26 July 2012
On 28-29 June 2012 Bristol hosted an international conference on the theme of 'Thucydides our Contemporary?', featuring speakers from the US, Canada, Germany and Italy as well as the UK, political theorists and philosophers as well as classicists and historians. The event concluded with a brilliant public lecture by Hunter Rawlings, distinguished classicist and current President of the Association of American Universities, on 'A Possession for All Time? How and why Thucydides still matters'; this charted the influence of Thucydides on thinking about the nature and causes of war through Thomas Hobbes, David Hume and W.H.Auden to his own encounter with the work in the shadow of the Vietnam War, and his son's recent engagement with it as a serving military officer in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Neville Morley, the director of the AHRC-funded research project on 'Thucydides: reception, reinterpretation and influence' that organised the conference, will be posting regularly over the next few weeks on the Bristol Classics blog bristolclassics.wordpress.com, giving summaries of the different papers and discussing some of the issues they raised.
Coincidentally, a landmark work on the reception of Thucydides, co-edited by Professor Morley and based on papers from the first phase of the project, has just been published by Cambridge University Press: 'Thucydides and the Modern World: reception, reinterpretation and influence from the Renaissance to the present'.