Letter from the Editor, Daisy Dunn

We are thoroughly spoiled this season for exhibitions dedicated to Greek and classical themes. The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge has mounted an extraordinary display of artefacts from ancient Cyprus, Crete and Sardinia in Islanders: The Making of the Mediterranean, which is open until 4 June and to be revisited in our next issue.

The Ashmolean in Oxford, meanwhile, presents Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth and Reality, a journey into the pre-Greek world of Minoan Crete, which provides the cover story of this issue. As the curator of Labyrinth Dr Andrew Shapland explains in his vibrant feature (pp. 6-9), Sir Arthur Evans often turned to the myths of Crete as a means of understanding his discoveries on the island, spawning some eye-popping theories about the Minoan past. (Continue reading)

Contents

ANCIENT

ANDREW SHAPLAND, curator of a major new exhibition of Minoan culture at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, on the timeless quest for the labyrinth
JOHN CRAWSHAW explores the archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos’s very appealing
hypothesis that Homer’s Ithaca was actually located at Paliki, the western peninsula of Kefalonia
DIANA BENTLEY visits the ancient theatre at Nicopolis and speaks to the archaeologist leading the project to revive it
HENRY COSMO BISHOPWRIGHT introduces the luxuries of Persia and Greece at the British Museum
ALEXANDER NORRIS finds surprising common ground in works by Sophocles and Thucydides on the subject of the Greek city-state
JOHN DAVIE explores the cultural and scientific vicissitudes of ancient Alexandria
JANE DRAYCOTT on how Cleopatra’s daughter eluded the fate of her mother

MODERN

PAUL WATKINS tells the tragic story of the sponge divers of Kalymnos
DAVID WILLS revisits the Dodacenese island of Symi in the light of a travel book from 1970

SOCIETY

HELLENIC SOCIETY NEWS HIGHLIGHTS
FIONA HAARER, Secretary of the Hellenic Society, peers into the archives to learn about the establishment and development of the society’s Library in its first twenty years from 1879 to 1899

REVIEWS

A round-up of recent and forthcoming books
SEAN MANNING on King of the World by Matt Waters
PAUL CARTLEDGE on three Alexander the Great publications by Richard Stoneman and others
THOMAS W. HODGKINSON on What the Greeks Did for Us by Tony Spawforth
LEONIE BREEDS on Adventures in Time: Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile by Dominic
Sandbrook
ALICE DUNN on Greek Lessons by Han Kang
J. W. BONNER on This Afterlife by A. E. Stallings