Tim Rood

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Tim Rood is a lecturer in classics at the University of Oxford, where he is a fellow and tutor at St Hugh’s College. His research focuses on the literary techniques of Greek historians, especially Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, and on the way their works and the events they describe have been perceived in the modern world. His most recent book, The Sea! The Sea! The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination (Duckworth Overlook, 2005), which was short-listed for the Runciman Award, is a study of the reception of Xenophon’s Anabasis, focusing on the extraordinary echoes and reverberations in the last two hundred years of “Thalatta! Thalatta!”—the famous shout uttered by the Greek mercenary army retreating through Asia when it first caught sight of the sea. He has also edited the Anabasis for the Oxford World’s Classics series.

At Radcliffe, Rood plans to complete the first detailed modern literary study of the Anabasis. He will focus particularly on Xenophon’s imaginative geography, his portrayal of the army as a political unit, and his self-presentation and will show how his military memoir contributed to Greek political and ethical thought.

Rood earned his BA and DPhil at Oriel College, Oxford. His DPhil thesis (1995) shared the Hellenic Foundation prize; he revised it for publication as Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation (Oxford University Press, 1998) while he held a Junior Research Fellowship at The Queen’s College, Oxford. His research has also been supported by the British Academy.