Professor Armand D’Angour

speaker

82 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 7 Aug

Professor Armand D’Angour’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Talking History with Patrick Geoghegan · Neolithic Tombs In Galway · 7 Aug 2026 podcast

And uh Plutarch, the historian, tells us that Pericles famously honored Aspasia more than any Athenian man honored their wife.

He embraced her in public, for example.

Any Athenian of the time reading the name Diotima would go, Aha, honored by Zeus, that must mean Pericles' wife Aspasia.

So that was the first clue, uh which really had been overlooked by many readers.

Uh the second was that when Socrates says I learned about love from a very clever woman called Diotima.

And um she was clever in all sorts of ways, he says.

And among other things, she postponed the Great Plague of Athens by ten years, by arranging sacrifices.

Now that's a very strange, very specific claim.

And again, people haven't done as it were done the math to ask what happened ten years earlier before the Great Plague.

And actually, if one looks into that, it's it's immediately obvious that it's referring to the battle against the island of Samos, which was waged by Pericles in four forty BC, which was ten years before the Great Plague of Athens in four thirty BC.

And th that battle was notorious because at the end of it

The Athenians won and they uh crucified the commanders of the Samians, the Sam of the people of Samos, and threw them out without burial.

So what should have happened according to Greek law was that a plague would have visited the Athenians for such a sacrilegious act, but there wasn't one.

Ten years later there was the Great Plague, Pericles died from it.

And so the dating suggests that somebody, some woman, who is named as Diotoma in Plato, would have arranged sacrifices to try and ward off the inevitable plague and managed to do so.

Now, obviously, that's not how it actually happened, but what happened was when the plague struck, people must have thought, ah, that's the one which we all

thought was gonna happen ten years ago when Pericles acted so s sacrilegiously on Samos,

And that was the time when Aspasia, presumably, because who else would have done it, arranged expiatory sacrifices to try and make sure that the gods didn't punish the Athenians, and it seems to have worked because there wasn't a plague until now.

So that is the elucidation of the introduction by Socrates of this woman.

Showing 41–60 of 82 · page 3 of 5