Classics Lecture: Who Were the Greeks?

Sir John Myres posed this question in his 1927 Sather Lectures at the University of California Berkeley. Contrary to many scholars of his day, Myres did not believe that the issue of Greek identity was self-evident and he argued that it had arisen slowly over a period of time on Greek soil. This lecture will examine how, why, when, and on what grounds the ancient Greeks began to think of themselves as a singular ethnic entity and will trace developments in the definition of what it meant to be Greek in the ancient world.

Jonathan M. Hall, Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities and Professor in the Departments of History and Classics at The University of Chicago