Tim Rood
Biographic Data
| ID | 979771 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tim Rood |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tim |
| FAMILY NAME | Rood |
| SIGNATURE | ROOD T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8009-5729 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 54 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 116 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 51 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Greek Palimpsest: Alfred Zimmern at the British School at Athens, 1909–10
This article analyses the significance of the British School at Athens for the development of Alfred Zimmern’s famous 1911 monograph, The Greek Commonwealth , which was largely written at the School during Zimmern’s residence as an Associate Member in 1909–10. The article sheds light on the composition and goals of Zimmern’s book and on his other activities during his year in Greece, including journalism for the Manchester Guardian. Throughout, i…
E. H. Carr and Alfred Zimmern: Utopia, reality, and the twenty years’ crisis
This article offers a new approach to the opposition of utopianism and realism in interwar International Relations. It first analyses how E. H. Carr drew on Karl Mannheim to develop that opposition in his 1939 classic, The Twenty Years’ Crisis , and how Alfred Zimmern, one of Carr’s predecessors in the Woodrow Wilson Chair in International Politics at Aberystwyth, responded to Carr and his Mannheimian model in a review in the Spectator as well as…
Alfred Zimmern’s Early Political Thought II: Liberalism, Burke and The Greek Commonwealth
This is the second of two articles analysing the intellectual formation of Alfred Zimmern, a leading figure in the study of International Relations in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on many archival sources, it argues against claims in recent scholarship that Zimmern should be classified as a Burkean liberal. It first outlines Zimmern’s frequent advocacy of Socialism and state intervention, and then examines the politics of Zimm…
From The Greek Commonwealth to The Commonwealth of Nations: Zimmern, Curtis, and a Tale of Two Titles
This article analyses the development of the notion of 'commonwealth' within the Round Table group in relation to two books: Alfred Zimmern's The Greek Commonwealth (1911) and Lionel Curtis' The Commonwealth of Nations (1916). Modern historians of International Relations have argued that the title of Zimmern's book alluded to conceptions of the British empire as a 'commonwealth'. Drawing on previously unused archival sources and on detailed study…
Zimmern, Athens, and the British Empire: Ancient and Modern Imperialism in The Greek Commonwealth
This article offers a reading of the intersections of ancient and modern imperialism in Alfred Zimmern's 1911 monograph The Greek Commonwealth: Politics and Economics in Fifth-Century Athens . The first section looks at Zimmern's use of ancient and modern comparisons and shows that, far from modernizing the ancient Greeks, as scholars have argued, he in fact insistently drew attention to the differences between the ancient and modern worlds. The …
Xenophon’s ›Anabasis‹ and its Reception
This volume constitutes the first large-scale collaborative reflection on Xenophon’s Anabasis , gathering experts on Greek historiography and Xenophon. It is structured in three sections: the first section provides a linear reading of the Anabasis through chapters on select episodes (from Book 1 through Book 7), including the opening, Cyrus’ characterisation, the meeting of Socrates and Xenophon, Xenophon’s leadership, the marches through Armenia…
Mythical and Historical Time in Herodotus: Scaliger, Jacoby, and the Chronographic Tradition
‘At the very beginning of non-contemporary history there was myth.’ 1 Thus wrote John Marincola, in a much-cited section of Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography devoted to history and myth or, more precisely, the ways in which historians established authority by their exclusion, and occasional inclusion, of myth. One of the attractions of Marincola’s discussion is that he stresses not just the reaction against the ‘mythical’ that was…
The Authoritative Historian: Tradition and Innovation in Ancient Historiography
In this volume an international group of scholars revisits the themes of John Marincola's ground-breaking Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography. The nineteen chapters offer a series of case studies that explore how ancient historians' approaches to their projects were informed both by the pull of tradition and by the ambition to innovate. The key themes explored are the relation of historiography to myth and poetry; the narrative auth…
Xenophon's ›Anabasis‹ and Its Reception
From Ethnography to History: Herodotean and Thucydidean Traditions in the Development of Greek Historiography
