Antiquity

Athenian philosopher who turned the conversations of Socrates into written dialogues and founded the Academy.

PhilosophyPoliticsMetaphysics

Athenian who wrote nothing and questioned everyone, and was executed for it.

PhilosophyEthics

Plato's student, tutor to Alexander, and the first systematic investigator of nearly every subject he touched.

PhilosophyLogicScience

Founded a garden school teaching that pleasure, properly understood, is freedom from fear and pain.

PhilosophyEthicsPhysics

A merchant from Cyprus who, after a shipwreck, began teaching in the painted colonnade and founded Stoicism.

PhilosophyEthics

The name attached to the Iliad and the Odyssey, and possibly to no single person.

PoetryLiterature

Called the father of history for enquiring into the Persian Wars and everything around them.

HistoryEthnography

Athenian general who wrote the history of the war that ruined his city.

HistoryPolitics

Founder of a secretive community that treated number as the structure of reality.

MathematicsPhilosophyMusic

Worked in Alexandria and organised geometry into the Elements.

MathematicsGeometry

Alexandrian mathematician and Neoplatonist teacher, murdered by a mob in a city tearing itself apart.

MathematicsAstronomyPhilosophy

Roman lawyer and statesman who carried Greek philosophy into Latin prose.

RhetoricPhilosophyPolitics

Stoic writer, tutor and minister to Nero, ordered by him to die.

PhilosophyLettersDrama

Emperor who kept a private notebook of Stoic self-correction on campaign.

PhilosophyPolitics

Born enslaved, later a teacher whose lessons were written down by a student.

PhilosophyEthics