Ancient World Seminar: Water Infrastructure at Isthmia: Festival Necessity, Manifestation, or Both?

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

Dr. Axel Frejman is a researcher in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History at Uppsala University, with a specialization in ancient Greek sanctuaries and their spatial organization, ritual practices, and material infrastructure. His work combines archaeological fieldwork with theoretical approaches to sacred space, landscape, and religious experience in the ancient world. Dr. Frejman is particularly known for his leadership of the Sanctuaries of Poseidon project, which reexamines the cultic and political significance of key Poseidon sanctuaries in the Greek world. His research contributes to broader debates on the role of religion in the construction of civic identity, the performativity of sacred spaces, and the interplay between ritual and topography.