The aim of this chapter is to analyse the role played by ethnography in perceptions of the opposition between Herodotus and Thucydides and of the development of Greek historiography. From a vast range of possible evidence, I have selected a number of writers, some influential in their own right, some simply representative of their age. I will focus in turn on the place of ethnography in narratives of the development of historiography, in views of…
Reading Thucydides in the Early Twentieth Century (on B. Earley, The Thucydidean Turn: (Re)Interpreting Thucydides’ Political Thought Before, During and After the Great War)
he Thucydidean Turn starts with the Thucydides trap-Graham Allison's recent attempt to conceptualise the relations between China and the US through Thucydides' analysis of how the fear engendered in Sparta by Athenian growth 'made war inevitable'.Earley (henceforth E.) then turns back from the 'trap'-which he claims has 'given greater public prominence to Thucydides than the Greek historian has ever enjoyed in the past' ()-to analyse an earlier p…
Xenophon de Halbattiker: Xenophons woordenschat, ‘zuiver’ Attisch en de ontwikkeling van de Griekse historiografie
This article analyses Xenophon’s lexical choices in Anabasis . It examines ancient and modern critical approaches to his language: Xenophon has often been criticized for lapses from ‘pure’ Attic, but this notion of a ‘pure’ Attic should be regarded as a conservative response to the increasing variety of spoken Attic in the fourth century BC. Xenophon’s lexical choices reflect the influence both of this ‘Great Attic’ (which developed into koine Gr…
Anachronism and Antiquity
This book is a study both of anachronism in antiquity and of anachronism as a vehicle for understanding antiquity. It explores the post-classical origins and changing meanings of the term ‘anachronism’ as well as the presence of anachronism in all its forms in classical literature, criticism and material objects. Contrary to the position taken by many modern philosophers of history, this book argues that classical antiquity had a rich and varied …
Xenophon: Anabasis Book III
This is the first comprehensive commentary on a section of Xenophon's Anabasis in English for almost a century. It provides up-to-date guidance on literary, historical and cultural aspects of the Anabasis and will help undergraduate students to read Greek better. It also incorporates recent advances in Xenophontic scholarship and Greek linguistics, showcasing in particular Xenophon's linguistic innovations and varied style. Advanced students and …
Cato the Elder, Livy, and Xenophon’s Anabasis
This article argues firstly that Cato the Elder’s account of a daring plan involving the tribune Caedicius in the First Punic War is modelled on a scene in Xenophon’s Anabasis . It then argues that Livy’s account of a heroic escape in the First Samnite War orchestrated by P. Decius Mus is modelled not just on the First Punic War episode described by Cato, as scholars have suggested, but on the same passage of Xenophon; it also proposes that Livy’…
Thucydides, Sicily, and the Defeat of Athens
Cet article explore la réception du récit de Thucydide sur la défaite athénienne en Sicile en 415-413 av. J.-C., en insistant sur la relation entre la catastrophe sicilienne et la défaite finale d’Athènes en 404. Il commence par un bref aperçu de la renommée du récit de Thucydide. Il analyse ensuite la réception chez les écrivains postérieurs d’un certain nombre de motifs thucydidéens spécifiques : l’idée que l’expédition de Sicile est un symbole…
Horoscopes of Empires: Future Ruins from Thucydides to Macaulay
Xenophon’s Changing Fortunes in the Modern World
Xenophon’s Narrative Style
Self-Characterization and Political Thought in Xenophon’s Anabasis
This chapter analyses Xenophon’s self-portrayal in Anabasis, particularly in the scene after the arrest of the generals where Xenophon rises to prominence in his own account and in the retreat to the sea. It reads Xenophon’s account of the recreation of a sense of community in the Greek army from its position of aporia at the start of Book 3 against sophistic accounts of human development. At the military level, the Greek army is shown gradually …
Political Thought in Xenophon: Straussian Readings of the Anabasis
The main aim of this paper is to discuss some influential approaches to political thought in Xenophon’s Anabasis within the field of Political Science, especially within the United States, where the influence of Leo Strauss’ writings on Xenophon has been powerful. It starts by discussing a number of features shared by these discussions, notably a strong idealisation of Xenophon’s wisdom and accuracy; a lack of interest in the conditions under whi…
Space and Landscape in Xenophon’sAnabasis
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Space, Place, and Landscape in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture
This book brings together a collection of original essays that engage with cultural geography and landscape studies to produce new ways of understanding place, space, and landscape in Greek literature from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. The authors draw on an eclectic collection of contemporary approaches to bring the study of ancient Greek literature into dialogue with the burgeoning discussion of spatial theory in the humanities. The essay…
The Cylon Conspiracy: Thucydides and the Uses of the Past
Redeeming Xenophon: Historiographical reception and the transhistorical
The aim of this article is to explore some of the ramifications of Charles Martindale’s work for the study of the reception of classical historiography and to highlight some of the particular challenges facing researchers in this branch of reception studies. Historiography is a relatively undeveloped field within the area of classical reception studies, though there are signs that this is starting to change (notably through the large AHRC-funded …
Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation
War is a harsh teacher wrote Thucydides in the fifth century BC. Rood analyses the techniques through which Thucydides' narrative explains the origin and course of the Peloponnesian War and exposes harsh truths about how individuals and states behave. Rood concentrates on how the use of techniques, such as selectivity, interaction of speech and narrative, and manipulation of time and perspective, points at one level to general human constraints, …
Political Thought in Xenophon: Straussian Readings of the Anabasis
The main aim of this paper is to discuss some influential approaches to political thought in Xenophon’s Anabasis within the field of Political Science, especially within the United States, where the influence of Leo Strauss’ writings on Xenophon has been powerful. It starts by discussing a number of features shared by these discussions, notably a strong idealisation of Xenophon’s wisdom and accuracy; a lack of interest in the conditions under whi…
Redeeming Xenophon: Historiographical reception and the transhistorical
The aim of this article is to explore some of the ramifications of Charles Martindale’s work for the study of the reception of classical historiography and to highlight some of the particular challenges facing researchers in this branch of reception studies. Historiography is a relatively undeveloped field within the area of classical reception studies, though there are signs that this is starting to change (notably through the large AHRC-funded …
Black Sea variations: Arrian's Periplus
Comme tous les Grecs, il n'a pas pu ne pas embellir ce qu'il a touché. On retrouve en lui cet éminent esprit d'une race privilégiée qui dans les sujets les plus arides fait pénétrer l'art et même la poésie. ... même en quittant ... le Périple d'Arrien, nous pouvons dire comme Fuséli en quittant les marbres du Parthénon: ‘Ah! les Grecs, les Grecs, c'étaient des dieux.’ H. Chotard, Le Périple de la Mer Noire par Arrien Arrian's Periplus maris Euxin…
Anachronism and Antiquity
This book is a study both of anachronism in antiquity and of anachronism as a vehicle for understanding antiquity. It explores the post-classical origins and changing meanings of the term ‘anachronism’ as well as the presence of anachronism in all its forms in classical literature, criticism and material objects. Contrary to the position taken by many modern philosophers of history, this book argues that classical antiquity had a rich and varied …
Alfred Zimmern’s Early Political Thought II: Liberalism, Burke and The Greek Commonwealth
This is the second of two articles analysing the intellectual formation of Alfred Zimmern, a leading figure in the study of International Relations in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on many archival sources, it argues against claims in recent scholarship that Zimmern should be classified as a Burkean liberal. It first outlines Zimmern’s frequent advocacy of Socialism and state intervention, and then examines the politics of Zimm…
Zimmern, Athens, and the British Empire: Ancient and Modern Imperialism in The Greek Commonwealth
This article offers a reading of the intersections of ancient and modern imperialism in Alfred Zimmern's 1911 monograph The Greek Commonwealth: Politics and Economics in Fifth-Century Athens . The first section looks at Zimmern's use of ancient and modern comparisons and shows that, far from modernizing the ancient Greeks, as scholars have argued, he in fact insistently drew attention to the differences between the ancient and modern worlds. The …
Cato the Elder, Livy, and Xenophon’s Anabasis
