The Leiden Greek and Roman History Team concentrates on the study of the economies, societies and cultures of the large empires of the Graeco-Roman world, starting with the empires of Alexander the Great and his successors.

The Greek and Roman History Team concentrates on the study of the economies, societies and cultures of the large empires of the Graeco-Roman world, starting with the empires of Alexander the Great and his successors.

In this doctoral dissertation (2012) the effects of the monetization of the Greek world in the 5th and 4th century on conceptions of reciprocity in friendship are analyzed.

Festival, Study trip Greek and Roman History 2026

This monograph by dr. Kim Beerden compares Greek divination to divinatory practices in Neo-Assyrian Mesopotamia and Republican Rome.

Inspired by a critical reconsideration of current monolithic approaches to the study of Greek religion, this book argues that ancient Greeks displayed a disquieting capacity to validate two (or more) dissonant, if not contradictory, representations of the divine world in a complementary rather than…

Lecture

Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Augustan Rome: Greek culture in the Roman world.

Lexicographical description of Greek; production of Greek-Dutch dictionary

This project will study the cultural meaning of the mythological figure of Orestes within the ancient Greek imagination, as it emerges from various literary sources from the archaic and classical periods.

This subproject of 'From Homo Economicus to Political Animal' will be on ancient analogues for modern-day “ersatz economics”, the economics of the “man in the street”.

These courses deal with all language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary are discussed thoroughly.

This new handbook by Frits Naerebout and Henk Singor places the history of the Greeks and Romans within the larger context of the contemporary Eurasian world.

On 16 November 2022 ms. Eftychia Mylona successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

This dissertation explores how domestic political power struggles in Greece and Turkey during the Cold War engaged with the ongoing conflict in Cyprus and aims to demonstrate how socialist parties in Greece and Turkey struggled with the concept of the “nation” in battling for power and political positioning…

Ancient Greek is well-known for displaying relatively free word order. This dissertation examines word order variation in the Koine Greek of the New Testament Greek in a variety of domains: declarative clauses, questions and relative clauses. In particular, I examine the way in which word order corresponds…

Ancient Greek was spoken in a large number of different dialects. Although we do not find direct evidence for syllabic liquids in any of our sources, comparative evidence shows that these sounds must have been present in Proto-Greek, and that they were retained until comparatively recently in the prehistory…

Whereas when we started the first Project the chief aim was pure research, to find out more about the past in a region, now we see that the countries of Europe are faced with the great problem that there are far too many archaeological sites for them to deal with by excavation, but yet some kind of…

Form and Function in Greek Grammar. Linguistic Contributions to the Study of Greek Literature is a new book, written by Albert Rijksbaron. Rijksbaron is internationally known as one of the leading scholars of the Ancient Greek language, whose work has exerted a strong and lasting influence on the scholarly…

This thesis aims at contributing to our understanding of the semantic and prosodic properties of object foci in Greek, employing theoretical and experimental tools.

The skin has recently gained attention within body studies for its many specific cultural and social associations, in addition to its biology. This project aims to examine the different layers of meaning and the functions invested in the skin in ancient Greece: how did ancient Greek literary and medical…

Objects, Appropriation and Cultural Change

The project ‘Diversifying Ancient History’, sponsored by the JEDI Fund from the Faculty of Humanities, aims to thoroughly revise the first-year curriculum of Ancient History. Through these innovations, the course will cater the needs of the present generation.

This project looks at the Ancient Greek language from the perspective of the ordinary writer. A large corpus of more than 60.000 Greek texts on papyrus, from private letters to petitions and contracts, offers an excellent opportunity to study the Greek language as written by non-literary writers in…

This is the first full-scale reference grammar of Classical Greek in English in a century.

This is the first comprehensive commentary on a section of Xenophon's Anabasis in English for almost a century.

The academic staff of the Leiden University Institute for History.

Turning the tables on the misconception that Ezra Pound knew little Greek, this volume looks at his work translating Greek tragedy and considers how influential this was for his later writing.

This project examines the intriguing relationship between Greek literary criticism and Latin literature in Rome (first centuries BC and AD).

Many lecturers aim to make their courses more diverse, but they often encounter problems in the process. How can they receive the information they need? This project ‘Wanted: roadmap’ develops a roadmap for Dutch (academic) historians to bring diversity into practice. BA1 teaching in Graeco-Roman history…

Which plants in the Mediterranean garden were already known to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and how were they utilized?

In the History of the Roman Emperors, what does Herodian’s method of composition consist of and how does it relate to his writing intention, particularly in terms of political and moral idea(l)s?

The combination of global questions and a wide range of local sources characterizes the Leiden University Institute for History.

To what end and how does Plautus constantly underline the Helleni(sti)c provenance of his art? How does this aspect relate the author’s originality?

This volume investigates how urban growth and prosperity transformed the cities of the Roman Mediterranean in the last centuries BCE and the first centuries CE, integrating debates about Roman urban space with discourse on Roman urban history.

We live in a data-drenched society awash with numbers. An inhabitant of the democratic polis of Athens (5th and 4th centuries B.C.E.) increasingly found himself surrounded by numerical data. This project aims to analyze the communicative functions and the political meaning(s) ascribed to these public…

On the 17th of June Rea Matsangou successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

The Impact of Mobility and Migration in the Roman Empire assembles a series of papers on key themes in the study of Roman mobility and migration.

This volume contains the first edition of 66 papyri and ostraca in the collection of the Leiden Papyrological Institute.

This project is about a funerary altar with a Latin inscription for Q. Petronius Turnus. It was found in Rome and dated to the first century CE. It became part of the collection of Baron van Westreenen, and is now in Museum The House of the Book in The Hague.

The Master History (study load 60 EC) offers you the chance to determine a study based on your own particular interests and ambitions.

In this dissertation, the types of context Dutch speakers need to interpret the poly-interpretable word ergens ‘somewhere/anywhere’ are studied.

The first objective is to create a catalogue raisonée, i.e. a structured database that will store the main attributes of each town in a standardized format database, which will be freely accessible when completed; the second objective is to exploit theories and methods that can help us to understand…

Migration is the talk of the town. On the whole, however, the current situation is seen as resulting from unique political upheavals. Such a-historical interpretations ignore the fact that migration is a fundamental phenomenon in human societies from the beginning and plays a crucial role in the cultural,…