Ancient World Seminar: Herodotus’ ‘Reception’ of the Persian Wars.

We are pleased to announce that the Ancient World Seminar originally scheduled for 17 September 2024 has been rescheduled due to unforeseen circumstances. The seminar will now take place on Tuesday, 20 May 2025, and will feature the same lecture by Professor Thomas Harrison, Keeper at the British Museum.

After the seminar, we invite you to join us for free drinks, no registration required. If you would like to join the dinner after the drinks, please register by sending an email to crasis.aws@rug.nl.

Abstract

Like his younger contemporary Thucydides, Herodotus has long been so closely associated with the wars that form the central topic of his Histories that we may easily be seduced into imagining features of his work to be inevitable. This paper attempts the thought-experiment of examining the Histories not so much as a work of history-writing but as a work of reception. Sketching a range of distinctive Herodotean choices—in style, scope, and patterning—and re-examining the ways in which the Histories relate to Herodotus’ own time, the paper seeks to reassert the distance between author and event.

About the Speaker

Thomas Harrison is Keeper of the Department of Greece and Rome at the British Museum. Previously Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews, Thomas has broad interests in the history of the archaic and classical Greek and Persian worlds, and in the history of scholarship in these areas. His research focuses on reconstructing past visions: the ways in which the Greeks understood and interacted with foreign peoples, how they understood the role of the divine in ordinary life, or the complex thought-worlds of scholars of antiquity from the nineteenth century to today.