480 (BCE): The Modern Making of a World Historical Date
Date: Wednesday, February 5, 2025
Time: 6:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. EST
Location: House A (3100 Whitehaven St. NW, Washington, D.C., 20008) and Zoom
Please join us the evening of February 5 for a lecture by Suzanne Marchand, LSU Systems Boyd Professor of European Intellectual History.
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 form a liberal nationalist narrative Marchand calls ‘deep Athenocentricism.’ Drawing on visual as well as textual sources of many kinds, she 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.
About the Speaker
Suzanne Marchand is LSU Systems Boyd Professor of European Intellectual History. Marchand obtained her BA from UC Berkeley in 1984, and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1992. She is the author of Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970 (Princeton, 1996) and German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Race, Religion, and Scholarship (2009), among other works. She has received fellowships from the ACLS, Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others, and in 2026 will be president of the American Historical Association. She is now working on a book titled Herodotus and the Instabilities of Western Civilization.
