Robin Osborne - Greece in the Making, 1200-479 BC (2006).jpg

Robin Osborne was educated at Colchester Royal Grammar School and at King's College Cambridge. At Colchester he came under the influence of A.F.J. Brown, who taught Greek and Latin but had a lifelong enthusiasm for local history, writing extensively about Essex in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and of Terence Doherty, who was employed as head of biology but whose real enthusiasm was for the history of art (and who combined his interests in an edition of The Anatomical Works of George Stubbs). At King's the dominant influences were Geoffrey Lloyd and John Henderson, but it was Peter Garnsey who inculcated rigorous historical method and Hugh Plommer who showed how much potential there was in classical archaeology.

Robin Osborne's PhD (1982) was written under the supervision of Anthony Snodgrass on the relationship of town and country in classical Athens. It was published as Demos: the Discovery of Classical Attika in 1985. Four years of research fellowship at King's enabled both the writing of a more general book on town and countryside in classical Greece (Classical Landscape with Figures: the Ancient Greek City and its Countryside, 1987) and forays into other areas of history (including Athenian law and religious history), archaeology, and art history (in particular a paper on the Parthenon frieze in Journal of Hellenic Studies 1987).

In 1986 Robin Osborne was appointed to a five-year fixed-term position at Magdalen College Oxford, as a colleague of Oliver Taplin, teaching Greek history and archaeology for Magdalen and Christ Church (where he came under the spell of David Lewis). An invitation from George Forrest to talk about archaic Attica to the Ancient History seminar led to the commission from Fergus Millar to take on the challenge of writing the volume covering archaic Greece for the Routledge Ancient History series.

By the time Greece in the Making, 1200–479 BC was published in 1996, Robin Osborne had a permanent CUF University Lecturership at Corpus Christi College Oxford, and a titular chair in ancient history. He was closely involved both with the invention of the undergraduate degree in archaeology and anthropology and with the M.St. degree in Women's Studies. His Archaic and Classical Greek Art was published in 1998, but the 1990s were particularly marked by a series of co-edited volumes, undertaken partly with former Cambridge colleagues (Simon Goldhill, Susan Alcock) and partly with colleagues in Oxford (Simon Hornblower).