Professor Rosalind Thomas: List of publications

© Rosalind Thomas 2019. Greek 'local histories', better called polis and island histories, have usually been seen as the poor relation of mainstream 'great' Greek historiography, and yet they were demonstrably popular and extremely numerous from the late Classical period into the Hellenistic. The extensive fragments and testimonia were collected by Felix Jacoby and have been supplemented since with recent finds and inscriptions. Yet while the Athenian histories have received considerable attention, those of other cities have not: this is the first book to consider the polis and island histories as a whole, and as an important cultural and political phenomenon. It challenges the common label of 'antiquarianism' and argues that their role in helping to create 'imagined communities' must be seen partly as a response to fragile and changing status in a changing and expanding Greek world. Important themes are discussed alongside case studies of particular places (including Samos, Miletus, Erythrai, Megara, Athens).

The chapter examines Thucydides’ intellectual milieu, concentrating on medical theories of the time, rhetoric, and especially the rhetorical use of theories of justice and self-interest. It examines the account of the Plague and the impossibility of isolating a cause, akribeia as a wider aim of medical writers, and Thucydides’ familiarity with intellectual theories, which he then supersedes. Finally, it examines aspects of the presentation of rhetoric and its effects: it focuses on Thucydides’ Plataean Debate and the claims made to justice, law, and convention, comparing Antiphon and Thrasymachus’ theories of justice and Thucydides’ possible contribution to this debate.

In this volume, an international group of leading academics undertake an examination of epitēdeumata ('way of life') in Greek history, looking at cultural practices as acts which relate meaningfully to perceived sequences of past acts.

Distinguished European scholars discuss the conceptual and temporal frames through which modern Western historiography has linked itself to classical antiquity.

This timely volume attempts to formulate new interesting ways of talking about the entire concept of literacy in the ancient world--literacy not in the sense of ...