Ronald Syme

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Ronald Syme

Sir Neville Ronald Syme OM , FBA (born March 11, 1903 in Eltham , New Zealand , † September 4, 1989 in Oxford ) was a historian from New Zealand . He became known through his work The Roman Revolution of 1939. Syme is considered one of the most important ancient historians of the 20th century.

Life

Sime's ancestors were originally from Scotland , but he was deeply connected to his native New Zealand and never gave up his New Zealand citizenship. Syme first studied Latin and Ancient History from 1921 , from 1922 also Greek at Victoria College , today's Victoria University of Wellington , from 1925 at Oriel College at the University of Oxford , where he received three prizes for Latin and Greek prose and poetry. From 1929 he taught at Trinity College there as a Fellow and "Tutor in Ancient History".

During the Second World War , Syme worked as a press attaché for the British Foreign Ministry at the embassy in Belgrade as a press attaché, since he also spoke Serbo-Croatian in addition to several other languages . After the German occupation of Yugoslavia in April 1941, he went to the embassy in Ankara . At the University of Istanbul he was also Professor of Classical Philology until 1945 .

Quickly known through the success of The Roman Revolution from 1939 onwards, Syme was appointed to the Oxford Brasenose College in 1949 , where he succeeded Hugh Last as Camden Professor of Ancient History and heir to the venerable chair (since 1622). He held this position for 21 years until his retirement in 1970, but remained scientifically active as an Extraordinary Fellow of Wolfson College in Oxford and until his death. Sime's closest student Fergus Millar held Sime's previous chair as Camden Professor from 1984 to 2002.

From 1944 Syme was a member ( fellow ) of the British Academy . In 1959 he was beaten to a Knight Bachelor degree . Also in 1959 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society . From 1955 he was a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . 1959/1960 Syme was appointed Sather Professor at the University of California at Berkeley .

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Syme wrote several standard works and wrote numerous articles, including several chapters for the first edition of the Cambridge Ancient History . His best-known work is The Roman Revolution ("The Roman Revolution", published on September 7, 1939), in which he traced the path of the first Roman emperor Augustus . For Syme, Augustus was a calculating man of power who bore the old, crumbling republic to the grave in order to establish sole rule under an apparently republican facade - the choice was between freedom and stable government. Deliberate parallels to the emergence of totalitarian systems (such as fascism or the communist dictatorship in the Soviet Union ) in Symes' time come to light.

For Syme, who mastered a rousing prose , the historian Tacitus was authoritative, both with regard to the style and to the open and latent anti-monarchical criticism that permeates the work of this ancient historian (cf. also senatorial historiography ). In a nutshell, this means: Syme wrote, in a sense, that account with the principate of Augustus that Tacitus was unable to write. In addition, the example of Gaius Asinius Pollio is palpable in his Roman Revolution , who wrote a now-lost historical work about this time and (like Syme) his presentation in 60 BC. Began. However, criticism was sometimes expressed by colleagues who accused Syme of a lack of distance from his subject, and the usability of the expression "revolution" was also questioned. Nevertheless, the importance of the work in research is now generally recognized and is not questioned. Not least because of the negative view of Augustus, the work was initially only slowly received in Germany, where Caesar and Augustus were for a long time seen as ingenious “leaders”.

The focus of Symes' academic work was on Roman history from the end of the Republic to the 4th century AD. He dealt in numerous books and essays with some historians who were important for this time, above all with Tacitus, on whom he wrote up to wrote an important standard work today. In this work he emphasizes the important role that provincial Romans would have played in the Trajan administration (Syme himself was a homo novus from the provinces, in his case the British Empire). Another focus of his research was the very controversial Historia Augusta ; He dedicated a total of three books and numerous essays to this late antique work, which were later published collectively. He also dealt with the composition and development of the empire's senatorial leadership. He is considered to be one of the most important representatives of prosopography (although Arnaldo Momigliano criticized this approach in his review), whereby he owed a lot to the work of Friedrich Münzer and Matthias Gelzer and brought this "German method" to the fore in the English-speaking world.

“Like Mommsen and Heuss , Ronald Syme was the powerful magician who had completely appropriated the historical material and expressed his rule over it by claiming to be able to obtain generally valid insights from history. [...] On the other hand, in the search for his perspective, Syme joined the interests and suffering of the three story-writing aristocrats Pollio , Sallust and Tacitus as closely as possible . "

- Uwe Walter

Fonts (selection)

