Ryan Stitt
129 episodes listed below
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The History of Ancient Greece Podcast is a deep-dive into one of the most influential and fundamental civilization in world history. Hosted by philhellene Ryan Stitt, THOAG spans over two millennia. From the Bronze Age to the Archaic Period, from Classical Greece to the Hellenistic kingdoms, and finally to the Roman conquest, this podcast will tell the history of a fundamental civilization by bringing to life the fascinating stories of all the ancient sources and scholarly interpretations of the archaeological evidence. And we won't just detail their military and political history, but their society, how the Greeks lived day-to-day, as...
Based on 4 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Ryan Stitt makes Ancient Greek power struggles legible while keeping disagreements among the surviving sources firmly in view.
Ryan Stitt builds political and military history from close attention to both events and the evidence behind them. Episodes on Socrates, Xenophon and "The Ten Thousand," Spartan hegemony, and the Corinthian War connect individual lives to the unstable Greek world after the…
Xenophon's troop count gets audited, and suddenly your inner pedant has plans.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A careful campaign-history episode on Sparta, Persia, and the uncertain numbers behind the Korinthian War.
The Korinthian War follows Sparta from its Asian campaign under Agesilaus II into a wider conflict shaped as much by Persian money and naval power as by hoplite fighting.
Sparta's victory hardens into hegemony, and the cracks show early.
It follows Sparta from postwar winner to uneasy hegemon and keeps the irony plain: the force that claimed to free the Greeks is the one tightening its hold on them.
A sharp setup for Xenophon, Cyrus, and the dangerous politics behind the Ten Thousand.
Xenophon's road to the Ten Thousand starts less as a march than as a problem of character and politics. Ryan Stitt places him in postwar Athens, among the wealthy horse-owning class, with enough aristocratic sympathy to help explain his distrust of democracy and admiration for…
Socrates as a source problem and a political one, with the philosophy kept grounded.
The episode treats Socrates as someone known mostly through other people's accounts, and that is where it has the most grip. It stays with the split between Plato, Xenophon, and the thinner surviving material from other students, then uses that uncertainty to ask what virtue,…
Athens loses the war, and the peace settlement quickly hardens into terror.
Episode 108 tracks Athens from surrender into the political wreckage that follows defeat, and its strongest stretch comes when the peace terms are treated as the opening of a longer struggle.
A spare, hard-edged account of how Athens turned victory into collapse.
Sparta Triumphant follows Athens from the self-inflicted wound of the Arginusae executions to the pressure building at Aegospotami, where Lysander and Persian backing close in on a city already running thin.
A precise conversation about how classical prestige is used to make white supremacist politics seem culturally acceptable.
Ancient Greece and Rome are treated here as prestige objects that white supremacists can use to make their politics appear cultured, serious, and more broadly acceptable.
A careful conversation on Greek identity, Egyptian evidence, and the political uses of ancient categories.
Race, identity, and theory meet lived practice in this single-episode review of a conversation shaped by McCoskey's careful account of Greekness as something people could use, adjust, and contest.
Greek myth told with fatal momentum.
Ancient empire told in old public-domain voices.
This episode covers the Korinthian War (395-387 BC), focusing on Spartan king Agesilaus II's campaigns in Asia Minor, Persian political intrigues including the execution of satrap Tisiphanes, and the formation of the Quadruple Alliance by Thebes, Athens, Corinth, and Argos to counter Spartan expansion.
Sparta wins, but the victory is shaky.
Xenophon appears first as an upper-class Athenian.
Ryan Stitt opens with Socrates as the figure widely considered the father of Western philosophy, then narrows the frame to a simple problem: evidence.
Athens surrenders to Sparta in April 404 BC after the blockade of Samos and the siege of the city.
Athens starts this chapter with a major naval victory and then turns it into a problem almost at once.
Ryan Stitt interviews Curtis Dozier, an Assistant Professor of Greek and Roman Studies at Vassar College and director of Pharos, a site documenting hate-group appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity.
Ryan Stitt interviews Denise Mikowski, a classics professor at Miami, Ohio University, about her 2012 book Race, Antiquity, and Its Legacy.