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Tim Whitmarsh

University of Cambridge, Classics, Faculty Member

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Northeast Normal University

Damjan Krsmanovic

Brown University

Christian Langer, FRHistS

The University of Georgia

Eugenia Manolidou

Athanasios Platias

University of Piraeus

Corvinus University of Budapest

Fordham University

University of Salerno Italy

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Books by Tim Whitmarsh

Dirty Love: The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel

Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

The Romance Between Greece and the East

by Stuart R Thomson and Tim Whitmarsh

The contact zones between the Greco-Roman world and the Near East represent one of the most excit... more The contact zones between the Greco-Roman world and the Near East represent one of the most exciting and fast-moving areas of ancient-world studies. This new collection of essays, by world-renowned experts (and some new voices) in classical, Jewish, Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Persian literature, focuses specifically on prose fiction, or 'the ancient novel'. Twenty chapters either offer fresh readings - from an intercultural perspective - of familiar texts (such as the biblical Esther and Ecclesiastes, Xenophon of Ephesus' Ephesian Story and Dictys of Crete's Journal), or introduce material that may be new to many readers: from demotic Egyptian papyri through old Avestan hymns to a Turkic translation of the Life of Aesop. The volume also considers issues of methodology and the history of scholarship on the topic. A concluding section deals with the question of how narratives, patterns and motifs may have come to be transmitted between cultures.

Beyond the Second Sophistic: Adventures in Greek Postclassicism

The Romance Between Greece and the East

Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World

The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel

Ancient Greek Literature

The Second Sophistic

Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation

Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance

Papers by Tim Whitmarsh

Opportunity and Threat

On China's embrace of classics

(Not) talkin’ ‘bout a revolution: Managing constitutional crisis in Athenian political thought

J. Klooster and I. Kuin eds. After the crisis: Remembrance, re-anchoring and recovery in ancient Greece and Rome (London: Bloomsbury, 2020): 15–29, 199–201., 2020

Contrary to what is often held, ancient Greeks did have a concept that corresponds partly to our ... more Contrary to what is often held, ancient Greeks did have a concept that corresponds partly to our 'revolution'. The misunderstanding is based in part on simplistic characterisations of different eras in terms of linear and cyclical time. If we look to classical Athens, we see that there were multiple different ways of evaluating 'revolution', and the violence that came with it.

The Anti-Black Theme in Nonnus' Dionysiaca

In M. Cariou and N. Zito eds. Μάρτυρι μύθῳ Poésie, histoire et société aux époques imp ériale et tardive Actes du colloque international Paris, Sorbonne Université, 8-10 septembre 2022, 2024

Discusses Nonnus' negative evaluation of the black skin of the Indians in the Dionysiaca in the c... more

Emotions and Narrativity in the Greek Romance

On the narrative role of emotions in the ancient Greek romance

Oedipus the atheist offprint

ASÉBEIA Estudios sobre la irreligiosidad en Grecia Studies in Greek Irreligiosity, eds. Vicente M. Ramón Palerm and Ana C. Vicente Sánchez, 2020

Sophocles' play Oedipus Rex contains many reflections on the religious controversies current in A... more

The Invention of Atheism and the Invention of Religion

Sceptic and Believer in Ancient Mediterranean Religions, eds. Babett Edelmann-Singer, Tobias Nicklas, Janet Spittler, and Luigi Walt, 2020

The idea of religion is often held to be a modern, western one. This chapter argues that the anci... more The idea of religion is often held to be a modern, western one. This chapter argues that the ancient Greek idea of ta theia, while crucially different to 'religion', covers some of the same ground. It also argues that the idea of ta theia was 'invented' at the moment when Athenians legislated against atheism.

WHAT SAMUEL BUTLER SAW: CLASSICS, AUTHORSHIP AND CULTURAL AUTHORITY IN LATE VICTORIAN ENGLAND

Cambridge Classical Journal, 2002

PCPS 48 , 2002 , pp. 66 - 86

WRITTEN ON THE BODY: EKPHRASIS, PERCEPTION AND DECEPTION IN HELIODORUS' AETHIOPICA

Novels have so much solid and monolithic bulk when they sit in a hand or on a shelf; inside, the ... more Novels have so much solid and monolithic bulk when they sit in a hand or on a shelf; inside, the pages are forests of symbols, as though even in books of such magnitude the sentences needed compression to fit on to pages. How different to poetic volumes, beguilingly slender, their pages brilliant with blank, white space, across which the spindly words stretch like gossamer. In terms of content, however, novels are rarely as monolithic as their physical form suggests. From earliest times since, the genre has dealt, centrally, with themes of metamorphosis, transubstantiation, the fundamentally permeable nature of the self. The solid material aspect of the novel often masks a central preoccupation with the fluidity of identity. In the compass of this article, I want to explore the central role accorded by Heliodorus, arguably the greatest of ancient novelists, to questions of perceptual deception, to seeing and seeming; and in particular, I want to explore the role of artworks within Heliodorus' narrative economy. The narrative turns, as is well known, on the amazing paradox of an Ethiopian girl born white. Charicleia's skin colour is a visual trap, an illusion. 1 Given that her freakish pigmentation is the result of her mother's glancing at an art-work at the moment of conception , Charicleia can almost be said to be a walking ekphrasis, an embodiment of the illusory traps of the unreal. Ekphrasis in Roman Greek culture has, of course, received considerable attention over the years. 2 For Heliodorus we have the fine work of Shadi Bartsch, who presents novelistic ekphrasis as a matter predominantly for formal analysis of narrative technique: her questions particularly concern the thematic relationship between the phenomenon described and the unfurling plot. 3 Others analyse the aesthetic techniques of the descriptions, taking them as synecdochic of the aspirations of the text as a whole. 4 Still others read novelistic ekphraseis in terms of a 'culture of viewing', exploring the wider ramifications of these texts' insistent visuality in terms of gender, class and cultural identity. 5 These are all important and weighty issues, which will reappear in the discussion that follows. What I want to explore here, however, is a different order of issue, which I shall call ekphrastic 'contagion': the power of the visual icon to infect its surrounding discourse with ontological and perceptual uncertainty. 6 Ekphraseis, that is to say, seep. Before turning to Heliodorus, I want to substantiate this claim by brief reference to a modern controversy. The term 'ekphrasis' has generally been used by modern scholars to denote a set-piece description of an artwork or similar, a pause in the temporal flow of the narrative. This, as Ruth Webb has underlined in an important discussion, is not what eK^paoiq meant to the Greeks, who used it rather to mean (in the words of Theon) 'descriptive language (A.6yo<;) that

VARIA LUCIANEA A. Camerotto: Le metamorfosi della parola. Studi sulla parodia in Luciano di Samosata . Pp. 349. Pisa and Rome: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, 1998. Paper. ISBN: 88-8147-161-2. P. von Möllendorff: Lukian : Hermotimos, oder Lohnt es sich, Philosophie zu studieren?...

Classical Review, 2003

Dirty Love: The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel

Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

The Romance Between Greece and the East

by Stuart R Thomson and Tim Whitmarsh

The contact zones between the Greco-Roman world and the Near East represent one of the most excit... more The contact zones between the Greco-Roman world and the Near East represent one of the most exciting and fast-moving areas of ancient-world studies. This new collection of essays, by world-renowned experts (and some new voices) in classical, Jewish, Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Persian literature, focuses specifically on prose fiction, or 'the ancient novel'. Twenty chapters either offer fresh readings - from an intercultural perspective - of familiar texts (such as the biblical Esther and Ecclesiastes, Xenophon of Ephesus' Ephesian Story and Dictys of Crete's Journal), or introduce material that may be new to many readers: from demotic Egyptian papyri through old Avestan hymns to a Turkic translation of the Life of Aesop. The volume also considers issues of methodology and the history of scholarship on the topic. A concluding section deals with the question of how narratives, patterns and motifs may have come to be transmitted between cultures.

Beyond the Second Sophistic: Adventures in Greek Postclassicism

The Romance Between Greece and the East

Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World

The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel

Ancient Greek Literature

The Second Sophistic

Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation

Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance

Opportunity and Threat

On China's embrace of classics

(Not) talkin’ ‘bout a revolution: Managing constitutional crisis in Athenian political thought

J. Klooster and I. Kuin eds. After the crisis: Remembrance, re-anchoring and recovery in ancient Greece and Rome (London: Bloomsbury, 2020): 15–29, 199–201., 2020

Contrary to what is often held, ancient Greeks did have a concept that corresponds partly to our ... more Contrary to what is often held, ancient Greeks did have a concept that corresponds partly to our 'revolution'. The misunderstanding is based in part on simplistic characterisations of different eras in terms of linear and cyclical time. If we look to classical Athens, we see that there were multiple different ways of evaluating 'revolution', and the violence that came with it.

The Anti-Black Theme in Nonnus' Dionysiaca

In M. Cariou and N. Zito eds. Μάρτυρι μύθῳ Poésie, histoire et société aux époques imp ériale et tardive Actes du colloque international Paris, Sorbonne Université, 8-10 septembre 2022, 2024

Discusses Nonnus' negative evaluation of the black skin of the Indians in the Dionysiaca in the c... more

Emotions and Narrativity in the Greek Romance

On the narrative role of emotions in the ancient Greek romance

Oedipus the atheist offprint

ASÉBEIA Estudios sobre la irreligiosidad en Grecia Studies in Greek Irreligiosity, eds. Vicente M. Ramón Palerm and Ana C. Vicente Sánchez, 2020

Sophocles' play Oedipus Rex contains many reflections on the religious controversies current in A... more

The Invention of Atheism and the Invention of Religion

Sceptic and Believer in Ancient Mediterranean Religions, eds. Babett Edelmann-Singer, Tobias Nicklas, Janet Spittler, and Luigi Walt, 2020

The idea of religion is often held to be a modern, western one. This chapter argues that the anci... more The idea of religion is often held to be a modern, western one. This chapter argues that the ancient Greek idea of ta theia, while crucially different to 'religion', covers some of the same ground. It also argues that the idea of ta theia was 'invented' at the moment when Athenians legislated against atheism.

WHAT SAMUEL BUTLER SAW: CLASSICS, AUTHORSHIP AND CULTURAL AUTHORITY IN LATE VICTORIAN ENGLAND

Cambridge Classical Journal, 2002

PCPS 48 , 2002 , pp. 66 - 86

WRITTEN ON THE BODY: EKPHRASIS, PERCEPTION AND DECEPTION IN HELIODORUS' AETHIOPICA

Novels have so much solid and monolithic bulk when they sit in a hand or on a shelf; inside, the ... more Novels have so much solid and monolithic bulk when they sit in a hand or on a shelf; inside, the pages are forests of symbols, as though even in books of such magnitude the sentences needed compression to fit on to pages. How different to poetic volumes, beguilingly slender, their pages brilliant with blank, white space, across which the spindly words stretch like gossamer. In terms of content, however, novels are rarely as monolithic as their physical form suggests. From earliest times since, the genre has dealt, centrally, with themes of metamorphosis, transubstantiation, the fundamentally permeable nature of the self. The solid material aspect of the novel often masks a central preoccupation with the fluidity of identity. In the compass of this article, I want to explore the central role accorded by Heliodorus, arguably the greatest of ancient novelists, to questions of perceptual deception, to seeing and seeming; and in particular, I want to explore the role of artworks within Heliodorus' narrative economy. The narrative turns, as is well known, on the amazing paradox of an Ethiopian girl born white. Charicleia's skin colour is a visual trap, an illusion. 1 Given that her freakish pigmentation is the result of her mother's glancing at an art-work at the moment of conception , Charicleia can almost be said to be a walking ekphrasis, an embodiment of the illusory traps of the unreal. Ekphrasis in Roman Greek culture has, of course, received considerable attention over the years. 2 For Heliodorus we have the fine work of Shadi Bartsch, who presents novelistic ekphrasis as a matter predominantly for formal analysis of narrative technique: her questions particularly concern the thematic relationship between the phenomenon described and the unfurling plot. 3 Others analyse the aesthetic techniques of the descriptions, taking them as synecdochic of the aspirations of the text as a whole. 4 Still others read novelistic ekphraseis in terms of a 'culture of viewing', exploring the wider ramifications of these texts' insistent visuality in terms of gender, class and cultural identity. 5 These are all important and weighty issues, which will reappear in the discussion that follows. What I want to explore here, however, is a different order of issue, which I shall call ekphrastic 'contagion': the power of the visual icon to infect its surrounding discourse with ontological and perceptual uncertainty. 6 Ekphraseis, that is to say, seep. Before turning to Heliodorus, I want to substantiate this claim by brief reference to a modern controversy. The term 'ekphrasis' has generally been used by modern scholars to denote a set-piece description of an artwork or similar, a pause in the temporal flow of the narrative. This, as Ruth Webb has underlined in an important discussion, is not what eK^paoiq meant to the Greeks, who used it rather to mean (in the words of Theon) 'descriptive language (A.6yo<;) that

VARIA LUCIANEA A. Camerotto: Le metamorfosi della parola. Studi sulla parodia in Luciano di Samosata . Pp. 349. Pisa and Rome: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, 1998. Paper. ISBN: 88-8147-161-2. P. von Möllendorff: Lukian : Hermotimos, oder Lohnt es sich, Philosophie zu studieren?...

Classical Review, 2003

The Deep History of Atheism (and Why it Matters)

ATHEISTIC AESTHETICS: THE SISYPHUS FRAGMENT, POETICS AND THE CREATIVITY OF DRAMA. Cambridge Classical Journal 60, pp 109-126 ((c) Cambridge University Press)

The erotics of mimesis: gendered aesthetics in Greek theory and fiction

Resistance is futile? Greek literary tactics in the face of Rome

The Greek novel: titles and genre

Were the Greek novels titled according to a consistent convention? This article confronts the vie... more Were the Greek novels titled according to a consistent convention? This article confronts the view that the original titles were always historiographical in form (Assyriaka, Lesbiaka, Aithiopika, etc.) and that readers were thus steered to expect, in the first instance, realistic narrative. Examining the evidence in detail, it argues that the formula the novels were likeliest to have shared was ta kata + girl's name (or girl's + boy's names). On this basis, it is concluded that what the titles of the novels promised was primarily invasive narratives of private life. 4 Rohde 1914, 263-64 (with 263, n. 1, and Schmid's note pp. 616-18); Perry 1967, 167-68. Such titles are common in the third volume of FGrH. 5 See, e.g., Morgan 1993, 197-98, using historiographical elements in the titles (though he accepts more variation than Henrichs) to reinforce his argument that the novels aim at a quasi-historical form of realism. Julian Ep. 89b 301b Bidez is sometimes cited (e.g., by Morgan) for the view that the novels were §n flstor¤aw e ‡dei . . . plãsmata, but the passage does not in fact refer to novels (see appendix below).

Domestic poetics

Other Greek novels open in poleis, before swiftly shunting their protagonists out of them and int... more Other Greek novels open in poleis, before swiftly shunting their protagonists out of them and into the adventure world. Why does Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon open in a house (with no sign of any political apparatus), and stay there for almost one quarter of the novel? This article explores the cultural, psychological, and metaliterary role of the house in Achilles, reading it as a site of conflict between the dominant, patriarchal ideology of the father and the subversive intent of the young lovers. If the house principally embodies the authoritarian will of the father to order and control, it nevertheless provides the lovers with opportunities to re-encode space opportunistically as erotic. The house cannot be reconstructed archaeologically (Clitophon is too flittish a narrator for that), but it is nevertheless clearly divided into different qualitative zones-diningroom, bedrooms, garden-each of which has its own psychosocial and emotional texture, its own challenges, and its own resources. Achilles' modelling of the house may reflect Roman ideas of domestic aristocratic display, and perhaps even the influence of Roman literature (particularly love elegy).

Interview with Tim Whitmarsh: Philosophy and The Ancient Novel

by Zacharias Andreadakis and Tim Whitmarsh

Martin Bloomer, The School of Rome (review)

LRB

Dover, Greek Homosexuality (review)

TLS

married to one woman, for 63 years. In his bones, Dover was an establishment man, and a tradition... more married to one woman, for 63 years. In his bones, Dover was an establishment man, and a traditional classicist of the most conservative type. His first book was on word order in ancient Greek, and he retained an interest in language and style throughout his life. He also wrote commentaries on vibrant, energetic texts like Aristophanes' Clouds and Frogs and Theocritus' Idylls, but his precise eye was for linguistic and technical details rather than humour and literary sophistication.

Neil Hopkinson, Lucian: A Selection (review)

LRB

Lucian of Samosata, nicknamed 'blasphemer' or 'slanderer'-better, in fact, to call him 'atheist',... more Lucian of Samosata, nicknamed 'blasphemer' or 'slanderer'-better, in fact, to call him 'atheist', because in his dialogues he went so far as to ridicule religious beliefs ... The story goes that he was killed by dogs, because of his rabid attacks on the truth, for in his Life of Peregrinus he inveighed against Christianity, and (accursed man!) blasphemed against Christ himself. For that reason he paid the penalty due for his rabidity in this world, and in the life to come he will share the eternal fire with Satan.

Carolyn Higbie, Collectors Scholars and Forgers (review)

TLS

Eidinow and Kindt, Oxford Handbook of Greek Religion (review)

LRB

George Economou, Ananios of Kleitor

TLS