The History Written on the Classical Greek Body

Robin Osborne is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow and Senior Tutor of King's College and a Fellow of the British Academy. His research ranges broadly across Greek history, Greek archaeology and the history of Greek art. Along with numerous edited and coedited volumes, he has written Demos: The Discovery of Classical Attika (Cambridge University Press, 1985), Classical Landscape with Figures: The Ancient Greek City and its Countryside (1987), Greece in the Making, 1200–479 BC (1996, 2nd edition 2009), Archaic and Classical Greek Art (1998) and Greek History (2004). A collection of his papers has been published as Athens and Athenian Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2010). This book was written as a contribution to a project on 'Changing Beliefs of the Human Body' funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

• Introduction; 1. Writing history on the classical body; 2. The appearance of the classical Greek body; 3. The distinguished body; 4. The citizen body; 5. Foreign bodies; 6. Dirty bodies; 7. Godsbodies; 8. Telling bodies.

"His aim is not to produce a history of the Greek body, but rather to use the body as a lens to bring into focus the biases and distortions inherent in more traditional text-centered histories." -- Zachary Biles, New England Classical Journal