Ian Worthington

Professor

1982 …2026

Research activity per year

Personal profile

Biography

Ian Worthington has been Professor of Ancient History since 2017.

Before then, he held an endowed chair as Curators' Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Missouri, USA. He hails from northern England, taking his B.A. at Hull and M.A. at Durham, before moving to Monash University to do his Ph.D. 

Worthington specializes in Greek history and oratory. To date, he has written 10 sole-authored books (some translated into several languages), 2 co-authored books, edited 9 books, translated 2 volumes of the Greek orators (in the University of Texas Oratory of Classical Greece series), and written over 100 articles and essays on Greek history, oratory, and epigraphy.

Authored books:

Macedonia under the Argeads: From City to Empire (OUP forthcoming
 
The Military Legacy of Alexander the Great: Lessons for the Information Age, with Major M. Ferguson, U.S. Army (Routledge 2024)

The Last Kings of Macedonia and the Triumph of Rome (OUP 2023)

Athens After Empire: A History from Alexander the Great to the Emperor Hadrian (OUP 2021); pb. published 2022

Ptolemy I: King and Pharaoh of Egypt (OUP 2016)

Lives of the Attic OratorsPseudo-Plutarch, Photius and the Suda, with J. Roisman and R. Waterfield, Clarendon Ancient History Series (OUP 2015).

By the Spear. Philip II, Alexander the Great, and the Rise and Fall of the Macedonian Empire (OUP 2014)

Demosthenes of Athens and the Fall of Classical Greece (OUP 2013)

Philip II of Macedonia (Yale Univ. Press 2008)

Alexander the Great:Man and God (Pearson 2004)

Greek Orators Vol. 2, Dinarchus 1 and Hyperides 5 & 6 (Aris & Phillips 1999)

A Historical Commentary on DinarchusRhetoric and Conspiracy in Later Fourth-Century Athens (Univ. Michigan Press 1992)

Some edited volumes:

Alexander the Great: A Reader, 2nd ed (Routledge 2011)

Blackwell Companion to Ancient Macedonia (2010; co-edited with J. Roisman)

Blackwell Companion to Greek Rhetoric (2007)

Epea and GrammataOral and Written Communication in Ancient Greece (Brill 2002; co-edited with John Miles Foley)

Demosthenes: Statesman and Orator (Routledge 2000)

Voice Into TextOrality and Literacy in Ancient Greece (Brill 1996)

Ventures Into Greek HistoryEssays in Honour of N. G. L. Hammond (OUP 1994)

Persuasion: Greek Rhetoric in Action (Routledge: 1994)

He is currently writing monographs on Roxane, wife of Alexander the Great (for OUP in its 'Women in Antiquity' series), and on military rhetoric, threat perception, and warfare in Athens as part of an ARC funded project on democratic Athens at war. He is also co-editing two books, the first with Priscilla Gontijo Leite (Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Brazil) on scare tactic rhetoric in various Greek and Roman authors for Routledge and the second with David Pritchard (UQ) on Warmaking in Fourth-century Athens: New Appraisals, also for Routledge, with both to burst onto the world in, touch wood, 2025.

Since 2003 he has been Editor-in-Chief of the major international research project Brill's New Jacoby (BNJ), which has published so far the fragments with critical commentaries of c. 900 ancient historians (nearly 8,000,000 words!), involving a team of over 170 scholars in 22 countries.

In addition to many conference papers worldwide, he has given invited talks and keynote addresses win Australia, America, Canada, the UK, several European countries, Brazil, and Japan, as well as national and radio and TV interviews and podcasts, founded the Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece conference series, appeared in the 2011 BBC TV series Ancient Worlds, and has a ‘Great Courses’ DVD and CD titled The Long Shadow of the Ancient Greek World, released in 2008.

In 2019 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (London) and in 2020 he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (London)

Also in 2019, he and Assoc. Prof. David Pritchard (UQ) won an ARC Discovery Project Grant of over $141,000 for their research project 'Democratic Athens at War'.

A willing victim of Hallyu, the few hours of his week not taken up with research and the like are spent listening to k-pop, watching k-dramas, and even grappling with Korean.

Research interests

Greek History, Greek Oratory.

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