Centre for Hellenistic and Later Greek Studies

The Antigonid Network

The Antigonid dynasty, one of the four Hellenistic kingdoms that emerged after the death of the Alexander the Great, was established in 306 BC by its eponymous founder Antigonus I Monophthalmus (‘the One-Eyed’) and his son Demetrius Poliorcetes ('the Besieger'). Originally based in Asia Minor and Syria, the family later gained control over the territory of Macedonia in 275 BC under the aegis of Antigonus II Gonatas (277-74, 272-239 BC). The kingdom subsequently came to prominence, reaching its peak during the reign of Philip V (221-179 BC), before coming to an end following successive conflicts with Rome and the defeat of its final ruler, Perseus, in 168 BC.

While the Antigonids were an important part of the political scene in the Hellenistic period, study of them has been largely overshadowed by that of the Ptolemies, Seleucids and Attalids, which (other than the Attalids) were longer-lasting and saw a greater engagement with non-Greek peoples. This lack of attention has obscured the significance of this dynasty in the politics and culture of the ancient Mediterranean. It is the aim of this Network, therefore, to rectify this situation by drawing together scholars working on this dynasty from a range of disciplines and institutions, by promoting collaborative and interdisciplinary research through conferences and workshops, and by providing a platform with which to access relevant sources and scholarship.

Contact: For information regarding the Antigonid Network and its activities, please contact Emma Nicholson (e.l.nicholson@exeter.ac.uk).

Find out more on The Antigonid Network website

Connecting Late Antiquities

Connecting Late Antiquities is the initial phase of a collaborative project to create open, digital prosopographical resources for the Roman and post-Roman territories between the third and seventh centuries AD. Our ultimate aim is to digitise, unite and link existing resources to make them more accessible and enhance their reach and utility. This enterprise will dramatically improve access to information about late-antique people for all scholars of this period and allow the easy integration of prosopographical material with online geographical, textual, epigraphic and papyrological resources.

Find out more on the Connecting Late Antiquities website

Black Sea History

Black Sea History was a project created by Professor David Braund, who has worked in the Black Sea region since 1984, while continuing with his research in the Mediterranean. Its aim is to advance contact, collaboration and mutual understanding between scholars working on the ancient Black Sea region in UK, Europe and the countries of the region, especially through joint projects, conferences and publications. Accordingly, the project has received numerous academic visitors from the region over the years, for periods ranging from a week to two years. Those who have spent long periods with us include Professor Sergey Saprykin (Head of Ancient History, Moscow State University), Dr Darejan Kacharava (Director of excavations, Vani (Georgia) and Director of Museum Collections, National Museum, Tbilisi) and Dr Marina Vakhtina (Senior Researcher and Deputy Head of Classical Archaeology, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg). These many visitors have been key to a broader programme of collaboration with scholars in the region, which is most obvious in the series of conferences held in the UK and the region under the aegis of the project. The various activities of the project have secured invaluable funding from the AHRC, British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, Wardrop Fund, Ford Foundation and BP.

Braund has received a range of honours and distinctions for his work in the project, including the Honorary Diploma of the Russian Classical Association (2000), D.Litt. (Batumi University (2010). In 2014 he held an Onassis Research grant (Category A), partly in association with the Department of Black Sea Studies at the International Hellenic University, Thessaloniki.

Galen: Ancient Food and Medicine

The Department has emerged in recent years as a leading centre for the study of ancient food and medicine, especially in connection with the second-century AD medical writer Galen. The Department works closely with the Centre for Medical History, and also with medical experts on projects designed to promote preventative health-care. There have been Wellcome-funded projects on pharmacology (John Wilkins), sexuality and history (Rebecca Langlands), and a Leverhulme-funded project on psychology in Galen and Stoicism (Chris Gill).

Current projects include a monograph on Hellenistic medical psychology and its impact on Galen (David Leith); a translation of and commentary on On Simples (for the van der Eyck ed. CUP series) (John Wilkins); work on a monograph Galen on Maintaining Good Health, part of the public engagement project on Healthcare and Wellbeing; collaborative work on Galenic texts preserved in Syriac and Arabic (John Wilkins); work on the rhetorical strategies shared by Galen and the heresiologists (Richard Flower); and work on the Victorian reception of Galen (Daniel King).

