Politics of Greek in the Roman World

In this webinar, Professor Bill Hurst is joined by Professor Tim Whitmarsh. While many would associate Latin with being the language of the Romans, in fact, the Eastern Mediterranean and much of the Roman world remained Greek speaking. In this discussion, we will look at the politics of literature, philosophy, and other areas of discourse in the Greek speaking Roman world – and its relationship both to Roman rule and later developments in what became the Byzantine Empire and the later world.

About the speaker:

Tim Whitmarsh is Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. A specialist in the literature, culture and religion of ancient Greece, he is the sole author of nine books, including Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (Knopf 2015) and Dirty Love: The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel (Oxford University Press 2018). He is editor-in-chief of the Oxford Classical Dictionary (5th edition), and edits book series for Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press. He was Principal Investigator for a major AHRC project Greek Epic of the Roman Empire: A Cultural History (2014–17), which will (among other things) produce the first complete set of translations of this relatively neglected corpus of Greek poetry. He has written over 80 academic articles, lectured on every inhabited continent, and contributed frequently to newspapers such as the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books, as well as to BBC radio and TV.