Professor Michael Trapp

I read Classics at Oxford (Corpus Christi College) and wrote my doctoral dissertation there on the second-century Platonizing orator (and representer of Socrates) Maximus of Tyre. I came to the University of London in 1984, teaching first at Birkbeck College, and moving to King’s in 1989.”

Research interests

My main areas of research are Greek literature and thought of the first two centuries CE, and the reception of the ancient world, with special reference to the figure of Socrates, and to the local history of classical studies at King's College London. I am fascinated both by the world of Greek writers and intellectuals in the first centuries of the Roman Empire, in particular the uses made of the ideas and practices they called philosophia, and by the ways in which particular numinous figures from antiquity – Socrates is the richest and most provocative of all examples of this – have been re-imagined, appropriated and represented since their own day.

• Greek literature and thought of the first two centuries CE
• Philosophy as an institution in the ancient world
• The depiction and use of  Socrates in antiquity and since
• Classical survivals, real and imagined the history of Classics at King's College London

For more details, please see my full research profile. 

Expertise and public engagement

• Greek oratory and orators in the Roman Empire
• Philosophy in the Roman Empire 
• Images and uses of Socrates
• History of the King's Strand Campus, with special reference to Old Somerset House and Strand Lane
• History of Classics at King's
• Secretary, Gilbert Murray Trust Classical Committee

Selected publications

Just some notes for my own use: Arrian’s (‘Arrian’s’?) letter to Lucius Gellius, in J. Soldo and C.R. Jackson (ed.)Res vera, res ficta: fictionality in ancient epistolography (De Gruyter 2023) 85-102

Aelius Aristides I (Orations 1-2) and II: Orations 3-4 (ed. and tr.), Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Library) 2017, 2021

‘With all due respect to Plato: the Platonic Orations of Aelius Aristides’ TAPA 150 (2020) 85-113

‘“A fine specimen of Neronian brickwork” in Victorian London: how the Strand Lane Cold Bath became Roman’, in International Journal of the Classical Tradition 24 (2016) 147-174

Philosophy in the Roman Empire: Ethics, Politics and Society (Ashgate 2007)