Dr Peter Martin

Peter works on how Greek and Roman history writing changed over time, and on how Hellenistic epigraphy changed across space. His forthcoming book with CUP, The Changing Character of Greek and Roman Historiography, identifies features characteristic of history writing in one period but no longer found in another, revealing transformations in the way ancient historians asserted their truthfulness, conceived of the future, and judged individuals, between the time of Herodotus and Ammianus Marcellinus. In his next project, Inscribing Difference: Hellenistic City-States in the Cyclades, he argues that peer polity interactions in the Hellenistic period resulted not just in a sharing of practices across poleis but also in epigraphic differentiation. 

He has published on the absence of physical descriptions in classical Greek politics and has under review a chapter on the equivocal predictions about Rome’s future in historiography. He is currently working on various articles and chapters, including on the Old Oligarch’s unusual way of adopting his opponents’ political perspective; the emphasis on foreignness in the Hellenistic epigraphy of Amorgos; Thucydides’ and Attic stelai’s different conceptions of speech-events; and body politic imagery in Sallust. He is co-editing with Daniel Sutton a volume on the variety of uses of speeches in Greek and Roman historiography. 

Peter is the Mary and Moses Finley Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge. Prior to that, he was the Dan David Fellow at Tel Aviv University (2022–2023), and a visiting lecturer in Greek History at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire (2022). He received his BA, MPhil, and PhD in Classics at Cambridge. In Lent and Easter 2024 (and again in Easter 2026), he has been the Acting Director of Studies at Magdalene and Lucy Cavendish Colleges.