Max Leventhal

Background

My interest in Ancient Greek and Latin literature was first nurtured amidst the hills of Durham University (2009-12) where I was fortunate enough to be able to start both Latin and Greek from scratch. I then moved south to the much flatter Cambridge, first as a postgraduate student (2012-2018), then as a postdoctoral researcher (2018-22) and most recently as a College Teaching Associate at St John's College, Cambridge (2023-24). I briefly left the fens for the swamp, spending part of 2022-23 in Washington D.C. as a research fellow at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies. I arrived in Edinburgh in September 2024, thrilled to be joining an amazing community of Classicists and delighted again to be living and working in such a lofty and rolling cityscape.

Undergraduate teaching

  • Greek Intermediate (Greek 1c)
  • Greek Beginners (Greek 1b)
  • Greek Language A&B (Prose Composition)
  • Jewish Greek Literature
  • Journeys in the Greek Novel

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

I'd be delighted to hear from anyone interested in studying Hellenistic and later literature (prose as well as poetry), Hellenistic Jewish literature or Greek and Latin scientific and technical literature.

Research summary

Greek literature and especially Hellenistic literature; Hellenistic Jewish literature; science, mathematics and technology in Greek and Latin literature.

Current research interests

My abiding interest is in literary form: why do particular prose and poetic texts look the way they do? and how is this related to, and how does this express, the intellectual and religious contexts in which they were produced? In my current research this has led me to examine Hellenistic Jewish texts in Greek. After the Hebrew Torah was translated into Greek at some point in the third century BCE creating a document we now call the Septuagint, many non-scriptural or para-scriptural works were written by Greek-speaking Jews both in Judea and in the Diaspora. They include histories and novels, epics and tragedies, and prophetic, didactic and cosmological works. There are many fascinating aspects to these texts and as literary works they remain under-explored. While my guiding interest is in form, here it becomes a question not only of how the forms of these texts correspond to the religious context(s) that produced them, but also of how Greek literary traditions collide and combine with Jewish literary traditions. Several articles on these texts have been published or are forthcoming. I am currently working to complete a second monograph on the so-called Letter of Aristeas, a text from the end of the second century BCE which reports a story of how the Hebrew Torah was translated into Greek.

Past research interests

Literary form has also been central in the work I have completed to date. Questions of literary form led me, in my first book, Poetry and Number in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, to focus on poetry involving acts of counting and calculation; these mathematical moments can be found in the canonical poetry of Homer and Callimachus but also in the less well-known but no less interesting works of Archimedes (yes, that Archimedes!), Leonides of Alexandria (a first century CE epigrammatist) and the arithmetical poems preserved in the Palatine Anthology (dating from the Imperial Period to Late Antiquity). I wanted to consider how and why these moments might have been integrated into poetry. To which I proposed: such acts allow for a self-reflexive engagement with the expressive capacity of poetry and its demands on an audience.