Peter Hunt, chair of the Classics Department and a classical Greek historian, studies warfare and society, slavery, historiography, foreign policy thinking, and oratory. His first book, Slaves, Warfare and Ideology in the Greek Historians (Cambridge 1998), discerns a conflict between the extent of slave and Helot participation in Greek warfare and the representation of their role in contemporary historians. His second book, War, Peace, and Alliance in Demosthenes’ Athens (Cambridge 2011) uses the evidence of deliberative oratory as evidence for Athenian thinking and feeling about foreign relations; it was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement and won the Kayden Prize this year.
His current projects include a college-level text on Greek and Roman slavery and a new investigation tentatively entitled “Athens’ Thracian Frontier.” Over the years he has spent many months camping out and rock climbing in various parts of the western United States, which he loves.