Athenian Drama in Sicily (Ferdia Lennon, GLORIOUS EXPLOITS)

Lesche: Ancient Greece, New Ideas

Ferdia Lennon joins me in the Lesche to discuss his award-winning and bestselling novel, Glorious Exploits (UK Penguin Fig Tree/US Macmillan 2024), which is set in Syracuse in the aftermath of the Athenian invasion of Sicily during the Peloponnesian War.

About our guest

Ferdia Lennon was born and raised in Dublin. He holds a BA in History and Classics from University College Dublin and an MA in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia. Glorious Exploits is his first novel. It was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as a Book at Bedtime, was a Sunday Times bestseller and the winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2024. After spending many years in Paris, he now lives in Norwich with his wife and son.

Ancient texts

• Plutarch, Life of Nicias
• Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
• Euripides, various tragedies
• Aristophanes, various comedies

Also mentioned

• Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit)
• Karl Ove Knausgaard, Inadvertent
• Mary Renault’s historical novels

Further reading

• Kathryn G. Bosher, Greek Theater in Ancient Sicily. Cambridge 2021.
• Kathryn G. Bosher, ed., Theater outside Athens: Drama in Greek Sicily and South Italy. Cambridge 2012.
• Emily Greenwood, "Thucydides on the Sicilian Expedition," in S. Forsdyke, E. Foster, and R. Balot, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Thucydides. Oxford 2017.

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Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!
Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius
This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

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