Timothy John Guy Whitmarsh, FBA (born 23 January 1970) is a British classicist and Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge. He is best known for his work on the Greek literary culture of the Roman Empire, especially the Second Sophistic and the ancient Greek novel.
Whitmarsh was born on 23 January 1970 in Chelmsford, Essex, England. He was educated at Moor Park School, a Catholic prep school near Ludlow, and at Malvern College, then an all-boys private school. [1] He took his undergraduate degree and doctorate at the University of Cambridge.
From 2001 to 2007 he taught in the department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter where he remains an honorary fellow. [2] He then served as E. P. Warren Praelector, Fellow and Tutor in Greek at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Professor of Ancient Literatures at the University of Oxford. [3]
In October 2014, he succeeded Paul Cartledge as the A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. [4] In 2023, he became Regius Professor of Greek in the same university, succeeding Richard Hunter. [5]
Whitmarsh appears in the Classics Confidential series in conversation with various classical scholars:
His publications include Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation, [6] Ancient Greek Literature, [7] The Second Sophistic, [8] and Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance, [9] Beyond the Second Sophistic: Adventures in Greek Postclassicism. [10]
The Second Sophistic is a literary-historical term referring to the Greek writers who flourished from the reign of Nero until c. 230 AD and who were catalogued and celebrated by Philostratus in his Lives of the Sophists. However, some recent research has indicated that this Second Sophistic, which was previously thought to have very suddenly and abruptly appeared in the late 1st century, actually had its roots in the early 1st century. It was followed in the 5th century by the philosophy of Byzantine rhetoric, sometimes referred to as the Third Sophistic.
Ancient Greek literature is literature written in the Ancient Greek language from the earliest texts until the time of the Byzantine Empire. The earliest surviving works of ancient Greek literature, dating back to the early Archaic period, are the two epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, set in an idealized archaic past today identified as having some relation to the Mycenaean era. These two epics, along with the Homeric Hymns and the two poems of Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days, constituted the major foundations of the Greek literary tradition that would continue into the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods.
Geoffrey Stephen Kirk, was a British classicist who served as the 35th Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge. He published widely on pre-Socratic philosophy and the work of the Greek poet Homer, culminating in a six-volume philological commentary on the Iliad published between 1985 and 1993.
Glen Warren Bowersock is a historian of ancient Greece, Rome and the Near East, and former Chairman of Harvard’s classics department.
Paul Anthony Cartledge is a British ancient historian and academic. From 2008 to 2014 he was the A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. He had previously held a personal chair in Greek History at Cambridge.
Simon David Goldhill, FBA is Professor in Greek literature and culture and fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at King's College, Cambridge. He was previously Director of Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge, succeeding Mary Jacobus in October 2011. He is best known for his work on Greek tragedy.
Patricia Elizabeth Easterling, FBA is an English classical scholar, recognised as a particular expert on the work of Sophocles. She was Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge from 1994 to 2001. She was the 36th person and the first — and, so far, only — woman to hold the post.
Sir Peter Hugh Jefferd Lloyd-JonesFBA was a British classical scholar and Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford.
Richard Lawrence Hunter, FBA is an Australian classical scholar. From 2001 to 2021, he was the 37th Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge.
The A. G. Leventis Professorship of Greek Culture is the first professorship in Classics to have been endowed at Cambridge University since World War II, and Trinity College Dublin since 2017. Its purpose is to focus on the study of more than 1,000 years of Greek cultural achievements and to highlight the lasting influence they continue to have on society today.
Glenn Warren Most is an American classicist and comparatist originating from the US, but also working in Germany and Italy.
The Faculty of Classics, previously the Faculty of Literae Humaniores, is a subdivision of the University of Oxford concerned with the teaching and research of classics. The teaching of classics at Oxford was present since its conception and was at the centre of nearly all its undergraduates' education well into the twentieth century.
Christopher Kelly is an Australian classicist and historian, who specializes in the later Roman Empire and the classical tradition. He has been Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge since 2018.
Gregory Owen Hutchinson, known as G. O. Hutchinson, is a British classicist and academic, specialising in Latin literature, Ancient Greek literature, and Latin and Ancient Greek languages. Since October 2015, he has been the Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford, and a Student of Christ Church, Oxford.
Publius Anteius Antiochus, or Antiochus of Aegae, was a sophist—or, as he claimed to be, a Cynic philosopher—of ancient Rome, from the Cilician port city of Aegeae. He lived around the 2nd century AD, during the reigns of the Roman emperors Septimius Severus and Caracalla, and is known from a number of inscriptions that indicate him to have been a student of Philostratus, as well as a Syrian named Dardanus and a certain Milesian named Dionysius.
The Faculty of Classics is one of the constituent departments of the University of Cambridge. It teaches the Classical Tripos. The Faculty is divided into five caucuses ; literature, ancient philosophy, ancient history, Classical art and archaeology, linguistics, and interdisciplinary studies.
Philip Russell Hardie, FBA is a specialist in Latin literature at the University of Cambridge. He has written especially on Virgil, Ovid, and Lucretius, and on the influence of these writers on the literature, art, and ideology of later centuries.
Zahra Newby is Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick. She is known in particular for her work on Greek mythology in Roman art and the visual culture of Greek festivals in the Roman east. Newby is currently the Head of the Classics and Ancient History Department at the University of Warwick.
Nancy Worman is Professor of Classics at Barnard and Columbia University. She is an expert on ancient Greek drama and oratory, on ancient literary criticism and literary theory, and on the reception of ancient Greece in the post-classical world.
Ahuvia Kahane is a British academic working in Ireland, specializing in the study of Greek and Roman antiquity, its traditions and the relations between the ancient world and modern culture and thought. Kahane is the 17th Regius Professor of Greek at Dublin, the A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture (2017) and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. He is also Senior Associate at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford.