Claire Hall is a historian of ancient Greek science and religion.
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From seasonal cycles and reincarnation to cosmic destruction and rebirth, ancient Greek and Roman philosophers developed competing theories of how time repeats—and what that repetition means for human life.
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Claire Hall is a research fellow at Durham and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Her research explores the future in Greco-Roman antiquity, examining how philosophical, literary, and religious texts—and technical disciplines such as medicine, astronomy, and divination—shaped ideas of prediction and foresight. Her current book project, Knowing the Future in the Greco-Roman World, investigates how a new concept of the future as a predictable, mappable space emerged in the first two centuries AD.
Her first book, Origen and Prophecy (2021), studied prophecy in the work of the Christian philosopher Origen of Alexandria, situating it within Classical and Hellenistic philosophy and ancient Jewish thought. Hall has also published on Greek authors including Ptolemy, Vettius Valens, Galen, and Artemidorus. She teaches history, philosophy, and the languages of Greek and Latin across all areas of Greco-Roman antiquity.External
The Cook Always Wins
London Review of Books | March | 2024
Galen, a famous doctor in the late 100s CE, disapproved of people who focused only on building big muscles instead of their minds. In his time, gym culture and athletic competitions were central to Greek and Roman life, and public baths were major social spaces. Galen believed many people cared too much about food and luxury. A new edition of his writings shows his view that health depends on each person’s unique body. A good doctor, he argued, must understand both healthy and sick bodies to restore true well-being.
London Review of Books | May | 2023
Hall reviews Carlo Rovelli’s book Anaximander and the Nature of Science.
Fresh Perspectives on a Controversial Christian Philosopher
Times Literary Supplement | January | 2022
In 2012, scholars discovered a miscatalogued Greek manuscript in Munich containing twenty-nine homilies on the Psalms. Archivist Marina Molin Pradel and expert Lorenzo Perrone realized many were the original Greek versions of known Latin translations by the early Christian thinker Origen, plus several completely unknown homilies. Although exciting, the find adds only modestly to Origen’s already huge body of work. Origen, a major early Christian philosopher, lived in Alexandria and later Caesarea.
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Co-authors: Elsa Giovanna Simonetti | Cambridge University Press | October | 2023
This book looks at the tension in ancient divination: it was believed to be a divine gift inspired by the gods, yet it also depended on human judgment and special skills. Divination used different methods and types of knowledge. One way to see the tension is as two axes: inspired to skill-based methods, and knowledge about changeable events to knowledge about higher, spiritual matters. Since ancient times, people distinguished “natural” inspired divination from “technical” sign-reading practices.
Fate, Authority, Allegory, and the Structure of Scripture
Oxford University Press | September | 2021
Origen (c.185–255 AD) is often considered the most important Christian writer of his time and the first to build a full theological system. Origen and Prophecy explores how he understood prophecy, a word that covered predicting the future, guiding people morally, and receiving spiritual visions. The book argues that Origen used the same three levels he saw in scripture—literal, moral, and spiritual—to explain prophecy. It also traces how earlier Greek, Jewish, and Christian ideas shaped his views.
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