Professor Richard Seaford
Professor
Extension: 4248
Telephone: 01392 724248
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 about 70 papers on subjects that include Homer, Greek lyric poetry, Greek religion (in particular the cult of Dionysos), the earliest philosophy, Greek tragedy, Greek satyric drama, and the New Testament.
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 (called by the Times Literary Supplement 'undoubtedly one of the most important works on Greek religion and society to have appeared in the last quarter of the twentieth century'). My recent books are Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Dionysos (Routledge, 2006), and Cosmology and the Polis: the Social Construction of Space and Time in the Tragedies of Aeschylus (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
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 kind of society in which they live.
In 2009 I was honorary President of the national Classical Association.
