Dr. John Marincola

Leon Golden Professor of Classics

Research and Teaching Specializations

• Greek and Roman Historiography
• Ancient Rhetoric

Background

John Marincola (Ph.D., Brown) is the Leon Golden Professor of Classics. He specializes in Greek and Roman historiography and rhetoric. He is the author of Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography (Cambridge, 1997), Greek Historians (Oxford, 2001), and (with Michael A. Flower) Herodotus: Histories Book IX (Cambridge, 2002). He has edited A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography (Blackwell, 2007) and co-edited (with Carolyn Dewald) the Cambridge Companion to Herodotus (Cambridge, 2006); he has revised the Penguin edition of Herodotus' Histories (1996; further revised edition, 2003), and will soon publish a revision of Plutarch's Rise and Fall of Athens (Penguin, 2010). He has written articles on many Greek and Roman historians and is currently at work on a book on Hellenistic historiography.

Research Projects in Progress

• Hellenistic Historiography
• Studies in Plutarch’s de Malignitate Herodoti
• Plutarch’s Persian Wars: Myth History and Identity in Roman Greece

Recent Publications and Lectures

• Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography (Cambridge 1997)
• Greek Historians (Greece & Rome New Surveys in the Classics, no. 31); Oxford 2001
• Herodotus: Histories Book IX, edited with introduction and notes by M. A. Flower and John Marincola (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics, Cambridge 2002)
• A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography, 2 vols. (Oxford and Malden, Mass. 2007).

• ‘Historiography’, in A. Erskine, ed., A Companion to Ancient History (Blackwell 2009) 13–22.
• ‘Odysseus and the Historians’, SyllClass 18 (2007) 1–79.
• ‘Universal History from Ephorus to Diodorus’, in A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography (Oxford 2007) 171–9.

• ‘The “Rhetoric” of History: Exemplarity, Allusion and Intertextuality in Ancient Historiographical Speeches’, keynote address at the Conference Perspektive, Polyphonie, Performativität: Funktionen von Reden in antiken Geschichtswerken, Giessen, September 25, 2008.
• ‘Eros and Empire: Virgil, Sallust, and the Narrative of Civil War’, Cambridge Literature Seminar, Cambridge, May 28, 2008.
• ‘History and Tragedy – and Comedy?’, University of Bristol, May 22, 2008.

Teaching

Greek: Introductory, Intermediate, and Advanced Greek; authors include (at the intermediate level) Lysias and Plato, and (at the advanced or graduate level) Hesiod, Aeschylus, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Aristophanes, Plutarch, Josephus.

Latin: Introductory, Intermediate, and Advanced Latin; authors include (at the intermediate level) Catullus and Cicero, and (at the advanced or graduate level) Plautus, Sallust, Livy, Virgil, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, and Suetonius.

Classics Courses in Translation: Survey of Greek Literature; Survey of Latin Literature; Greek and Roman Epic in Translation; Greek and Roman Historiography; Roman Civilisation; Freshman Preceptorial (core curriculum course, with readings from Genesis to the 20th Century).

History: Classical Greek History; The Hellenistic World: Alexander to Augustus; Classical Athens and Sparta; History of the Roman Republic; History of the Roman Empire.

Graduate Seminars: The Persian Wars in Greek Literature and Thought; Thucydides: The Sicilian Expedition; Josephus, Jewish War Book VI; Hellenistic Greece; Xenophon’s Cyropaedia.