Thinking with Classical Matter

What is classical culture for? Thinking with Classical Matter brings together leading experts from across the humanities, and as a whole celebrates the career of Simon Goldhill, in order to consider the place of the Ancient Greco-Roman world in the formation and formulation of different orders of knowledge. Since at least the eighteenth century, the study of Greece and Rome has played a pivotal role in both the institutional and intellectual partition of disciplines from philology to theology, aesthetics to anthropology. Such regimes of knowing, however, are also materially embedded. The knowing subject is at the same time a gendered body and the objects of knowledge are also their subject. Thinking with Classical Matter explores these questions from a wide range of theoretically informed perspectives and shows how the ancient world continues to prompt some of the most pressing questions in the humanities today.

Miriam Leonard, Professor of Greek Literature, University College London,Tim Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and its Reception, University of Cambridge

Miriam Leonard is Professor of Greek Literature and its Reception at University College London. Her research explores the intellectual history of classics in modern European thought from the eighteenth century to the present. She is author of several books including Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-War French Thought (OUP, 2005), Socrates and the Jews: Hellenism and Hebraism from Moses Mendelssohn to Sigmund Freud (University of Chicago Press, 2012), Tragic Modernities (Harvard University Press, 2015). Revolution: Modern Uprisings in Ancient Time is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press. She has curated two recent exhibitions at the Freud Museum in London.


Tim Whitmarsh FBA 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 author of 10 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), and over 100 academic articles. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Classical Dictionary (5th edition). He has 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.

1. Introduction: Embodied Knowledge, Miriam Leonard2. Rigor and the Disciplines, Lorraine Daston3. Ontological Remoteness: Frazer at Nemi, Marilyn Strathern4. The Contemporary Relevance of Greco-Roman Antiquity - Where Science is Concerned, Geoffrey Lloyd5. Prolegomena to Another Forced Retirement: Origen's 'Allegory' Revisited, Daniel Boyarin6. 'Speaking otherwise': Pictorial Allegory through a Philostratean Lens, Jas Elsner and Michael Squire7. The Body as Proof: A Cultural History of Classical Scars, Tim Whitmarsh8. Watching, Waiting, Wailing: Afterlives of the Oresteia, Mary Jacobus9. Trivial Pleasures: Classicizing Porcelains in the Age of the Libertines, Susanne Marchand10. A Post Card from Telos, Dated 327 BC: On Being Touched by a Work of Art, Peter de Bolla11. Epilogue, Homi Bhabha