Arnold Hugh Martin Jones

Arnold Hugh Martin Jones (born March 9, 1904 in Birkenhead , † April 9, 1970 on the ship passage from Brindisi to Patras ) was an important British ancient historian .

Arnold Hugh Martin Jones received his degree in Literae Humaniores (a degree with classical content, ancient history and philosophy) in 1926. He was a fellow at All Souls College , Oxford from 1926 to 1946 , from 1929 to 1934 as a reader in ancient history at Cairo University and from 1939 to 1946 as a lecturer in ancient history at Wadham College , Oxford. In 1944 he wrote a treatise on British church buildings for the British Ministry of Information , a propaganda institution during the Second World War. From 1946 to 1951 he was Professor of Ancient History at University College London .

From 1951 to 1970 he taught as the successor to Frank E. Adcock as Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge University and was a fellow at Jesus College . He dealt with the entire classical antiquity and wrote representations about the Attic democracy , the Roman administration and judiciary, the ancient city Sparta , the Roman emperors Augustus and Constantine , the economic history or the development of the cities in antiquity, whereby he regularly an astonishing Knowledge of literary sources (he paid less attention to archeology ).

Jones made a particular contribution to the study of late antiquity . His main work is the three-volume representation The Later Roman Empire, 284–602. A social, economic and administrative survey , a handbook published in 1964 that puts the end of antiquity with the death of the Eastern Roman emperor Maurikios in 602. It was worked almost exclusively from ancient written sources, is designed in great detail and is still one of the most important handbooks on late Roman history. Due to the extraordinary density of facts, however, it is difficult to read. The demonstrative refusal of its author to take into account the research of others caused irritation early on, especially since it was soon recognized that Jones had in fact received the work of other scholars to a much greater extent than he had given the impression.

In addition, Jones was involved in the conception of the important Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire over the period from 260 to 641 until his death . The first volume was published in 1971. Jones' influence on Anglo-American research in late antiquity can hardly be overestimated to this day.

Fonts

• The Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces (1937)
• The Herods of Judaea (1938)
• The Greek City from Alexander to Justinian (1940)
• The British Churches in War Time . HMSO, London, (1944)
• Ancient Economic History (1948)
• Constantine and the conversion of Europe (1948)
• Athenian Democracy (1957)
• Studies in Roman Government and Law (1960)
• The Later Roman Empire 284-602. A social, economic and administrative survey , 3 vols. (1964); Reprinted in 2 volumes. 1986
• The decline of the ancient world (1966; is a short version of Jones' Later Roman Empire )
• Sparta (1967)
• Augustus (1970)
• The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire , Vol. 1, with John Robert Martindale and John Morris (1971)

literature

• John Anthony Crook : AHM Jones. In: Proceedings of the British Academy . Volume 57, 1971, pp. 425-438.
• David M. Gwynn (Ed.): AHM Jones and the Later Roman Empire. Brill, Leiden 2008.
• AD Lee: Jones, Arnold Hugh Martin. In: The Dictionary of British Classicists. Volume 2, Thoemmes Continuum, Bristol 2004, pp. 522-524.
• John HWG Liebeschuetz : AHM Jones and the Later Roman Empire. In: DF Clark, Margaret M. Roxan , John J. Wilkes (Eds.): The Later Roman Empire Today. Papers Given in Honor of Professor John Mann. Institute of Archeology, London 1993, ISBN 0-905853-32-6 , pp. 1-8.
• Stefan Rebenich : Jones, Arnold Hugh Martin. In: Peter Kuhlmann , Helmuth Schneider (Hrsg.): History of the ancient sciences. Biographical Lexicon (= The New Pauly . Supplements. Volume 6). Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02033-8 , Sp. 627-629.
• Stefan Rebenich : Mommsen, Harnack and the prosopography of late antiquity. In: Studia Patristica. Volume 29, 1997, pp. 109-118.

Individual evidence

1. ^ British Academy Fellows , accessed November 5, 2019