Michael Scott's blog

Kylie Minogue’s new Aphrodite tour has hit the UK. The press have been fascinated by her emphasis on ancient Greece and Rome: from the tour’s very title, to sequences involving her emerging as Aphrodite/Venus from Botticelli’s shell, to perching atop a gold Pegasus, to being pulled around in a chariot by hunky centurions. Kylie, it seems, can't get enough of the ancient world.

Recently, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles has returned to the small Sicilian hilltop town of Aidione, a large cult statue of Aphrodite, which the museum bought in 1988 for $18 million, but which was subsequently proved by the Italian authorities to have been excavated, exported and bought illegally. The statue was welcomed home by a brass band and cheering crowd and will eventually go on display in Aidione archaeological museum.

There are faint details emerging of new finds on the Acropolis in Athens. Not just any finds, but new pieces of the Parthenon. First news reports indicate that five new metopes (the sculptured panels that intersperse with the triple-lined blocks (triglyphs) in the Parthenon’s architrave) have been discovered buried in the south wall of the Acropolis.

I am currently working on two new documentaries for the BBC about luxury. Luxury is a hot topic at the moment given the modern-world’s current economic crisis. It has, as one expert recently commented to me, become ‘a four letter word’. Yet when you think about it, our response to luxury is actually far more complex: we both love it and hate it, we all have our own sense of luxury (one person’s luxury is another person’s hell) and even the basic criteria for luxury are in constant flux.

Sometime between 360 and 346 BC, a manual on how to survive a siege was written in ancient Greece. The text as we have it today is commonly attributed to a man named Aeneas, or rather Aeneas the ‘Tactician’ as he has become known.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported on a move to bring the working model of the ancient Greek trireme, Olympias, currently in dry dock in Athens, to New York. The project does not seek simply to install the ancient warship in a new dry dock, but to make it ready for the sea once again and to row it into New York Harbour as part of a festival of ships to be held in New York on 4 June 2012.

Late in 2010, it was announced that Andrew Carol, an Apple software engineer, had used 1,500 different lego pieces to construct a model of the ancient Antikythera mechanism. Why so much time and (Lego) effort? Because the original mechanism, rescued in 1901 from a shipwreck found off the coast of Antikythera in the Aegean, has captivated attention ever since its discovery.

In late November 2010, the eagerly awaited Pirelli calendar for 2011 was launched. Since the 1960’s, the Pirelli calendar has been one of the most celebrated icons of corporate communication, bringing together world-class photography, fashion, designers and models in a statement of female, most often naked, beauty. The calendar is not sold, but only given away as a highly-prized corporate gift. For 2011, Karl Lagerfeld was invited to create the calendar; the results have just been revealed, and Lagerfeld’s theme is intriguing: ancient Greek myths.

I was recently working in Rio di Janeiro at the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) university where I was invited to give a course of lectures about ancient Greek democracy to Brazilian students of international politics, law, economics and history. It was, I must admit, a surprising request to be invited to Brazil to teach about a place 10,000 km and 2,500 years away.

Were the ancient Greeks funny? It’s a question not often asked. When thought about, most people will turn to the ‘comedies’ put on at different religio-theatrical festivals across ancient Greece, most notably in Athens. The majority surviving for us today are by Aristophanes, writing across the divide of the 5th and 4th centuries BC, but some also survive by Menander writing later in the 4th century BC.