We were pleased to welcome again Jeffrey Rusten of Cornell University, Department of Classics, for an Open House discussion on Thucydides on Early Greece and the Trojan War.
For the Open House Jeffrey Rusten invites us to think about and discuss the following questions:
How does Thucydides approach the Iliad and think it has historical value? Is his analysis flawed in any way? Is it anachronistic? Is it in any way modern or “scientific”?
In preparation, you might like to read the following passages from Thucydides (PDF handout):
Thucydides on early Greece and the Trojan War
The event was streamed live on Thursday, January 11, at 11 a.m. EST, and was be recorded.
You can view the event in the frame below, or on our YouTube channel.
Members of the Kosmos Society can start and continue the discussion associated with this event in the Forum.
For further videos please visit the Watch page.
Jeffrey Rusten
Jeffrey Rusten has taught at Cornell since 1988, in the Classics Department, of which he has twice been chair, as well as the director of graduate studies in the graduate program in Theater. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard, taught there and at the University of Cologne in Germany, as well as at the University of Pennsylvania, and Washington University in St Louis. He also spent a year as Whitehead visiting professor at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. His teaching and research and translations center on the literature of Ancient Athens, during the age which saw the beginnings of tragedy, comedy, history, philosophy, and rhetoric. His research specialties are Thucydides, the historian of the War between Athens and Sparta, Athenian comedy, in particular the fragments of comic authors other than the best-known one, Aristophanes; and tragedy and the Athenian tragic theater. Among his other books are translations of Theophrastus’ Characters and Philostratus’ Heroicus (Loeb Classical Library), commentaries on Thucydides Books II (Cambridge University Press), on Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (Bryn Mawr commentaries), and The Birth of Comedy, translations of the most important fragments of two centuries of ancient Greek comedy (Johns Hopkins Press). He also edited studies of Thucydides by the renowned scholars Mabel Lang (Narrative and Discourse in Thucydides) and Jacqueline de Romilly (The Mind of Thucydides, with Elizabeth and Hunter Rawlings).