Curated playlist
Historians of ancient Rome
- Christopher Kelly (historian)Christopher Kelly, a British-Australian classicist and historian born in London and raised in Sydney, has spent his career asking a question that most people never think to ask: what actually held the later Roman Empire together, and what…
- Adrian GoldsworthyAdrian Goldsworthy, born in 1969, once summed up his outlook in a single blunt line. "English, so obviously do not have a philosophy. I am a Christian, though, if you want to know about important beliefs," he said. That same directness…
- Barbara LevickBarbara Mary Levick made two solo trips to Turkey in the mid-1950s, a young woman travelling alone through Anatolia at a time when the field of epigraphy was dominated by Scottish men. She was working on her doctoral thesis, supervised by…
- Howard Hayes ScullardHoward Hayes Scullard was born on the 9th of February 1903 in Bedford, England, and spent his career turning the chaotic centuries of Rome's rise and fall into clear, teachable history. He died on the 31st of March 1983, leaving behind a…
- Edward GibbonIt was on the night of the 27th of June 1787, between eleven and midnight, that Edward Gibbon wrote the last lines of his life's great work in a summer-house in his garden. He felt joy at recovering his freedom. Then a sober melancholy…
- Andrew Wallace-HadrillAndrew Frederick Wallace-Hadrill was born in Oxford on the 29th of July 1951, the son of a mediaeval historian. That family connection to the deep past may explain something about the direction his life took. He became one of Britain's…
- Georges DumézilGeorges Dumézil was born in Paris on the 4th of March 1898, the son of a highly educated general in the French Army. By the time he died in the same city on the 11th of October 1986, he had published more than seventy-five books, mastered…
- Theodor MommsenTheodor Mommsen stood up at a formal banquet at the University of Berlin in 1892, and the entire room rose with him. Mark Twain was there, seated at the head table among roughly twenty eminent professors, and he watched as the guards'…
- Ronald SymeRonald Syme published The Roman Revolution in 1939, just as fascism was tightening its grip on Europe, and the book hit the scholarly world like nothing before it. It argued that Augustus, Rome's first emperor, was not a restorer of…
- Barthold Georg NiebuhrBarthold Georg Niebuhr was born in Copenhagen on the 27th of August 1776, the son of Carsten Niebuhr, a prominent German geographer. He grew up to become a statesman, banker, and historian, eventually earning the title of Germany's leading…
- Clifford AndoClifford Ando was born in 1969, and by the time he reached Princeton University as an undergraduate, he was already drawn to a world two millennia removed from his own. What kept pulling him back was a deceptively simple question: how does…