Edith Hall

Edith Hall (born 4 March 1959) is a British scholar of classics, specialising in ancient Greek literature and cultural history, and professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. She has spoken on the radio and appeared on television as an expert in Ancient Greek society, literature and theatre. , her most recent book is Classical Civilisation and Ancient History in British Secondary Education, written with Arlene Holmes-Henderson (2025, Liverpool University Press).

Education

Edith Hall was born in Birmingham and attended school in Nottingham. Her doctoral thesis was awarded the Hellenic Foundation Prize. She went on to a post at the University of Oxford, where she was a fellow of Somerville College. She was quoted as saying "You cannot have a serious university without the study of the Greeks and Romans, as Terry Eagleton has said. It is a tragedy because we were really building something here". Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660–1914, by Hall and Fiona Macintosh, came out of the project. It was shortlisted for the Theatre Society Book of the Year Prize, the J.D. Criticos prize and the Runciman Award.

In 2012 Hall was awarded a Humboldt Research Prize to study ancient Greek theatre in the Black Sea.

In 2014 she was elected to the Academy of Europe. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2022.

Research

Hall researches ancient Greek literature, especially Homer, tragedy, comedy, satyr drama, ancient literary criticism and rhetoric, Herodotus and Xenophon, although her publications discuss many other ancient authors including Lucian, Plutarch, Artemidorus, Menander, Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle, and other ancient evidence including metre and versification, papyri, painted pottery and inscriptions. She is an expert on classical reception – the ways in which ancient culture and history have informed later epochs, whether in later antiquity or modernity, and whether in fiction, drama, cinema, poetry, political theory, or philosophy. Her research has been influential in three areas: the understanding of the performance of literature in the ancient theatre and its role in society, the representation of ethnicity; the uses of Classical culture in European education, identity, and political theory.

Ancient theatre and society

Several of her books argue that theatre plays an important role in intellectual and cultural history, especially because entertainments reach lower-status audiences. These include Greek and Roman Actors (2002, with P. E. Easterling), and The Theatrical Cast of Athens (2006), which incorporates a revisiting of Inventing the Barbarian in the light of developments in international history since 1989. New Directions in Ancient Pantomime (2008), the first study of the performance of mythological narratives which educated mass audiences across the ancient Mediterranean world for several centuries, was praised by D. Feeney, professor of Latin at Princeton University, as "indispensable for all students of the Roman Empire". Her book, Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun, argues that Greek tragedy is a philosophical medium, includes an essay on every surviving ancient Greek tragedy and has been described as "admirably exhaustive". Her 2013 book Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris: A Cultural History of Euripides' Black Sea Tragedy is a history of the impact of a tragedy by Euripides, covering its presence in vase-painting, Aristotle, Latin poetry, Pompeian murals, Roman imperial sarcophagi and literature including the ancient novel and Lucianic dialogue.

Bacchae and Other Plays by Euripides. Introduction by Edith Hall, trans. Morwood. Oxford World's Classics 2000

From 1996 to 2003, Hall contributed to the Oxford World's Classics Euripides series, which included all nineteen of Euripides' extant plays, newly translated by James Morwood and Robin Waterfield. Hall provided the introductions to each of the five volumes, drawing out the modern parallels with the texts. In the introduction to Bacchae and Other Plays, she explored Euripides' supposed "radicalism", quoting the critic F. L. Lucas: "not Ibsen, not Voltaire, not Tolstoi ever forged a keener weapon in defence of womanhood, in defiance of superstition, in denunciation of war, than the Medea, the Ion, the Trojan Women".

Ethnicity

Hall's first monograph, Inventing the Barbarian (1989), argued that ancient European identity relied on the stereotyping as 'other' of an Asiatic enemy. Her argument that ancient ideas about ethnicity underlie modern questions of nationalism, racism and ethnic self-determination has been influential in classics, and regarded as "seminal" by scholars in other fields. This work was developed in her scholarly commentary on the Greek text of Aeschylus' Persians, with English translation (1996), and in the essay collection she edited Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars (2007).

Classics and society

Hall's research has incorporated later cultural history, especially the social role played by the presence of ancient Greece and Rome. Her books in this area include The Return of Ulysses: a Cultural History of Homer's Odyssey (2008), noted by The New York Times for its scholarship and accessibility. This was followed by two collections of essays on ancient slavery and one on the uses and abuses of Greek and Roman texts and ideas in the relationship between India and Britain 1757–2007.

Hall is the principal investigator for The People's History of Classics, a project which presents and amplifies the voices of British working-class women and men who engaged with ancient Greek and Roman culture between 1789 and 1917. This developed from a research project based at King's College, London, called Classics and Class in Britain 1789-1917. Hall delivered the J P Barron Memorial Lecture at the Institute of Classical Studies in 2017 on Classicist Foremothers and Why They Matter. She advocates the teaching of classics, including classical civilisation as well as languages, in British state schools. In February 2014 she appeared on BBC2 Newsnight and recited a newly-discovered poem of Sappho in ancient Greek.

Personal life

Hall has been married and divorced, and has two daughters with her second husband, Richard Poynder. She has had family members die by suicide, and has written about this in Facing down the Furies: Suicide, the Ancient Greeks, and Me (2024).

Selected publications

Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (OUP, 1989) Sophocles' Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra (OUP, 1994) Aeschylus' Persians: Edited with Translation and Commentary (1996) Medea in Performance (Legenda, 2000) Dionysus since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium (2004) Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660–1914 (2005, with Fiona Macintosh) The Theatrical Cast of Athens: Interactions between Ancient Greek Drama & Society (2006) Agamemnon in Performance (Oxford University Press, 2007) Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars (OUP, 2007, with Emma Bridges and P. J. Rhodes) Aristophanes in Performance (Legenda, 2007) The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer's Odyssey (2007) New Directions in Ancient Pantomime (2008, with Rosie Wyles) Sophocles and the Greek Tragic Tradition (CUP, 2009, with Simon Goldhill) Greek Tragedy: Suffering Under the Sun (OUP, 2010) Theorising Performance (Duckworth, 2010) Reading Ancient Slavery (Bloomsbury, 2010) India, Greece and Rome 1757–2007 (Institute of Classical Studies, 2010) Ancient Slavery and Abolition (Oxford University Press, 2011) Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris: A Cultural History of Euripides' Black Sea Tragedy (OUP, 2013) Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind (W. W. Norton, 2014) Women Classical Scholars: Unsealing the Fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly (OUP, 2016, with Rosie Wyles) Aristotle's Way: How ancient wisdom can change your life (The Bodley Head, London, 2018) (Penguin, 2020, ) A People's History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity. Co-authored with Henry Stead. Routledge, 2020, Tony Harrison: Poet of Radical Classicism. Bloomsbury, 2021, Aeschylus' Agamemnon, edited with Translation, Introduction and Commentary. Aris & Phillips, 2024, Facing down the Furies: Suicide, the Ancient Greeks, and Me. Yale University Press, 2024, Epic of the Earth: Reading Homer’s Iliad in the Fight for a Dying World. Yale University Press, 2025, A Very Short Introduction to Sophocles. OUP, 2025, Classical Civilisation and Ancient History in British Secondary Education, co-authored with Arlene Holmes-Henderson Liverpool University Press, 2025, Time, Tense and Genre in Ancient Greek Literature. Co-edited with Connie Bloomfield-Gadêlha. OUP, 2025,