Hello, I'm Thomas Jones, an editor at the London Review of Books.

Hello, I'm Emily Wilson. I'm a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

And we're here to tell you about the new series of Among the Ancients, a close readings podcast from the London Review of Books,

in which over the course of 12 months, starting in January, we'll be discussing 12 writers,

although actually it's a couple more than 12,

since we won't always limit ourselves to one a month, from the ancient Greek and Roman world.

A completely different set from the 12 we talked about in series 1, though whittling them down was

just as agonising a process as last time, more agonising, possibly.

We're covering an even longer time span from Hesiod in the

7th century BC, a contemporary of Homer to the extent you can say things like that, to Marcus

Orrelius in the second century AD. There's verse and prose, fiction and history, philosophy and comic

drama, epic and lyric. And our theme, quite a broad theme, is truth and lies.

So what was your thinking behind that idea, Emily? Well, truth and lies seems like it's a universal

theme, which of course is particularly pressing in the contemporary world, where we're very much

conscious of the ways that lies can spread in the internet world.

But I was also thinking about how at the start of Hesiod's Theogony, the poet encounters the muses

on Mount Helicon and the muses tell him we know how to say false things that are very like the

truth. And we also know when we choose how to tell the truth. And so I thought that might be a

starting point for talking about all the different ways that the muses or the muses who inspire

different genres of writing in antiquity inspire both falsehoods that are like the truth and also

when they choose truth and the difficulty of telling the difference between what is pseudas or false and what might be true.

So some of a couple of the rices that we'll be talking about.

...