This article argues firstly that Cato the Elder’s account of a daring plan involving the tribune Caedicius in the First Punic War is modelled on a scene in Xenophon’s Anabasis . It then argues that Livy’s account of a heroic escape in the First Samnite War orchestrated by P. Decius Mus is modelled not just on the First Punic War episode described by Cato, as scholars have suggested, but on the same passage of Xenophon; it also proposes that Livy’…
Perceptions: Towards Peace
Rhamphias and his men [reinforcements for Brasidas] returned home, knowing that when they set out, the Spartans were more inclined towards peace. Indeed it happened that, directly after the battle of Amphipolis and the retreat of Rhamphias from Thessaly, both sides no longer set their hands to war, but were more inclined to peace. The Athenians had suffered a blow at Delion, and again shortly afterwards at Amphipolis, and no longer had that confi…
Conclusion: The Ends of History
I started with two oppositions: between Plutarch’s vivid Thucydides, an incomparable writer, and the Thucydides whom historians (like Plutarch himself) have to confront when they tell their own stories about the period of his war; and between. Thucydides’ claim simply to tell a story of what people did and said, and his ambition to satisfy those who want ‘a clear picture of the past and of the similar things which will happen again at some time, …
Title Pages
Selectivity and Omission: Book I
Thucydides made his beginning at the point where Greek affairs began to decline. This should not have been done by a Greek and an Athenian, especially one who was not among the outcasts, but was counted by the Athenians among the foremost men and thought worthy of commands and other offices of state. And such is his malice that he actually attributes the overt causes of the war to his own city, though he could have attributed them to many other s…
Nikias and Athens
Our great historian—after devoting two immortal books to this expedition—after setting forth emphatically both the glory of its dawn and the wretchedness of its close, with a dramatic genius parallel to the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophokles—when he comes to recount the melancholy end of the two commanders, has no words to spare for Demosthenes (far the abler of the two, who perished by no fault of his own), but reserves his flowers to strew on the gr…
Temporal Manipulation
In life many different actions are accomplished at the same time, but those who record them have to interrupt the narrative and to parcel out different times to simultaneous events. This is contrary to nature: the result is that while reality conveys the experience of events, the written record, deprived of such power, imitates events, but falls far short of the true arrangement. (Diod. xx. 43. 7)
The Analysis of Narrative: Pylos
Thucydides’ treatment of land battles ... is either unnecessarily extended or excessively condensed. His narrative of Athenian operations at Pylos and the island called Sphakteria where they blockaded the Spartans and carried their position by siege, is an example. ... he describes with accuracy and force all that both sides did in the fighting, deliberately devoting more than three hundred lines to these battles, although the numbers who died or…
Introduction: History and Literature
The best historian is the one who, by a vivid representation of emotions and characters, makes his narrative like a painting. Thucydides is always striving in his writing for this vividness, since it is his desire to make the reader a spectator, as it were, and to instil in readers the emotions of amazement and consternation felt by viewers. For Demosthenes drawing up the Athenians at the very edge of the breakwater at Pylos; and Brasidas urging …
Selectivity and Omission: Athenian Politics
Defeat came upon us through our own quarrels. We were never conquered by others, and to this day we are still unconquered by them; but we were our own conquerors, and suffered defeat at our own hands. (Pl. Menex, 243d4-7)
The Pentekontaetia
The Pentekontaetia, Thucydides’ account of the (almost) fifty years between the Persian and the Peloponnesian Wars, is sparse and uneven, it omits many (in)famous events, and its account of those events it does mention is chronologically imprecise and lacking in strategic guidance. These perceived inadequacies, and the professional frustration they have caused, have led some scholars to conclude that the Pentekontaetia is unfinished, hastily writ…
Dedication
Appendix
Continuity: Book VIII
‘Some say that the eighth book is spurious, and not by Thucydides’: so Marcellinus (43). He himself names, and rejects, three people who had been credited with its authorship: Thucydides’ daughter (‘it would not be womanly nature to imitate such skill and excellence’), Xenophon (on grounds of style), and The opompus (without comment). He continues: ‘to some (especially those of discernment), it seems to be by Thucydides, but unadorned, written in…
