Professor Timothy Duff
Timothy Duff is Professor of Greek at the University of Reading (UK). He is a specialist in Ancient Greek history, language and literature. His research interests are in Greek and Roman historiography and biography, and the Greek literature of the Roman imperial Period, especially Plutarch.
He was educated at the University of Cambridge, and has held fellowships at Princeton University, Harvard University, the Free University of Berlin, the Australian National University, Wolfson College Cambridge, and the University of Cincinnati. He has taught at the British Archaeological School at Athens.
His publications include Plutarch's Lives: exploring virtue and vice (Oxford University Press: 1999), The Greek and Roman Historians (Duckworth/Bristol Classical Press: 2003), and Plutarch: the Age of Alexander (Penguin: 2012).
More information at https://www.reading.ac.uk/classics/about/staff/t-e-duff.aspx
Lecture One ( for teachers and graduate students)
Topic："The earliest Greek historians"
Time: Sept.18, Fri. afternoon 1:30-3:00 pm
Place: Rm C512
Abstracts : This lecture will examine two of the earliest and most influential writers in the western world: the Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides. It will introduce their works and the context in which they wrote, and we will study a few excerpts from both authors in order to examine how each conceived of his task as a writer. Notably, they saw themselves in competition with each other and with poets like Homer. They also saw the historian's role as a profoundly moral one, in which good actions and good men are to be commemorated and the bad condemned.
Lecture Two ( for undergraduate students)
Topic："The world of Ancient Greece"
Time: Sept.19, Mon. afternoon 4:00-5:30 pm
Place: at Residential College403
Abstracts :This lecture will introduce students to the Ancient Greek world in the Classical period (5th-4th centuries BC). It will focus on the concept of the autonomous city-state (polis), and the varieties of political and social forms within different states, and will take the city-states of Sparta and Athens as contrasting case-studies: in particular, it will focus on the Athens as the first 'democratic' state in the world, and what that system meant. The lecture will close with the defeat of the Persian invasion of Greece in 490 and 480-470 BC, an important event in the history of Western civilisation.
Lecture Three (for undergraduate students)
Topic："The rise and fall of Ancient Athens"
Time: Sept.21, Wed. afternoon 1:30-3:00 pm
Place: Rm C512
Abstracts : This lecture will focus on the ancient Greek city-state of Athens at the high-point of its power and influence, in the fifth-century BC. It will examine Athenian methods of self-government, for which the Athenians invented the terms demokratia or 'people in power'. It will aim to give students a sense of the distinctive contributions of ancient Athens in political thought and practice, and of how unusual Athens was even amongst other ancient Greek cities. As we shall see, ancient democratic Athens survived attacks by the Persian Empire but could not resist its rival Sparta.
Lecture Four (for teachers and graduate students)
Topic："The paradox of Ancient Athens"
Time: Sept.23, Fri. afternoon, 1:30-3:00 pm
Place: Rm C512
Abstracts :The inhabitants of the ancient Greek city of Athens set up a unique political system, in which 'the people' made collective decisions, and in which the power of the rich land-owners, who in other cities formed the governing class, was drastically curtailed. This system gave birth to distinctive art forms, such as comedy and tragedy. But it also contains some feature which to us seem surprising: for example, the Athenians considered that holding elections was undemocratic; they kept slaves; and while they proclaimed 'equality' for their own citizens, they maintained an empire abroad in which they exploited other, smaller Greek cities.
