Every student of history surely feels impressed by one achievement or another of the ancient Greeks, whether in the field of engineering, art, or the convergence of the two. Even a bored college undergrad in a thousand-seat lecture hall has to admire ancient Greek vases when they pop up in the lecturer’s Powerpoint slides.

That much-studied culture’s penchant for stylizing images of their society on their pottery has allowed us to see their world as, in some sense, a living, breathing one — or to see it through the eyes of the artisans who lived to see it themselves. But for all their mastery of the art of the vase, they never actually got their images to live nor breathe. For that, we must turn to 21st-century technology, specifically as applied by Panoply, a project animator of Steve K. Simons and ancient Greece scholar Sonya Nevin, which was designed to bring these vases to life.

HOPLITES! Greeks at War - Full animation video