The rise of populism in our contemporary world is much noted and much discussed. The ancient democracy of Athens, with a direct vote from citizens on every issue, would seem to have affinities. Were the ancient demagogues early populists? The historian Thucydides offered his own characterisation of these fifth-century politicians, from Pericles to Alcibiades, Cleon to Athenagoras.

In this month’s Balliol Online Lecture, Professor Rosalind Thomas will examine the surprising similarities and dissimilarities to certain modern populist strategies – and what Thucydides might have been trying to emphasise about the nature of political discourse at the time.

Professor Rosalind Thomas FBA is Dyson McGregor Fellow, Jowett Lecturer and Tutor in Ancient History, and Professor of Greek History. She teaches Greek and Roman history, and has written extensively on ancient literacy, particularly Greek literacy and orality, or non-written and performance culture, and on the implications of ancient Greece for wider theories about literacy.

Her research interests also include Greek law and society, the relation of rhetoric and Athenian democracy, Greek relations with Persia and Greek ideas about ‘the barbarian’, and on historiography, mainly Herodotus and Thucydides and most recently the local histories of the Greek city-states.

Among her monograph works, Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of persuasion (CUP 2000) examines the ‘father of history’ and his ethnographic explorations in the contemporary context of early medical and philosophical thought. Polis Histories, Collective Memories and the Greek World (CUP 2019) investigates the extensive local histories as a cultural & political phenomenon of the Greek world.