  • The Roman Revolution. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1939.
    • See the fundamentally revised and, for the first time, complete new edition of the German translation by Friedrich Wilhelm Eschweiler and Hans Georg Degen; with references to Syme, an afterword and an essay on his life and work:
    • The Roman Revolution. Power struggles in ancient Rome. Fundamentally revised and, for the first time, complete new edition. Edited by Christoph Selzer and Uwe Walter . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-608-94029-4 .
  • Tacitus. 2 volumes. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1958.
  • Sallust (= Sather Classical Lectures. Vol. 33, ZDB -ID 420164-4 ). University of California Press, Berkeley CA et al. 1964 (In German: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1975, ISBN 3-534-04355-3 ).
  • Ammianus and the Historia Augusta. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1968.
  • Emperors and Biography. Studies in the Historia Augusta. Clarendon Press, Oxford et al. 1971, ISBN 0-19-814357-5 .
  • Roman Papers. 7 volumes. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1979–1991 (important collection of Symes essays) .
  • Historia Augusta Papers. Clarendon Press, Oxford et al. 1983, ISBN 0-19-814853-4 .
  • The Augustan Aristocracy. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1986, ISBN 0-19-814859-3 .

literature

  • Géza Alföldy : Sir Ronald Syme, "The Roman Revolution" and the German ancient history (= meeting reports of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. Philosophical-Historical Class. 1983/1). Winter, Heidelberg 1983, ISBN 3-533-03307-4 .
  • Karl Christ : Ronald Syme (1903-1989). In: Karl Christ: New Profiles of Ancient History. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1990, ISBN 3-534-10289-4 , pp. 188-247.
  • Werner Dahlheim : Ronald Syme. History as aristocratic scholarship and literary art. Epilogue. In: Ronald Syme: The Roman Revolution. Power struggles in ancient Rome. Fundamentally revised and, for the first time, complete new edition. Edited by Christoph Selzer and Uwe Walter. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-608-94029-4 , pp. 713-731.
  • Gerhard Dobesch : Ronald Syme. In: Almanac of the Austrian Academy of Sciences for 1989/90. 140th year, Vienna 1990, pp. 393–398.
  • Fergus Millar : Style Abides. [Review of Roman Papers , Vols. 1 and 2]. In: The Journal of Roman Studies . Vol. 71, 1981, pp. 144–152, doi : 10.2307 / 299503 , (good introduction to Syme's life and work) .
  • GW Bowersock : Ronald Syme, 1903-1989 . In: Proceedings of the British Academy . tape 84 , 1994, pp. 539-563 ( thebritishacademy.ac.uk [PDF]).

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Book of Members 1780 – present, Chapter S. (PDF; 1.4 MB) In: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org). Retrieved January 29, 2019 .
  2. ^ Member History: Sir Ronald Syme. American Philosophical Society, accessed January 29, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Cf. also generally the afterword by Werner Dahlheim and the essay by Uwe Walter in: The Roman Revolution. Power struggles in ancient Rome. Stuttgart 2003, p. 713 ff.
  4. ^ Karl Christ: Ronald Syme (1903-1989) . In: Karl Christ: New Profiles of Ancient History. Darmstadt 1990, pp. 188–247, here p. 201: Symes' evaluations were shaped “by the seizure of power by the parties of Mussolini and Hitler , by the Spanish civil war , and also [...] by the constitution of the Soviet Union, which Stalin enacted in 1936 and which reminded him of the 'constitution' of the Augustan principate as illusion and deception ”. Christ partially cites Géza Alföldy here .
  5. ↑ Cf. in summary, for example, the overview of the work by Karl Christ: Neue Profil der Alten Geschichte. Darmstadt 1990, p. 193 ff.
  6. ↑ For the subsequent recent research cf. the contributions in Adalberto Giovannini (ed.): La révolution romaine apres Ronald Syme. Bilans et perspectives (= Entretiens sur l'Antiquité Classique. Vol. 46). Fondation Hardt, Genève 2000, ISBN 2-600-00746-6 .
  7. ↑ For the reception see Géza Alföldy : Sir Ronald Syme, “The Roman Revolution” and the German ancient history. Heidelberg 1983.
  8. ↑ Historia Augusta Papers. Oxford 1983.
  9. ^ Arnaldo Momigliano : Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1939. Pp. 568. 21s. In: The Journal of Roman Studies. Vol. 30, 1940, pp. 75–80, doi : 10.2307 / 296948 : Momigliano describes Syme's book as “a reference book for prosopographical research” (p. 75), but criticizes this approach: “a faction or even a party, in the sense of a limited, circumscribed, number of men, cannot explain the Augustan principate. In other words, we shall reaffirm that prosopographical research cannot give a sufficient interpretation of this period (and, we would add, of any historical period). ”(P. 77).
  10. ↑ Uwe Walter: Passage in two worlds: "The Roman Revolution" and the language of the historian . In: Ronald Syme: The Roman Revolution. Power struggles in ancient Rome. Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-608-94029-4 , pp. 735-747, here pp. 736 f .; on Pollio, Sallust and Tacitus as role models Symes cf. Ronald Syme: The Roman Revolution. Power struggles in ancient Rome. Stuttgart 2003, p. 11 ff.
personal data
SURNAME Syme, Ronald
BRIEF DESCRIPTION New Zealand historian
DATE OF BIRTH March 11, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Eltham , New Zealand
DATE OF DEATH 4th September 1989
Place of death Oxford