Dr Oliver Clarke

I grew up in Birmingham, before I moved to Oxford to read Classics at New College as an undergraduate. After a short period of working in the real world, I spent a year in Scotland at St Andrews where I did my MLitt in Classics. I then returned to New College to pursue my doctorate. After my DPhil, I worked on the ERC-funded CHANGE project for a year alongside teaching tutorials at several colleges, before I started in October 2025 as Curatorial Assistant for Greek Coins in the Heberden Coin Room of the Ashmolean Museum, a position I hold alongside my stipendiary lectureship at LMH.

My research is on the Hellenistic world (c.330-30 BC), and is especially concerned with making connections between different kinds of evidence: how do we interpret public and private inscriptions on stone erected in Greek cities from Sicily to modern Afghanistan; the gold, silver and bronze coins minted by cities and kings across the same geographical range; and the literary testimonies, often fragmentary, that come down to us in sources that were often written long after the events they describe?

My doctoral research, which I am now turning into my first monograph, focused on the cities of Western Asia Minor in the first 50 years of this period. This work asks how, in cities such as Rhodes, or Ephesus, or Ilion (better known as Troy), did local politicians and the citizens of these places, learn how to navigate and negotiate their way from the rapid conquests of Alexander the Great to the death, five decades later, of the last of his Successors, via a dizzyingly complex series of wars in between. I argue that, although these cities, large and small, had to react to a rapidly changing geopolitical environment, they were, on average, quite successful in weathering these storms and leveraging their advantages.

My future projects are divided into several different streams: I am working on a series of publications of the coinage of the city of Magnesia on the Maeander, in what is now western Turkey. These span from the coins issued by the exiled Athenian leader Themistocles, who had a final career as dynast under the Persian king through to the coinage issued in honour of Augustus, and the establishment of the Roman empire.

Another element is a series of studies of individuals who, during the Roman Empire, claimed descent from prominent figures of the Classical and Hellenistic periods. Why did certain successful Samians claim to be descended from the infamous Alcibiades, an Athenian, 500 years earlier? Could these claims be true, or at least, were they credible to these individuals peers? And what benefits did they accrue from such claims?

I am also beginning to sketch out a larger project on the Hellenistic historian Polybius, and his conception, and use, of time, in his Histories.

I teach a full range of Greek history papers.