Audio from Chalke Valley History Festival for Schools 2017 with Amanda Mitchison.

Audio from Chalke Valley History Festival for Schools 2017 with Helen Rappaport

Audio from Chalke Valley History Festival for Schools 2017 with James Holland.

Audio from Chalke Valley History Festival for Schools 2017 with Dr Gareth Davies.

Audio from Chalke Valley History Festival for Schools 2017 with Chris Culpin.

Audio from Chalke Valley History Festival for Schools 2017 with Ben Kane.

The Greeks of the fifth century BCE did not practise life-writing. Our word ‘biography’ is of Greek derivation (biographia), but the genre was not developed until well after Herodotus’s lifetime and achieved its apogee only with Plutarch (c. 46 BCE – CE 120). That’s one reason why Herodotus’s life and death dates (?? 484-425 BCE) are only approximate: no one cared to record them at the time. Another is that the genre of biography was reserved at first for ‘great’ men, movers and shakers on the political scene, such as Pericles or Alexander the Great. Not for men of letters, mere intellectuals: even though – as we now know -  it’s historians who make history.