Principal's Research Seminar - Prof Katherine Clarke FBA

To Boldly Go: Travels of the Imagination to the Edges of the Earth

How did people make sense of the world over 2000 years before anyone had looked down on it from space or even from a plane? Professor Clarke will explore some of the strategies adopted by ancient Greek authors to conceptualise, articulate, and convey the vast space of the world known to them through exploration, economic ventures, tourism, conflict, and conquest – in other words, to ‘map’ its geography, its peoples, and their customs. The vastness of that world was mirrored by the variety of places that ‘Greek authors’ called home, from North Africa to Syria and beyond, so that there was no single Greek ‘centre’ from which the rest of the world could be reliably viewed, measured, and assessed. Instead, scientific thinking came together with travellers’ tales and imaginative fiction in a range of illuminating and entertaining texts that take the reader not only to the edges of the earth, but even beyond into outer space.

Professor Katherine Clarke, has been Fellow & Tutor in Ancient History since 1998. She has published books on how the Greek geographical tradition was moulded to the world of the Roman empire; Greek concepts of time, particularly in relation to the local histories of city-states; and human interaction with the natural world in the monumental Histories of the Greek historian, Herodotus. She is currently working on a book exploring the prevalence of regal power in Rome, the supposedly king-hating polity par excellence, viewed through the eyes of the Roman historian, Tacitus.