Mary Beard & John Henderson
Classics
A Very Short Introduction
Timelines
c.800–500 bce Early Greece
c.800–700 Homer’s Epics, Iliad and Odyssey
First temple of Zeus built at Olympia
c.776 First Olympic Games held
c.600–550 Sappho and Alcaeus’ lyrical poems
c.500–300 bce Classical Greece
c.500–31bce Republican Rome
c.500–450 Persian Wars between Greeks and Persians
490 Greeks defeat Persians at Battle of Marathon
c.450–400 Period of radical Athenian Democracy
Tragic plays written by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides
Herodotus’ Histories
Parthenon built on Acropolis in Athens
Democritus’ Philosophy
c.430–400 Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta
Thucydides’ Histories
Aristophanes’ Comedies
Temple of Apollo Epikourios built at Bassae
399 Death of Socrates
c.380–350 Plato’s philosophical Dialogues at Academy
c.335–322 Aristotle’s philosophical works
336–323 Alexander the Great of Macedon’s empire stretches from Greece to India
c.320–270 Menander’s Comedies
Epicurus’ Philosophy
c.200–150 Roman conquest of Greek world
Plautus’ Comedies
Polybius’ History of Rome
c.60–55 Catullus’ Love Poetry
Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things
44 The dictator Julius Caesar assassinated
43 Legalized murder of Cicero
c.40–35 Gallus’ Elegies
Virgil’s Eclogues
Varro’s On Farming
31 bce–14 ce Reign of Augustus
31 bce–c.500 ce Imperial Rome
31 Octavian’s defeat of Antony and Cleopatra
c.31–17 ce Livy’s History of Rome
27–23 Augustus’ ‘restoration’ of the Republic (= his Principate)
23 Horace’s Odes
c.20 Vitruvius’ treatise On Architecture
19 Death of Virgil, his unfinished Aeneid published
c.12 Horace’s Epistles II
c.1–17 ce Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti
100–20 Tacitus’ Historical Works
Juvenal’s Satires
122–8 Hadrian’s Wall built
c.160 Pausanias’ Guidebook to Greece
c.500–600 Collapse of Roman Empire in Western Europe
c.1300–1600 Renaissance
c.1300–15 Dante Alighieri’s Italian epic, Divine Comedy
1502 Jacopo Sannazaro’s romantic poem, Arcadia
1592 Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence, Arcadia
1599 Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar first performed
Seventeenth Century
1600–69 Life of Pope Clement IX (Papacy 1667–9)
1638–40 Nicolas Poussin’s Arcadian Shepherds painted
Eighteenth Century
1748 Pompeii rediscovered
1753 British Museum founded
1765 Bassae rediscovered by Joachim Bocher
1768 Joshua Reynolds sets up Royal Academy
1769 Reynolds’s Mrs Bouverie and Mrs Crewe painted
1770 Dr Johnson becomes Professor at Royal Academy
1768–88 Goethe’s Italian Travels; writes his Italian Journey
1783 US Independence recognized
1789 French Revolution
1795 Goethe’s Roman Elegies
c.1750–1820 George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Founding Fathers establish USA
Nineteenth Century
c.1800–29 Napoleonic Wars and Greek War of Independence from Turkey
Keats’s poetry
Byron’s poetry
1806 Edward Dodwell’s visit to Bassae
1811 Sculptures from temple of Aphaia on Aegina excavated and taken to Munich
‘Elgin’ marbles taken from Parthenon to British Museum
1811–15 C.R. Cockerell and friends excavate temple at Bassae
Frieze taken to British Museum (welcomed by Benjamin Haydon)
1829 Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘To Helen’
1847 B.H. Kennedy’s The Child’s Latin Primer first published
1848 Thomas de Quincey’s Modern Greece
Edward Lear visits Bassae
1859 Edward Lear’s The Temple of Apollo at Bassae installed in Fitzwilliam Museum
1840–80 Karl Marx’s political works written and published
c.1870–80 Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations; discovers sites of Troy and Mycenae
1872–9 Friedrich Nietzsche elaborates philosophy and theory of Tragedy
1880 (General) Lew(is) Wallace’s novel, Ben-Hur.
1890 J.G. Frazer visits Bassae
1898 J.G. Frazer’s Pausanias
1896–1909 Lewis Farnell’s Cults of the Greek States
c.1897–1939 Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic works
Twentieth Century
1910–15 J.G. Frazer’s Golden Bough published (twelve volume edition)
1922–43 Mussolini’s Fascist regime in Italy
1929 J.G. Frazer’s Fasti
1933 Erwin Panofsky to USA (refugee from Nazis)
H.D. Kitto’s In the Mountains of Greece
1934 Claudette Colbert’s Cleopatra
Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and Claudius the God
1936 Erwin Panofsky’s essay on Et in Arcadia Ego
1938 Anthony Blunt’s essay on Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego
c.1925–60 Louis MacNeice’s poetry
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
1945 Hermann Broch’s Death of Virgil
Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited
1951 E.R. Dodds’s Greeks and the Irrational
1954 Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle’s How to be Topp
1956 Mary Renault’s The Last of the Wine
1958 Willans and Searle’s Down with Skool!
Mary Renault’s The King Must Die
1959 Ben-Hur film starring Charlton Heston
1962 Elizabeth Taylor stars in Cleopatra
Mary Renault’s The Bull from the Sea
1964 R.Goscinny and A. Uderzo’s Asterix the Gladiator
1972 Simon Raven’s Come Like Shadows
1980 Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose
1981 Charles Segal’s Tragedy and Civilisation
1987 Temple of Apollo at Bassae enclosed in a tent
1991 British Museum Conference tries out Frederick
A. Cooper and Brian C. Madigan’s reordering of the Bassae frieze
1994 Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s The Pan Principle
1995 Classics: A Very Short Introduction published