Tristan Hughes

Ever wondered what it feels like to be a gladiator, facing a roaring crowd and potential death in the Colosseum?

Find out on the Ancients podcast from History Hit.

Twice a week, join me, Tristan Hughes, as I hear exciting new research about people living thousands of years ago, from the Babylonians to the Celts to the Romans, and visit the ancient sites which reveal who and just how amazing our distant ancestors were.

That's the Ancients from History Hit.

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I met a traveller from an antique land who said, "'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone, sand in the desert.

Near them, on the sand, half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tell that its sculptor well those passions read which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things.

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed, and on the pedestal these words appear.'

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

No thing beside remains round the decay of that colossal wreck.

Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.

That was the poem Ozymandias, published by the English poet Percy Shelley in 1818.

It was inspired by the impending arrival in London of a colossal ancient Egyptian statue, the head of a pharaoh who had lived 3,000 years earlier and whose fascinating story was only then just being rediscovered.

The Greeks called this figure Ozymandias, but we know him today by his actual name, Rameses.