Alexander the Great stands as one of the most compelling figures in ancient history—a man whose story blends myth, legend, and reality into an unforgettable narrative. To the Greeks and Romans, he was a hero whose exploits reached god-like status.
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Ancient Invisible Cities episode 2 – Athens: Michael Scott uses the latest 3D-scanning technology to reveal the historical secrets of ancient Athens and tell the story of how this remarkable city created the world’s first democracy two and a half thousand years ago. He begins his journey on the Acropolis, where, in the late 6th century BC, the people of Athens overthrew a tyrant and set up the world’s first democracy. There, he investigates a mysterious, asymmetrical temple called the Erechtheion that sits in the shadow of the world famous Parthenon. Decoding the stories from ancient Greek mythology that were
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Pavlopetri – The City Beneath the Waves: Just off the southern coast of mainland Greece lies the oldest submerged city in the world. It thrived for 2,000 years during the time that saw the birth of western civilisation. An international team of experts uses cutting-edge technology to prise age-old secrets from the complex of streets and stone buildings that lie less than five metres below the surface of the ocean. State-of-the-art CGI helps to raise the city from the seabed, revealing for the first time in 3,500 years how Pavlopetri would once have looked and operated. Underwater
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Greek Island Odyssey with Bettany Hughes episode 6: Bettany travels through the Corinth Canal – a feat of engineering that required the removal of 12 million cubic metres of earth – before heading for her penultimate stop of Corfu, where Count Flamburiari reveals the island’s close connections to Britain. From there, Bettany sails to Ithaca, Odysseus’s home island, finally completing her 1,700-mile voyage across the Greek Islands. However, there’s a startling surprise in store when she is awoken in the night by an earthquake measuring 4.9 on the Richter scale. Greek Island Odyssey with Bettany Hughes episode
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Greek Island Odyssey with Bettany Hughes episode 5: Bettany arrives in the Peloponnese, a peninsula regarded as home to some of ancient Greece’s most legendary kings and vicious warriors. To understand the violent world in which the myths and legends are set, Bettany visits the bones of a 19-year-old-warrior who died more than 3,500 years ago. Healed sword marks and a large hole in his skull are a testament to his environment. In Sparta, the home town of Helen of Troy, Bettany discovers what made the region’s warriors so feared, before heading to Mycenae, likely home to the
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Greek Island Odyssey with Bettany Hughes episode 4: Arriving in Crete just as a storm hits, the historian is lucky to reach `the big island” before the seas become impassable and the annual Christian Epiphany festivities are hampered. She travels to the ruins of the ancient city of Knossos, synonymous with English archaeologist Arthur Evans who unearthed much of its palace over 100 years ago, beneath which the legendary King Minos is said to have kept a crazed half-man, half-bull – the Minotaur. Bettany meets Professor Stampolidis, whose ground-breaking archaeological discoveries prove links between ancient legend and historical
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Greek Island Odyssey with Bettany Hughes episode 3: In Santorini, she visits a Minoan city preserved in time by one of the most violent volcanic eruptions in history. Bettany’s next port of call is Naxos, where in an abandoned marble quarry, she finds a genuinely monumental statue of the god that has lain there for thousands of years, before heading to a taverna to take part in some local festivities. The presenter later arrives in Sifnos, where long-distance communications were mastered millennia before telegrams or telephones. The historian and classicist goes Greek island-hopping to explore their history from
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Greek Island Odyssey with Bettany Hughes episode 2: Bettany visits the sacred isle of Delos, where it has been forbidden for anyone to permanently reside since ancient times. Wandering the ruins, Bettany discovers a dark history to this incredible site as she explores how the Romans turned Delos into a marketplace for their slave trade. She then moves on to Ikaria, an island famous for its long-lived population, and gets a lesson in wine-making. As she moves on to Mykonos, Bettany’s boat is caught in a storm reaching a 10 on the Beaufort scale. The historian and classicist
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Greek Island Odyssey with Bettany Hughes episode 1: The historian and classicist explore Greece from the time of the Ancients up to the present day. She begins by exploring a graveyard of ancient shipwrecks in the waters of the Eastern Mediterranean, then enjoys the tradition of a warm welcome on the island of Chios. Next, Bettany heads to the island of Lesbos, visiting the ancient Greek Theatre of Mytilene and taking a dip in the island’s thermal waters. Finally, Bettany stops on Samos, an island known for both its ancient naval power and its famous sixth-century BC resident,
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The Greeks episode 3 – Chasing Greatness: They were an extraordinary people born of white rock and blue sea. They invented democracy, distilled logic and reason, wrote plays to plumb the deepest recesses of the soul, and captured the perfection of the human form in athletics and art. Quite simply, the Greeks created our world. Today, of course, Greece conjures very different images: civic unrest, financial meltdowns, long ATM lines. But, as its ancient history attests, strife and discord are often incubators for greatness. Delve into groundbreaking new explorations of the ancient Greeks’ journey across time in this
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The Greeks episode 2 – The Good Strife: Delve into groundbreaking new explorations of the ancient Greeks’ journey across time in this three-part series. Explore history as the ancient Greeks emerge from the first dark ages to compose timeless epics, compete in the original Olympic Games, conjure early theories of nature, and construct the world’s first democracy. The Greeks episode 2 – The Good Strife Ancient Greece was a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of antiquity (c. AD 600). Immediately
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The Greeks episode 1 – Cavemen to Kings: Uncover the origin story of Western civilization, as the early Greeks rise from nothing and change everything – laying the groundwork for a revolution in human thought. Delve into groundbreaking new explorations of the ancient Greeks’ journey across time in this three-part series. The Greeks episode 1 – Cavemen to Kings Ancient Greece was a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of antiquity (c. AD 600). Immediately following this period was the beginning
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