Kidnapping Helen of Troy (from Pompeii) In ancient Greece, xenia meant "the way you treat strangers or foreigners". It comes from a very old Proto-Indo-European (Yamnaya) word that means "stranger" [...]
Greek slaves: An enslaved woman playing a kithara. You can tell she is a slave because she has short hair. What did Greek slaves work at? In ancient Greece, most [...]
Greek schools: The students stand before the teachers. Did ancient Greek kids go to school? Most Greek children never went to school at all. Girls, to begin with, always stayed [...]
Ancient Greek people: boys playingknucklebones (ca. 440-430 BC, now in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles) Like other Indo-European people, the Greeks had a general tendency to divide the world into [...]
Ancient Greek women kneading bread while a flute player keeps the production speed up. (Thebes, 500s BC, now in the Louvre) A hard place to be a woman Ancient Greece [...]
Greek friendship: People call this "After the Party": the boy's puking on a slave. Greeks thought that was funny. Greek friendship Among the Greeks, teenaged boys and young men often [...]
An ancient Greek family: two women playing with little boys Ancient Greek family Most Greeks, like most other people throughout history, lived in families with a mother and a father [...]
A Greek image of a Persian "barbarian" (now in Berlin) To get an idea of why the Greeks thought foreigners were all barbarians speaking nonsense, try listening to some videos [...]
A Greek image of a Persian "barbarian" woman Where does the word 'barbarian' come from? People in ancient Greece called everyone who didn't speak Greek a barbarian (barbaros). They said [...]
A later portrait of Xenophon (now in the Prado museum in Madrid) Xenophon, like Thucydides, was an Athenian from a rich family who lived during the Peloponnesian War, in the [...]
