This week we are going back to witness the birth of history
as a written discipline.
Our guide on this long journey into the ancient world has spent his life
studying and teaching Greek language and culture, but it was when he retired from academia that Professor Roderick Beaton found the time to write the book he had been dreaming about since he first visited Greece as a teenager. The Greeks, A Global History is a masterful, sweeping journey through 3500 years of history that tells the stories of Greek people, their language and their culture.
In this episode, Roderick takes us back to the year 447BCE and the moment when Herodotus of Halicarnassus, newly arrived in Athens, sat down and began to write his Histories and in doing so, laid the foundations of the discipline of History itself.
As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.
Click here to order Roderick Beaton’s The Greeks: A Global History from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.
Show Notes
Scene One: Herodotus of Halicarnassus arrives in Athens and begins writing his monumental Histories.
Scene Two: Pericles, the many-times elected statesman of the Athenian democracy, persuades his fellow-citizens to embark on a huge and
controversial building programme on the Acropolis of Athens.
Scene Three: Outside the small town of Coronea, an Athenian expeditionary force is defeated by the city’s neighbours, the Boeotians. The defeat marks the beginning of division of the ancient Greek world into blocs led by Athens and Sparta, and is the harbinger of the Peloponnesian War in which the Greek city-states fought themselves to exhaustion and stalemate.
Memento: One of the rolled scrolls on which Herodotus wrote his Histories.
People/Social
Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Roderick Beaton
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Unseen Histories
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
Or on Facebook
See where 447 BCE fits on our Timeline
Edward Shawcross: The Last Emperor of Mexico (1867)
Nick Rennison: Scenes from a Turbulent Year (1922)
Christmas with the Three Wise Historians (2021)
Tom Chivers: Journeys into Deep London (62 AD)
Elizabeth Drayson: The Last Muslim Sultan of Granada (1492)
Nigel Pickford: Samuel Pepys and the Strange Wrecking of the Gloucester (1682)
Zoë Playdon: The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes (1967)
Jamie Mackay: Garibaldi and the Birth of Italy (1860)
Christina Lamb and Judith Mackrell: Looking for Trouble with Virginia Cowles (1938)
Tracy Borman: Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada (1588)
Robert Lyman: A War of Empires (1944)
Robert Sackville-West: The Missing of the First World War (1915)
James Clark: The Dissolution of the Monasteries (1540)
Malcolm Gaskill: An Execution and a Witch (1649)
Justine Picardie: Miss Dior (1947)
Garry J Shaw: Ancient Egypt and Tutankhamun (c.1335 BC)
Neil Oliver: Skara Brae (2,500 BC)
Michael Pye: The City at the Hub of the World (1549)
Susan Denham Wade: The Gutenberg Press (1454)
Join Podbean Ads Marketplace and connect with engaged listeners.
Advertise Today
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Irish Songs with Ken Murray
History Obscura
Historycal: Words that Shaped the World
Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra
The Rest Is History