Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ronald Syme's most famous work is The Roman Revolution, published in 1939. It is a study of Roman political life following the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE, arguing that Augustus built a disguised monarchy rather than restoring the Republic.
Ronald Syme was born in Eltham, New Zealand on the 11th of March 1903. He attended school in Stratford and New Plymouth before studying at the University of Auckland, Victoria University of Wellington, and then Oriel College, Oxford, where he took First Class honours in Literae Humaniores.
Syme was appointed Camden Professor of Ancient History at Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1949, a post he held until his retirement in 1970. He subsequently became a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, from 1970 until the late 1980s.
Syme was knighted in 1959, the same year he was elected to the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the Order of Merit in 1976 and had been elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1944.
Syme used prosopography, the systematic tracing of kinship, marriage, and shared material interest among Rome's leading families. He used this method to argue that political ideals and constitutional principles in Rome were largely "political catchwords" that masked the personal power networks of the elite.
Syme concluded that the Historia Augusta was a fraudulent work and called its anonymous author "a rogue grammarian." He identified ten methods the forger used to fabricate names and demonstrated how the biographer invented sources to simulate authenticity, across four books and numerous essays on the subject.