Tim Rood | |
---|---|
Nationality | British |
Occupation | Classical scholar |
Awards | Hellenic Foundation Prize |
Academic background | |
Education | St Paul's School, London Oriel College, Oxford (B.A., D.Phil.) |
Alma mater | University of Oxford |
Academic work | |
Institutions |
Tim Rood is a British classical scholar,specialising in Greek historiography and reception studies. He is Professor of Greek Literature at the University of Oxford and a fellow and tutor at St Hugh's College,Oxford. His research is principally concerned with the literary techniques of Herodotus,Thucydides,and Xenophon. [1]
Rood attended St Paul's School and then Oriel College,Oxford,where he gained a BA and DPhil. He shared the Hellenic Foundation Prize for his DPhil thesis in 1995 and published a revised version three years later as Thucydides:Narrative and Explanation (Oxford University Press,1998). During that time,he held a Junior Research Fellowship at The Queen's College,Oxford. He is the author of two other books,and has published several articles on Greek historiography. [2]
During the 2007–2008 academic year,Rood was a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study,Harvard University, [3] where his work centred primarily on Xenophon's self-presentation,description of the army as a political unit,and imaginative geography. During this time he delivered a lecture on "A Delightful Retreat:Xenophon's Scillus" to the Yale Department of Classics. [4]
Rood has a special interest in the reception of ancient culture in the modern world. Not only does his book American Anabasis trace the influence of the classical writers in American politics,but it also draws conclusions concerning the contemporary American artist Cy Twombly,whose work is heavily influenced by antiquity. Rood presented some of his ideas on Twombly in January 2012 at the 143rd annual meeting of the American Philological Association in a talk entitled "Twombly's Narratives of Conflict:The Anabasis Series". [5]
In March 2012,Rood was invited to deliver a lecture on the subject of "Thucydides and Homeric Scholarship" to the Department of Classics at the University of Virginia. [6]
Herodotus was an ancient Greek writer, geographer, and historian born in the Greek city of Halicarnassus, part of the Persian Empire. He is known for having written the Histories – a detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars. Herodotus was the first writer to do systematic investigation of historical events. He is referred to as "The Father of History", a title conferred on him by the ancient Roman orator Cicero.
Thucydides was an Athenian historian and general. His History of the Peloponnesian War recounts the fifth-century BC war between Sparta and Athens until the year 411 BC. Thucydides has been dubbed the father of "scientific history" by those who accept his claims to have applied strict standards of impartiality and evidence-gathering and analysis of cause and effect, without reference to intervention by the deities, as outlined in his introduction to his work.
Xenophon of Athens was an Athenian military leader, philosopher, and historian. At the age of 30, Xenophon was elected commander of one of the biggest Greek mercenary armies of the Achaemenid Empire, the Ten Thousand, that marched on and came close to capturing Babylon in 401 BC. As the military historian Theodore Ayrault Dodge wrote, "the centuries since have devised nothing to surpass the genius of this warrior". Xenophon established precedents for many logistical operations, and was among the first to describe flanking maneuvers and feints. Xenophon's Anabasis recounts his adventures with the Ten Thousand while in the service of Cyrus the Younger, Cyrus's failed campaign to claim the Persian throne from Artaxerxes II of Persia, and the return of Greek mercenaries after Cyrus's death in the Battle of Cunaxa. Anabasis is a unique first-hand, humble, and self-reflective account of military leader's experience in antiquity. On the topic of campaigns in Asia Minor and in Babylon, Xenophon wrote Cyropaedia outlining both military and political methods used by Cyrus the Great to conquer the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 539 BC. Anabasis and Cyropaedia inspired Alexander the Great and other Greeks to conquer Babylon and the Achaemenid Empire in 331 BC.
Greek literature dates back from the ancient Greek literature, beginning in 800 BC, to the modern Greek literature of today.
Anabasis is the most famous work of the Ancient Greek professional soldier and writer Xenophon. It narrates the expedition of a large army of Greek mercenaries hired by Cyrus the Younger to help him seize the throne of Persia from his brother, Artaxerxes II, in 401 BC.
Thespiae was an ancient Greek city (polis) in Boeotia. It stood on level ground commanded by the low range of hills which run eastward from the foot of Mount Helicon to Thebes, near modern Thespies.
