Richard Seaford

Richard Seaford is a professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter in England. His main publications are Euripides Cyclops with Introduction and Commentary (Oxford University Press, 1984); Reciprocity and Ritual. Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-state (Oxford University Press, 1994); Euripides Bacchae (Aris and Phillips, 1996); Reciprocity in Ancient Greece (co-editor with C. Gill and N. Postlethwaite) (Oxford University Press, 1998); Money and the early Greek Mind: Homer, Tragedy, and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2004). [http://www.huss.ex.ac.uk/classics/staff/seaford/] .Seaford is a prominent representative of the anti-Israel movement among British academics. Already in 1990 he was a signatory to a campaign against the Israeli law of return, voicing his opposition to 'the state of Israel as a Jewish state and to the Zionist movement'. On January 28, 2006, he published in the Independent a letter describing the claim that 'the success of Hamas will now make peace negotiations impossible' as a 'myth', adding 'Why should Israel negotiate when it is a thousand times more powerful than the Palestinians, and continues to create settlements with the de facto support of the US and the EU?' Later that year he declined an invitation to review a book for the Israeli journal Scripta Classica Israelica, explaining that he felt 'outrage' at what he called the 'brutal and illegal expansionism, and the slow-motion ethnic cleansing, being practised by your [the Israeli] government'. [http://www.ejpress.org/article/news/8593]