Katie Lentakis Memorial Fund Award and Third Mary Margaret McCabe Dissertation Prize in Ancient Philosophy, in partnership with King’s CHS and Classics Department, the Anglo-Hellenic League, and the Foundation for Platonic Studies.

Speaker: Professor Emeritus Michael Trapp (King’s) on ‘A Life of Socrates in Six Scenes’

Abstract: This talk will use a set of trade cards from the 1940s as a point of entry into questions about how the biography of Socrates has been constructed and reconstructed over the ages. What episodes have been highlighted as specially significant, how have they been organised and supplemented, what has been de-emphasised or suppressed, and what perceptions, aims and constraints have operated to shape his biographers’ choices?

About the speaker: Michael Trapp is Emeritus Professor of Greek Literature and Thought at King’s College London, where he taught from 1989 to 2023. His research and publications range over Greek literature and philosophy in the Roman Imperial period, ancient epistolography, the reception of Socrates in and since antiquity, the history of classical studies at King’s, and the local history (classical and non-classical) of the King’s Strand campus. He is currently working on an edition and translation of the complete works of Aelius Aristides for the Loeb Classical Library.