This book is a study both of anachronism in antiquity and of anachronism as a vehicle for understanding antiquity. We have tried to make it accessible to readers outside Classics with an interest in the history of temporality: we offer translations of all Greek and Latin (sometimes with small borrowings from published versions), and have offered guidance for further reading in the notes rather than exhaustive documentation of secondary literature. Published translations of post-classical works have sometimes been adapted.
The writing of this book was supported by the Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant ‘Anachronism and Antiquity’ (October 2016–September 2019: https://anachronismandantiquity.wordpress.com/), for which Tim Rood (TR) was Principal Investigator and Carol Atack (CA) and Tom Phillips (TP) Post-doctoral Research Associates; CA and TP are in addition preparing separate monographs for the project (on Plato and Apollonius respectively). Mathura Umachandran joined the project in September 2018 and provided intellectual energy and keen critical comments: the book owes a great deal to her involvement. John Marincola and Scarlett Kingsley were involved in preparing the Leverhulme application and supported the project throughout. Prior to the application, TR presented a collection of material on ancient anachronism and the history of anachronism at an exploratory workshop he organized in September 2015 with support from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University; papers were also given at the workshop by Kate Gilhuly, Larry Kim, Scarlett Kingsley, Paul Kosmin, John Marincola, Francesca Schironi, Valeria Sergueenkova, Barnaby Taylor and Emma Teng, all of whom made it a very fertile occasion. John Marincola in addition secured funding for a stimulating conference on anachronism at Florida State University in March 2018, where CA, TP, Emily Greenwood, Constanze Güthenke, Brooke Holmes, Scarlett Kingsley, Ellen O’Gorman, Mark Payne and Barnaby Taylor gave papers (six of which form a special issue of Classical Receptions Journal). We must express gratitude, too, to the project’s Steering Committee (Catherine Darbo-Peschanski, Emma Dench, Jaś Elsner, Constanze Güthenke, Nicholas Purcell and Kostas Vlassopoulos) and to the editorial team at Bloomsbury, Alice Wright and Lily Mac Mahon. The Musée Communale, Boulogne-sur-Mer, and the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, kindly offered free use of images; the cost of other images was supported by the Jowett Copyright Trust.
All three authors share a connection with St Hugh’s College, Oxford: TR as Fellow in Classics; CA first as Lecturer, then as Junior Research Fellow and Tutor for Equality; TP as alumnus. The college’s staff (academic and non-academic), students, buildings, libraries, gardens and food make it a wonderful place to work and breathe: we would like to offer this book to all those whose dedication helps to make it so.