T. P. Wiseman

In a review of Remembering the Roman People (2009), Mary Beard commented on Wiseman's methodology in trying to tease out a view of Roman popularist politics from elite-dominated sources:

The conference "Myth, History, and Performance: A Celebration of the Work of T.P. Wiseman" was held at Exeter in March 2000 and was the basis for the book Myth, History, and Culture in Republican Rome: Studies in Honour of T.P. Wiseman (2003). In 2004, Wiseman's book The Myths of Rome won the Goodwin Award of Merit from the American Philological Association and was nominated for the British Academy Book Prize.

He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1986 and served as its vice-president in 1992–94. In 2022, he was awarded the British Academy's Kenyon Medal "for his enormous contributions to the fields of Roman history and literature".

Wiseman was a teacher of J.K. Rowling when she was a student at Exeter from 1983 to 1986. In 2000, when Rowling was presented with an honorary doctorate from Exeter, Wiseman gave the introductory speech. In 2002, he published the article "At Figulus … : J.K. Rowling and the ancient world," in which he presents, in his words, "the only accurate account of what ancient authors Harry Potter's creator encountered when she was a student at Exeter." The title refers to Nigidius Figulus, the friend of Cicero who was a praetor and Pythagorean scholar in the 1st century BC and took on a legendary status in the later European magic tradition; figulus is the Latin word for "potter."

In 1977, he moved to the University of Exeter where he had been appointed Professor of Classics. He was head of the Department of Classics and Ancient History until 1990. He was Whitney J. Oates Fellow at Princeton University in 1988 and 2008. He retired from Exeter in 2001 and made emeritus professor.

Wiseman was educated at Manchester Grammar School, an all-boys independent school in Manchester. He studied Literae Humaniores (classics) at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree. He stayed at Balliol to undertake a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree, which he completed in 1967 with a doctoral thesis titled "Italian senators: 139B.C.-A.D. 14".

From 1963 to 1976, Wiseman was a lecturer in classics at the University of Leicester. He was an assistant lecturer from 1963 to 1965, lecturer from 1965 to 1973, and Reader in Roman History from 1973 to 1976. While at Leicester, he spent a year teaching at the University of Toronto as a visiting associate professor from 1970 to 1971.

Wiseman and his wife, Anne, also a classicist, have been married since 1962. The two collaborated on a translation of Julius Caesar's Gallic War commentaries published in 1980.

Timothy Peter Wiseman FBA (born 3 February 1940), who usually publishes as T. P. Wiseman and is named as Peter Wiseman in other sources, is a classical scholar and professor emeritus of the University of Exeter. He has published numerous books and articles, primarily on the literature and the social and political history of the late Roman Republic, but also the mythography of early Rome and Roman theatre.