Abbreviations
Athens and Sicily
As a result many other mistakes were made, as was to be expected in a great city with an empire, and above all the voyage to Sicily. It was not so much that this was an error of judgement with regard to those whom they were attacking, it was rather that the senders did not take the best measures for those who had gone out, but because of their personal quarrels over the leadership of the demos they weakened the army in the field and first introdu…
Misreadings: Book V
Victory at Mantineia ends one strand of the story of Pylos: Utterly worsted in respect of skill, the Spartans showed then that they were superior in courage. . . . By this one achievement they freed themselves from the imputations cast upon them by the Greeks at the time, of cowardice because of the disaster on the island, and of mismanagement and slowness generally: they were being maligned, so it seemed, for what was only ill fortune, but in sp…
Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation
War is a harsh teacher wrote Thucydides in the fifth century BC. Rood analyses the techniques through which Thucydides' narrative explains the origin and course of the Peloponnesian War and exposes harsh truths about how individuals and states behave. Rood concentrates on how the use of techniques, such as selectivity, interaction of speech and narrative, and manipulation of time and perspective, points at one level to general human constraints, …
Thucydides’ Persian Wars
Thucydides and his Predecessors
Thucydides' response to his literary predecessors has been explored with some frequency in recent years.Several articles have appeared even since Simon Hornblower recently wrote that 'two areas needing more work are Thucydides' detailed intertextual relation to Homer and to Herodotus'. In these discussions, Thucydides tends to be seen as inheriting a wide range of specific narrative techniques from Homer, and as alluding to particular passages in…
Herodotus and foreign lands
In the preface to his Histories , Herodotus promises to describe the great and wonderful deeds and monuments displayed both by Greeks and by non- Greeks as well as to explain why they fought against each other. He proceeds at once to what he claims is a Persian account of the origin of their disputes. The account attributed to the Persians turns out to be a sort of mythographic pastiche describing how enmity arose first when a Greek woman, Io, wa…
Objectivity and Authority: Thucydides’ Historical Method
A vivid vignette in Thucydides' narrative of fourth year of Peloponnesian War describes how Spartans get news to besieged city of Mytilene. Thucydides traces detail of Salaithos' journey to Mytilene. He perhaps even arouses some admiration for cunning of this Spartan, who manages to slip into a besieged city through enemy lines. Thucydides' regular allusions to himself as writer are most obvious way in which he breaks stream of factual narrative.…
The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus
Herodotus' Histories is the first major surviving prose work from antiquity. Its range of interests is immense, covering the whole of the known world and much beyond, and it culminates in a detailed account of the Persian Wars of the early fifth century BC. Moreover, research has shown that Herodotus is a sophisticated and at times even ironic narrator, and a pioneer and serious practitioner of historical research at a time when the Greeks' tradi…
The Development of the War Monograph
Attempts to understand the origins and development of Greek historiography are constantly thwarted by the paucity of information available to us. But if we turn to the development of one branch of Greek historiography, the war monograph, we seem to be in a slightly more fortunate position. We have in full the histories of both Herodotus and Thucydides. Herodotus' work covers a vast temporal and geographical spread, but it comes to a climax with a…
Oxford World's Classics: Xenophon: The Expedition of Cyrus
Black Sea variations: Arrian's Periplus
Comme tous les Grecs, il n'a pas pu ne pas embellir ce qu'il a touché. On retrouve en lui cet éminent esprit d'une race privilégiée qui dans les sujets les plus arides fait pénétrer l'art et même la poésie. ... même en quittant ... le Périple d'Arrien, nous pouvons dire comme Fuséli en quittant les marbres du Parthénon: ‘Ah! les Grecs, les Grecs, c'étaient des dieux.’ H. Chotard, Le Périple de la Mer Noire par Arrien Arrian's Periplus maris Euxin…
Classical Antiquity Studies (41 works) · History (41 works) · Art (33 works) · Literature (29 works) · Philosophy (21 works) · Political science (17 works) · Archaeology (16 works) · Classics (16 works) · Law (16 works) · Narrative (15 works)