About: Ben Potter

Ben Potter is a writer and university lecturer. He has lived and taught in several countries; notably Japan, China, Thailand, the UK, and Italy. He has an MA in Classics from The University of Edinburgh.

Recent Posts by Ben Potter

Agamemnon and The Cursed House of Atreus

Agamemnon, was the first of a trilogy of plays (the Oresteia), performed back to back during the Great Dionysia of 458BC; it focused on two generations of ‘The Cursed House of Atreus’. Regular readers will be well-aware of the bad blood flowing through, and often out of, the members of this unfortunate dynasty. Tantalus (grandfather

Written on August 18, 2019 at 9:03 am

Categories: Mythology

Tags: Aeschylus, Agamemnon, Ancient Greek play, Cassandra, Clytemnestra, orestes, Oretes, The Cursed House of Atreus, Tragedy

The Passion of Christ-ian Poetry

By Ben Potter, Contributing Writer, Classical Wisdom It is difficult to know definitively when the ‘Ancient World’ came to an end. In all likelihood, the demise of Rome and the beginning of the Dark Ages was far more a transition than any single event. But even if we’re on flimsy ground regarding the moment of

Written on July 26, 2019 at 9:26 am

Categories: Literature

Tags: Arians, Augustine, Donatists, Early Christian Poetry, Horace, King James Bible, Manichees, Ovid, Pelagians, Priscillians, Sedulius

Greece Versus Rome: Polybius Decides

By Ben Potter, Contributing Writer, Classical Wisdom It is the eternal question for all classics enthusiasts: brawn versus brains, power versus beauty, empire versus empiricism – Rome versus Greece. Which team do you support? Of course the equation is far, far more complex than that. Indeed, most of the choices listed above are somewhere on

Written on July 17, 2019 at 2:09 pm

Categories: History

Tags: Greece versus rome, History, Polybius, Roman Consitution, Roman Senate, Senate, The Rise of the Roman Empire

The Birth of the Biography

By Ben Potter, Contributing Writer, Classical Wisdom What springs to mind when we think about literature of the Ancient World? Maybe it’s Homer’s Achilles dragging the corpse of Hector around Troy or Sophocles’ Oedipus stabbing out his polluted eyes. Perhaps it’s Plato’s Socrates holding forth or Herodotus’ Leonidas and his 300 Spartans. It even might

Written on July 5, 2019 at 12:38 pm

Categories: History

Tags: Antony, Aristotle, Augustus, biography, Cleopatra, Funeral Oration, Hadrian, Herodotus, History, Homer, Josephus, Julius Caesar, Odyssey, pericles, Plutarch, Septimius Severus, Suetonius, Sulla and Sallust, Tacitus, Theopompus, Thucydides, Tiberius, Timaeus, Xenophon

Suicide: A Hero’s way out?

By Ben Potter, Contributing Writer, Classical Wisdom The debt we owe to the Ancients is almost impossible to measure. They gave the western world maths, theatre, wine, democracy, the Olympics, history, wine, libraries, roads, wine, philosophy, sanitation, universities, pizza and even wine (for a more comprehensive list see Monty Python’s Life of Brian). We have

Written on June 26, 2019 at 12:55 pm

Categories: Traditions

Tags: Ancient Suicide, mors voluntaria, suicidium