About the Lecture
The dichotomy of farming and militarism that structures the final episode of Herodotus' Histories (9.122) has received little scholarly attention, despite the interpretive importance of the passage. In it, the Persian Great King, Cyrus, construes a proposal to emigrate from harsh Persis to more fertile lands as an attack on Persian militarism, which is then opposed to agrarian enslavement. There is, as yet, no treatment exploring why Cyrus responds in this way and how it should be interpreted. In this talk, she illustrates the emergence of a conceptual opposition between the spear and the plough in the fifth century BCE and trace its long afterlife. She argues that Cyrus’ words represent Persia’s recommitment to an imperial, militaristic identity, and that this resonates with the Histories’ presentation of the nascent imperialist Athenians.
About the Speaker
K. Scarlett Kingsley is an Associate Professor of Classics at Agnes Scott College. Her research explores the intersections of early Greek historiography and philosophy, with a particular focus on Herodotus, Thucydides, and the Presocratics. She has published widely in these areas, contributing to the understanding of intellectual culture in the fifth century BCE. Her first monograph, Herodotus and the Presocratics: Inquiry and Intellectual Culture in the Fifth Century (CUP, 2024), was supported by a Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship. She is also the co-editor, with Giustina Monti and Tim Rood, of The Authoritative Historian: Tradition and Innovation in Ancient Historiography (CUP, 2022). Currently, she is collaborating with Tim Rood (Oxford) on Land, Wealth, and Empire in Herodotus: Reading the End of the Histories (forthcoming, OUP), a study that reexamines Herodotus’s conclusion and its implications for understanding ancient conceptions of power and territoriality.
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The Contest of the Spear and the Plough: Imperial Identity and the Hoplite Farmer