for his dialogues in which the Socratic Method was invented, was the first writer to mention the mysterious continent of Atlantis.

The story of Jason and his crew of Argonauts is one of the best-known and most beloved myths of all time. Blockbuster movies have been made about it, and legendary explorer and historian Tim Severin even constructed a replica of the Argo in 1984 and succeeded in sailing it to Colchis (modern-day Georgia). In the ancient world too, this myth was told and retold time and again.

Perhaps the most famous epic poems ever written, the Iliad and the Odyssey have been read for nearly 3,000 years, making them the oldest written works in the Western world. The poems made characters like Paris, Helen, Odysseus, Achilles, Hector, and Ajax instantly recognizable, and they also influenced other ancient poets like Virgil, whose Aeneid is clearly modeled after them.

Perhaps the most famous epic poems ever written, the Iliad and the Odyssey have been read for nearly 3000 years, making it also one of the oldest written works in the Western world. The poems made characters like Paris, Helen, Odysseus, Achilles, Hector, and Ajax instantly recognizable, and they also influenced other ancient poets like Virgil, whose Aeneid is clearly modeled after them.

Dominated to this day by the sprawling white marble complex of the Acropolis, Athens is a city which is immensely and rightly proud of its past. For a period of roughly three centuries, the polis of Athens stood, if not in a position of unchallenged supremacy among the cities of Hellas, then at the very least among its three most important polities.

Among all the early Iron Age people from the Near East, the Phrygians are perhaps one of the most misunderstood. They built a powerful and wealthy kingdom, but were overshadowed by their more powerful and wealthier neighbors, the Lydians. Although the Phrygians were literate, most of their surviving texts have been little use to modern historians who desire to reconstruct their chronology, so they are left to use often biased Classical and Assyrian sources.

Poseidon is one of the most easily recognizable characters in all of ancient Greek mythology. His signature trident is iconic; one sight of it invariably floods the modern mind with images of aquatic chariots and daunting typhoons. But there is so much more to the character of Poseidon than maritime denizens and disasters, which shouldn't really come as a surprise.

Ares, the god of war and personification of all that is reactionary and violent, is remembered today as the hated, unshakeable, and infallible embodiment of the violence prevalent in war and society at large, but surviving evidence suggests that this may not have always been the case. To understand that, it's necessary to remember that Greek mythology has been filtered and tempered by centuries of editors and zealots and fickle word of mouth.

What was the role - if any - of the land itself in shaping Greek (and particularly Athenian) attitudes toward themselves and their way of life? Did the land play any significant part at all in forming Greeks and Athenians? To answer these questions, it is essential to examine the impact of climate and landscape in the region known as Attica on the creation of Greek culture.

There are few battles in history in which the vanquished are better remembered and celebrated than the victors, and even fewer where a defeat is considered a victory. But that has become the enduring legacy of the Battle of Thermopylae, a battle as unique as it is famous. The story of the battle and the willing sacrifice of the Greek defenders to buy the rest of the retreating Greeks time is well known across the world and still resonates with audiences to this day.

Of all the peoples of the ancient Near East, the Phoenicians are among the most recognizable but also perhaps the least understood. The Phoenicians never built an empire like the Egyptians and Assyrians; in fact, the Phoenicians never created a unified Phoenician state but instead existed as independent city-state kingdoms scattered throughout the Mediterranean region.

Tyranny in ancient Greece was not a phenomenon limited to any particular period. Tyrants could be found in power throughout Greece, ruling poleis from the 7th century BC right through to the 2nd century BC, when Roman domination effectively put an end to this form of government throughout the Hellenistic world. That said, the heyday of tyranny was undoubtedly the 7th and 6th centuries BC, and it is in this period, known as the Age of Tyrants, that large numbers of tyrannies arose, particularly in the Peloponnese.