Professor Tim Rood

My research focuses on Greek historiography, especially Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, and its ancient and modern reception. My first book, Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation (1998), examined Thucydides’ methods of historical interpretation. Following that, I wrote two books on Xenophon’s Anabasis and its modern reception: The Sea! The Sea! The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination (2004) examines how later readers have (mis)quoted and played on the famous cry Thalatta! Thalatta!, while American Anabasis: Xenophon and the Idea of America from the Mexican War to Iraq (2010) analyses allusions to the Anabasis in the United States, especially during the expansion in the West in the 1840s and during the Civil War. More recently, I have written (together with Dr Luuk Huitink) a commentary on Book III of Xenophon’s Anabasis (2019) and (together with Dr Carol Atack and Dr Tom Phillips) Anachronism and Antiquity (2020), which derives from a Leverhulme-funded project that I led. I am now writing (with Professor K. Scarlett Kingsley) a monograph entitled The End of the Histories: Land, Wealth, and Empire in Herodotus. I am also currently researching the ways in which the study of Thucydides and classical Athens in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain (especially in Oxford) related to contemporary ideas of democracy and empire.