Department Colloquium: Suzanne Marchand (Louisiana State) "480 (BCE): The Modern Making of a World-Historical Date"

Speaker: Suzanne Marchand, Professor of History, Louisiana State University

Title: "480 (BCE): The Modern Making of a World-Historical Date"

Abstract: This paper will discuss the ways in which the significance of the date 480/79 was elevated in the course of historiographical developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Most particularly, it will emphasize the ways in which readings of Herodotus' Histories changed over this period, as Christian readings of the first books which focused on chronology and 'oriental' antiquities gave way to a Whiggish, philhellenic reading of the Graeco-Persian wars, one which drew inspiration less from Herodotus' account that from a liberal nationalist narrative I will call 'deep Athenocentricism.'  Drawing on visual as well as textual sources of many kinds, I will show that before the nineteenth century, it was not so natural for Europeans to conceive that the battles of Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea marked any particularly significant turning point in world history, or that 480 should be seen as the moment of western civilization's birth. The purportedly eternal 'clash of civilizations' does draw (very selectively) on ancient sources, but is largely an invention of the nineteenth century, one that recent research both in Herodotean studies and on the wider Mediterranean world cannot sustain.