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Professor Richard Seaford

Emeritus Professor

 

Professor Richard Seaford

I am strongly committed to the view that the study of ancient culture is a vital form of liberation (from the triviality and increasing narrowness of our own media culture).

I have published over 100 papers on subjects that include Homer, Greek lyric poetry, Greek religion, presocratic philosophy, the comparison of early Indian with early Greek religion and thought, Greek tragedy, satyric drama, the New Testament, and the reception of ancienet drama.

My books include commentaries on the two Dionysiac plays of Euripides (Bacchae and Cyclops), and Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State (Oxford U.P. 1994), Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy (Cambridge U.P., 2004), Dionysos (Routledge, 2006), Cosmology and the Polis: the Social Construction of Space and Time in the Tragedies of Aeschylus (Cambridge U.P. 2012, research funded by the Leverhulme Trust), Tragedy, Ritual, Money. Selected Essays (Cambridge U.P., 2018), and The Origins of Phiosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India. A Historical Comparison (Cambridge U.P., 2020, research funded by the AHRC).

I have an abiding interest in uncovering the relationship - in ancient Greece as well as in our own society - between how people think and the shape of the society in which they live.

In 2009 I was honorary President of the national Classical Association.

 

Other information

2005-2008: Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship

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