Ewen Bowie held the post of E.P.Warren raelector in Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, from 1965 to 2007; from 1968 he was also a lecturer in Greek and Latin Language and Literature in the University of Oxford, becoming a Reader in 1996 and a Professor in 2004. He was the first Director of the Corpus Christi College Centre for the study of Greek and Roman Antiquity in 1993-6.
His principal research interests have been Greek elegiac and iambic poetry of the 7th-5th centuries BC and the Greek literature and culture of the first three centuries of the Roman Empire. Significant publications in the first of these fields have been "Early Greek elegy, symposium and public festival", Journal of Hellenic Studies, 106 (1986) 13 35, and "Ancestors of Herodotus in Early Greek Elegiac and Iambic Poetry" in The Historian?s Craft in the Age of Herodotus, ed. N.Luraghi (Oxford 2001) 45-66. In the latter field, his first publication, "Greeks and their past in the second sophistic", Past & Present 46 (1970) 3 41; reprinted in Studies in Ancient Society, ed. M.I Finley (London 1974) 166 209, is still regularly cited. Other important contributions have been "Apollonius of Tyana: tradition and reality", Aufstieg und Niedergang der r?ischen Welt II.16.2 (Berlin 1978) 1652 99, "The importance of sophists", Yale Classical Studies 27 (1982) 29 59; "Greek Poetry in the Antonine Age", in Antonine Literature, ed. D.A.Russell (Oxford 1990) 53-90; and "The ancient readers of the Greek novels", in A Companion to the Ancient Novel, ed. G.Schmeling (Leiden 1996) 87-106.
His recent publications concerning the Imperial period include "Past and present in Pausanias" in Pausanias Historien: Entretiens Hardt 41 (1996) 207-230; "The chronology of the earlier Greek novels since B.E.Perry: revisions and precisions", Ancient Narrative 2: (2002) 47-63; "Denys d? Alexandrie: un po?e grec dans l?empire romain", REA 106 (2004) 177-185; "Viewing and listening on the novelist?s page" in E.Cueva (ed.) Papers in honour of Gareth Schmeling. Ancient Narrative. Supplementum 5. Barkhuis Publishing and Groningen University Library 2006; "Choral performances" in Greeks on Greekness, Supplement to the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, ed. D.Konstan and S.Said (2006); "Portrait of the sophist as a young man" in B.McGing and J.Mossman (edd.) The Limits of Ancient Biography (Swansea 2006) 141-153; "The construction of the classical past in the ancient Greek novels" in D.Searby (ed.). SUGXARMATA. Festschrift for J.-F.Kindstrand; "Pulling the other: Longus and tragedy" in C.Kraus, S.Goldhill, H.P.Foley and J.Elsner (ed.) Visualizing the Tragic. Festschrift for F.Zeitlin (New York: OUP 2007) 338-352; "The ups and downs of Aristophanic travel in the Greek literature of the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D." in E.Hall and A.Wrigley (edd.) Aristophanes in Performance. 421BC-AD 2007 (Oxford: Legenda 2007) 32-51.
Recent publications on archaic Greek literature include "Early Greek iambic poetry: the importance of narrative" in: A.Cavarzere, A.Barchiesi, A.Aloni, (edd) Iambic ideas : essays on a poetic tradition from Archaic Greece to the late Roman Empire (Lanham, Md. 2001) and "Early expatriates: displacement and exile in archaic poetry" in J.-F.Gaertner (ed.) Writing exile. The discourse of displacement in Greco-Roman antiquity and beyond. Leiden: Brill (2007) 21-49.
He has also published on Attic Comedy, most recently "Ionian iambus and Old Attic Comedy" in A. Willi (ed.) The language of Old Comedy (Oxford 2003) 33-50 and Hellenistic poetry, most recently "From archaic elegy to Hellenistic sympotic epigram?" in P.Bing and J.Bruss (edd.) Brill?s Companion to Hellenistic Epigram (Leiden 2007) 95-112.
Work shortly to be published includes "Wandering poets, archaic style" (a chapter for a Cambridge collection); an article on the reception of the Trojan war in Greek poetry between Homer and Attic tragedy; a chapter in the Cambridge Companion to the Ancient Novel relating the novels to the other Greek literature of their period; studies of the construction of Greek identity in three first century BC Mytileneans (Theophanes, Potamon and Crinagoras) and in the epigrammatic poets drawn upon in the Garland of Philip; studies of the quotation of earlier Greek literature in Aelius Aristides, Philostratus and Stobaeus; and a chapter on the presentation of Rome and the Roman empire in the civic speeches of Aristides.
A set of essays on Philostratus of which Ewen Bowie and Jas Elsner are the editors is about to go to press; and a commentary on which Ewen Bowie has been working for many years is now near completion. His next project will be a book on Hadrian?s relations with the Greek world.
