Lecturers > Robin Osborne

Name
Prof. Robin Osborne

College
King's

What is your field of history?
Greek History and Archaeology.

How did you come to specialise in this area?
Inspirational school teacher, A.F.J. Brown, who was both a Classicist and a local historian, and who on retirement at 60 from school teaching moved to a part-time post at the University of Essex where he taught for another 25 years…

What sort of source material do you tend to use, and what are its strengths and weaknesses?
Literary texts, inscriptions on stone and on pots, ancient painted pottery and sculpture, pottery scatters indicating patterns of settlement. Between them these raise the whole range of problems from the influence of the type of literature on what literary texts tell us, the editorial control of inscriptions and their giving information only on a 'need to know' basis, the selectivity of images and their mix of observation and fantasy, and preservation problems with archaeological data, inscriptions and texts.

Which individuals, events or forces are especially important in your area of history?
Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, conquest of Greece by Macedon (Philip II and Alexander the Great) and by Rome.

How has your field developed over the course of your career?
Social history has become much more important, most notably with regard to gender questions. The range of evidence used has become much wider, and the links between literary and historical studies and between archaeological and historical studies have become much closer.

Which areas of your field most urgently need further exploration?
The integration of different sorts of evidence still needs further work, and there is a lot of room for further work on socio-economic history and socio-political history.

What characterises good history?
The consciousness that history is the writing of a story and requires an argument, but that it also requires that that argument be based explicitly in evidence.

How did your understanding of history change during your time as a university student?
I acquired a much more sensitive approach to how one used ancient texts to write history, and a much more rigorous approach which involved making sure all available evidence on a question was under control before writing.

Where should somebody interested in your area of history go for further information?
I wrote Greek History (2004) - a very short book, despite the title! - precisely to give an introduction to the major questions in the field.