Prof. Jonathan Prag

My doctorate was on the transformation of Sicily into the first Roman province and understanding Hellenistic and Roman Sicily remains a core focus of my research, alongside wider interests in Roman Republican imperialism and political culture, Hellenistic and Roman epigraphy, and a growing involvement in the digital humanities. Many of these interests come together in one of my current major projects, I.Sicily, building a digital corpus of the inscriptions of ancient Sicily (sicily.classics.ox.ac.uk). The project is a leading example of the application of digital techniques to the publication of inscriptions, and is also developing an extensive network of collaborations with museums and scholars across the island, and I am involved in multiple epigraphic projects on the island, including curation of an exhibition at the Museo Civico di Catania, cataloguing the collection of the Syracuse museum, co-editing the Taormina financial inscriptions, publishing the Egadi rostra inscriptions, and co-curating a new lapidarium at the site of Halaesa. I am also now co-directing an archaeological excavation at the Hellenistic/Roman site of ancient Halaesa in northern Sicily (halaesa.web.ox.ac.uk). I have, additionally, been collaborating for a number of years on a French project to produce a new edition (text, translation, commentary) of Cicero's Verrines.

Beyond Sicily my interests in Roman Republican imperialism have been focused in particular on the phenomenon of 'auxilia externa', the use by Rome of non-Italian soldiers across the Republican empire (which in turn entails a wider engagement in Roman military history); and on the application of data visualisation techniques to the analysis of Roman Republican history (vre.web.ox.ac.uk) in an attempt to challenge the existing narrative framework (part of a broader engagement with the problems of 'Roman imperialism' in general). The co-edited volume 'The Hellenistic West' (Cambridge 2013) exemplifies my wider concerns with Sicilian, Hellenistic and Roman history and challenging established frameworks.