Cataloguing Damnation: The Birth of Scientific Heresiology in Late Antiquity

This AHRC-funded project, conducted by Professor Richard Flower, examines a surprising marriage of ‘science’ and ‘religion’, two concepts that are often regarded as representing fundamentally opposed methods of enquiry and systems of understanding.

In late antiquity, from the end of the fourth century onwards, Christian authors wrote encyclopaedias of heresies and deviant beliefs, creating a genre of literature that has come to be known as heresiology. What is striking about these texts is that, rather than merely basing their arguments for a particular theological viewpoint on biblical exegesis or Christian tradition, they also employed techniques from classical technical writing to present themselves as definitive guides to orthodoxy, communicating reliable information that had been collected and organised in the same manner as in a natural history or a guide to anatomy.

Like an encyclopaedist or physician, the heresiologist became a new type of scholarly expert, while heresiology was constructed as another branch of scientific knowledge to be studied, classified and defined. Moreover, even though imperial support by the emperor Constantine and his successors had freed Christianity from the danger of pagan persecution, it had also revealed, and even exacerbated, disagreements and divisions among believers. While heresiologies have often been dismissed as haphazard and distasteful agglomerations of attacks on the Church’s enemies, this project will both rehabilitate them as sophisticated examples of technical literature and also place them firmly back into a context of theological and institutional instability, interpreting them as attempts by authors to secure their own orthodox status against dangerous challenges from opponents.

By viewing the emergence of heresiology not as a dramatic, Christian-inspired break with the Greco-Roman past, but rather as a direct development from it, this project will illuminate a vital aspect of the re-use and transformation of classical literary conventions and methodologies for new contexts. In doing so, it will explore shifting attitudes towards the creation of authoritative knowledge during this period and, through comparison with epitomes, chronicles and other encyclopaedic writings, will contribute to the wider intellectual history of late antiquity. Moreover, by examining the variety of strategies employed both for the invention and redefinition of tradition and for the demarcation and policing of boundaries of acceptable behaviour and belief, it will, more broadly, provide a significant insight into the complex and often paradoxical ways in which science and religion can interlock, even – and perhaps especially – at times of rapid social and historical change.

Listen to our podcast series 'The Distant Pasts: Adventures in an Alternative Antiquity' on Soundcloud.

Might and Right: Thinking Through Thucydides

How do we help young people make sense of an ever more complex, rapidly changing world, and combat the problem of low voter turnout and decreased political engagement, with its corrosive consequences for political culture? It is widely recognised that people do want to contribute to discussions, but feel marginalised, uncertain and intimidated. Part of the answer is to improve political literacy through citizenship education in schools, but the teaching of citizenship is itself often marginalised, dependent on non-specialist teachers and with limited resources; the result is that often such classes are focused solely on delivering factual information about the British political system, rather than either engaging with broader issues and debates or inspiring and empowering students.

This project, led by Lynette Mitchell and Neville Morley, addresses this problem by turning to ancient Greek political thought; not as an end in itself – the project assumes no prior knowledge of ancient history, and provides students just with the basic information they need for the activities – but as a means for opening up the issues. Inspired by the Melian Dialogue in Thucydides, which has long been the go-to examples for discussions of power and justice between two unequal sides, we have created a series of games and other interactive activities, which engage students through the pleasure of participation and competition before leading them to reflect on the issues they raise. This includes a version of the Melian Dialogue as an interactive choose-your-own-adventure text, the full version of which you can play online. Thucydides does not provide simple answers to difficult situations; rather, he guides us to think through the problem, and to recognize the different claims and rhetoric of those involved. His work invites readers to compare the events described with their own times; the Melian Dialogue can shed light not only on issues in global politics, but on conflicts between citizen and state, policeman and civilian, parents and children and even bullies and bullied.

We are working with The Politics Project, an NGO dedicated to enhancing political literacy in schools through workshops and digital surgeries, to co-create a set of three one-hour workshops, which they will then be testing with schools in Manchester, London and Brighton while we work with local partners. We have also, drawing on their advice, developed a range of supporting material for teachers, including a video of a special adaptation of the Melian Dialogue, a short video lecture, and a set of historical briefing documents.

More information

If you have any queries – including if you represent a school or college in the south-west and would be interested in trying out these activities – then please contact Professor Lynette Mitchell or Professor Neville Morley.

• The Melian Dialogue: Might and Right
• Thinking Through Thucydides: A short introduction