Ronald Syme

• 1. Introduction

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  Ronald 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 tradition but a cunning autocrat who hid his true power behind the flattering poetry of court writers. "The Roman constitution", Syme wrote, "was a screen and a sham." That single sentence captured a worldview that would define the New Zealand-born classicist's entire career. Who was Ronald Syme, and how did a boy from Eltham, New Zealand become the man scholars placed in the company of Theodor Mommsen and Edward Gibbon?

• 2. From Eltham to Oxford

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  Eltham, New Zealand is where Ronald Syme was born on the 11th of March 1903, to his parents David and Florence. A teacher at Stratford District High School was the first to notice his unusual gift for languages, though that same period brought a serious setback: a bad case of measles that significantly damaged his vision. He transferred to New Plymouth Boys' High School at the age of 15 and led his class for both years he spent there. A house at New Plymouth Boys' High School still bears his name.

  Syme went on to the University of Auckland and Victoria University of Wellington, studying French language and literature alongside his degree in Classics. Oxford came next. Between 1925 and 1927 he studied at Oriel College, where he took First Class honours in Literae Humaniores, the rigorous course combining ancient history and philosophy. In 1926, he won the Gaisford Prize for Greek Prose, earning it by translating a section of Thomas More's Utopia into Platonic prose. The very next year he won the Gaisford Prize again, this time for Verse, by rendering part of William Morris's Sigurd the Volsung into Homeric hexameters. Winning the same prize twice, in two different categories, in consecutive years was a sign of what was coming.

• 3. War, Diplomacy, and Shadows

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  Syme's first scholarly article appeared in the Journal of Roman Studies in 1928, a year after he left Oriel. By 1929 he had become a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, where his focus settled on the Roman army and the edges of the Empire. Then the Second World War pulled him out of academic life and into something murkier.

  He served as a press attaché at the British Embassies in Belgrade and Ankara. Belgrade gave him a working knowledge of Serbo-Croatian. Ankara placed him at the intersection of wartime intelligence in a neutral country. His persistent refusal to explain what he actually did in Turkey led observers to speculate that he worked for the British intelligence services there, though no proof ever emerged to settle the question. What is documented is that he took a chair in classical philology at Istanbul University during the war years. His work at UNESCO during this period is mentioned in the autobiographical writings of his collaborator Jean d'Ormesson. By 1944 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, and in 1949 he was appointed Camden Professor of Ancient History at Brasenose College, Oxford, a post he held until his retirement in 1970.

• 4. The Roman Revolution

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  The Roman Revolution, published in 1939, opens in the aftermath of Julius Caesar's assassination in 44 BCE and traces how Octavian, later known as Augustus, seized and consolidated power. Syme was writing with the rise of fascist regimes in Germany and Italy directly in mind, and the parallel gave his prose its edge. He followed Tacitus in both literary style and in a characteristically pessimistic reading of political life.

  At the heart of the book was the method Syme called prosopography: the systematic tracing of kinship, marriage, and shared material interest among Rome's leading families. By mapping these networks he argued that ideals and constitutional principles were largely window dressing. Invocations of republican tradition, he concluded, were no more than "political catchwords". Augustus had not restored the Republic. He had built a monarchy on personal relationships and the ambitions of Rome's elite families, then disguised it behind panegyrics written to honor him in his final years and after his death. Scholars noted a strong resemblance between The Roman Revolution and Sir Lewis B. Namier's The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, published in 1930, which applied a similarly cold-eyed prosopographical approach to eighteenth-century British politics. Syme's work extended and deepened that tradition into the Roman world.

• 5. The Scholarship That Followed

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  Syme's two-volume biography of Tacitus appeared in 1958, nineteen years after The Roman Revolution. Its forty-five chapters and ninety-five appendices make it the most complete study of Tacitus yet produced, built on an exhaustive treatment of the Empire's first century as the backdrop to the historian's life. That same year, Oxford University Press published Colonial Elites: Rome, Spain and the Americas, drawn from the three Whidden Lectures Syme delivered at McMaster University in Ontario in January 1958. Syme compared the three empires he considered the most durable in Western history and argued that their longevity traced to the character of the men running colonial administration. In his own words, the "strength and vitality of an empire is frequently due to the new aristocracy from the periphery."

  His 1964 biography of Sallust, based on his Sather Lectures at the University of California, also came to be regarded as authoritative. Where Syme's work on the Historia Augusta is concerned, he pursued that project across four books and numerous essays, arriving at a conclusion he stated with characteristic bluntness: the anonymous author was "a rogue grammarian." He identified ten methods the forger used to fabricate names, labeling one category "perverted names," and traced how the biographer invented sources to lend the fraudulent text an air of authenticity. Allen M. Ward wrote in The Classical World in 1971 that no one interested in the Historia Augusta or third-century Roman history "can ignore this book."

  Syme's History in Ovid, published in 1978, placed Ovid squarely within his social world. The Augustan Aristocracy followed in 1986 as an explicit sequel to The Roman Revolution, examining how and why Augustus simultaneously promoted bankrupt patrician families and new political figures to build a governing coalition.

• 6. Honours and Students

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  Syme was knighted in 1959, the same year he was elected to both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Order of Merit followed in 1976. From 1970 until the late 1980s he held a fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford, where an annual lecture was established in his memory after his death.

  His doctoral students at Oxford carried his methods into their own careers. Barbara Levick, whose thesis in the mid-1950s examined Roman colonies in south Asia Minor, was one. Miriam T. Griffin, whose 1968 thesis was titled Seneca: the statesman and the writer, was another. Victoria University of Wellington's Classics Department holds a lecture in Syme's honour every two years, a recognition that ties his legacy back to the country where it began. Syme died in Oxford on the 4th of September 1989, at the age of 86, still writing and editing until the end. A posthumous volume, Anatolica, edited by Anthony Birley and published in 1995, dealt with the geography of southern Armenia and eastern Asia Minor through Strabo. His shorter writings are collected in seven volumes of Roman Papers published between 1979 and 1991, the first two edited by Ernst Badian and the rest by Birley.