A peltast was a type of light infantryman, originating in Thrace and Paeonia, and named after the kind of shield he carried. Thucydides mentions the Thracian peltasts, while Xenophon in the Anabasis distinguishes the Thracian and Greek peltast troops. The peltast often served as a skirmisher in Hellenic and Hellenistic armies. In the Medieval period, the same term was used for a type of Byzantine infantryman.
The Büyük Menderes River, is a river in southwestern Turkey. It rises in west central Turkey near Dinar before flowing west through the Büyük Menderes graben until reaching the Aegean Sea in the proximity of the ancient Ionian city Miletus. The word "meander" is used to describe a winding pattern, after the river.
The Anabasis of Alexander was composed by Arrian of Nicomedia in the second century AD, most probably during the reign of Hadrian. The Anabasis is a history of the campaigns of Alexander the Great, specifically his conquest of the Persian Empire between 336 and 323 BC. Both the unusual title "Anabasis" and the work's seven-book structure reflect Arrian's emulation of the Greek historian Xenophon, whose own Anabasis in seven books concerned the earlier campaign "up-country" of Cyrus the Younger in 401 BC.
Hellenica simply means writings on Greek (Hellenic) subjects. Several histories of 4th-century Greece, written in the mould of Thucydides or straying from it, have borne the conventional Latin title Hellenica. The surviving Hellenica is an important work of the Ancient Greek writer Xenophon and one of the principal sources for the last seven years of the Peloponnesian War not covered by Thucydides, as well as the war's aftermath.
The Perioeci or Períoikoi were the members of a social class and population group of non-citizen inhabitants of Laconia and Messenia, the territory controlled by Sparta, concentrated in the coastal and highland areas. The name Περίοικοι roughly means "those dwelling around/nearby", deriving from περί, peri, "around", and οἶκος, oîkos, "dwelling, house".
Edith Hall is a British scholar of classics, specialising in ancient Greek literature and cultural history, and Professor in the Department of Classics and Centre for Hellenic Studies at King's College, London. From 2006 until 2011 she held a Chair at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she founded and directed the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome until November 2011. She resigned over a dispute regarding funding for classics after leading a public campaign, which was successful, to prevent cuts to or the closure of the Royal Holloway Classics department. She also co-founded and is Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford University, Chair of the Gilbert Murray Trust, and Judge on the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation. Her prizewinning doctoral thesis was awarded at Oxford. In 2012 she was awarded a Humboldt Research Prize to study ancient Greek theatre in the Black Sea, and in 2014 she was elected to the Academy of Europe. She lives in Cambridgeshire.
Simon Hornblower, FBA is an English classicist and academic. He is Professor of Classics and Ancient History in the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
Hellenic historiography involves efforts made by Greeks to track and record historical events. By the 5th century BC, it became an integral part of ancient Greek literature and held a prestigious place in later Roman historiography and Byzantine literature.
Peter John Rhodes,, usually cited as P. J. Rhodes, was a British academic and ancient historian. He was Professor of Ancient History at the University of Durham. He specialized in Ancient Greek politics and political institutions.
Hellenic studies is an interdisciplinary scholarly field that focuses on the language, literature, history and politics of post-classical Greece. In university, a wide range of courses expose students to viewpoints that help them understand the historical and political experiences of Byzantine, Ottoman and modern Greece; the ways in which Greece has borne its several pasts and translated them into the modern era; and the era's distinguished literary and artistic traditions.
Christopher B. Krebs is an Associate Professor of Classics at Stanford University. Krebs' principal research interests are Greek and Roman Historiography, Latin Lexicography and the Classical tradition.
Emily Greenwood is professor of Classics and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She was formerly John M. Musser Professor of Classics and Chair of the Department of Classics at Yale University. Her research focuses on Ancient Greek historiography, particularly Thucydides and Herodotus, the development of History as a genre and a modern critical discipline, and local and transnational black traditions of interpreting Greek and Roman classics. Her work explores the appropriation and reinvention of Greco-Roman classical antiquity from the late nineteenth century to the present.
Carolyn Dewald is an American classical scholar who is Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Bard College. She is an expert on ancient Greek historiography, and the author of several books and articles focusing on the writings of Herodotus and Thucydides.
Charles Forster Smith was an American classical philologist, who focused on the ancient Greek historian Thucydides.