Ronald Syme

Sir Ronald Syme, OM, FBA (11 March 1903 – 4 September 1989) was a New Zealand-born historian and classicist. Long associated with Oxford University, he is widely regarded as the 20th century's greatest historian of ancient Rome. His great work was The Roman Revolution (1939), a masterly and controversial analysis of Roman political life in the period following the assassination of Julius Caesar.

Quotes

The Roman Revolution (1939)

• In all ages, whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic, or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the façade; and Roman history, Republican or Imperial, is the history of the governing class. The marshals, diplomats, and financiers of the Revolution may be discerned again in the Republic of Augustus as the ministers and agents of power, the same men but in different garb. They are the government of the New State.
  • Introduction: Augustus and History

• Without a party a statesman is nothing. He sometimes forgets that awkward fact.
  • Ch. 4.

• Security and aggression are terms of partisan interpretation.
  • Ch. 7.

• The best party is but a kind of conspiracy against the Commonwealth.
  • Ch. 9.

• The political cant of a country is naturally and always most strongly in evidence on the side of the vested interests. In times of peace and prosperity it commands a wide measure of acquiescence, even of belief. Revolution rends the veil.
  • Ch. 11.

• At Rome all men paid homage to libertas, holding it to be something roughly equivalent to the spirit and practice of Republican government. Exactly what corresponded to the Republican constitution was, however, a matter not of legal definition but of partisan interpretation. Libertas is a vague and negative notion—freedom from the rule of a tyrant or a faction. It follows libertas [liberty], like regnum [kingship] or dominatio [despotism], is a convenient term of political fraud.
  • Ch. 11.

Quotes about Ronald Syme

• The greatest modern historian of Rome.
  • Thomas W. Africa, 'The Owl at Dusk: Two Centuries of Classical Scholarship', Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 54, No. 1 (January 1993), p. 160

• With the death of Sir Ronald Syme we have lost the greatest historian of ancient Rome since Theodor Mommsen and the most brilliant exponent of the history of the Roman Empire since Edward Gibbon.
  • Glen Bowersock, 'Ronald Syme (March 11, 1903–September 4, 1989)', Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 135, No. 1 (March 1991), p. 118

• Few historians outside Oxford in the thirties could have realized that Syme was bringing to completion a book that would undermine the constitutional interpretation of Roman history that Mommsen had made into orthodoxy. Syme replaced it with a new, intense analysis of the Roman state in terms of the political ambitions of its leading families. The Roman Revolution appeared in the early autumn of 1939. Those who had time to read it in that troubled period recognized at once the powerful impact of contemporary events in both Italy and Germany on Syme's portrayal of the emperor Augustus. Taking his lead from dark insinuations in the work of Tacitus and forging an extraordinary English style that echoed Tacitean brevity with Gibbonian phrases, Syme outlined the ruthless and brutal manipulation by which the emperor Augustus established a monarchy under the guise of restoring the old Republic. Generations of historians, brought up in the shadow of Mommsen, were almost scandalized to read, "The Roman constitution was a screen and a sham."
  • Glen Bowersock, 'Ronald Syme (March 11, 1903–September 4, 1989)', Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 135, No. 1 (March 1991), pp. 118-120

• It was inevitable that Syme would dedicate an entire work to the ancient author who was clearly most important to him. His Tacitus appeared in two fat volumes in 1958. With its forty-five chapters and ninety-five appendixes it still constitutes the most thorough and reliable treatment of the early Roman Empire ever produced by a single hand.
  • Glen Bowersock, 'Ronald Syme (March 11, 1903–September 4, 1989)', Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 135, No. 1 (March 1991), p. 120

• The Roman Revolution might be described as the first great step in a long campaign to free Roman history from the domination of a faction of abstract nouns. Syme substituted for the abstractions and generalizations essential to a long-established school of Roman history an acute awareness of the language and concepts actually used in Roman society; a sensitivity to those movements, aspirations and fortunes of innumerable individuals and families, which actually constituted the reality of a great historical change; a careful and precise yet illuminating use of epigraphic evidence: and a wider awareness of the geographical background, and in particular of the local origins of those domi nobiles who moved unceasingly into the Roman governing class.
  • Fergus Millar, 'Sir Ronald Syme', The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 63 (1973), p. xi
  • Article signed "F.M." attributed to Millar in Thomas W. Africa, 'The Owl at Dusk: Two Centuries of Classical Scholarship', Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 54, No. 1 (January 1993), p. 160

• Since the publication of his first book, The Roman Revolution, in 1939, he was recognised the outstanding Roman historian of his generation... In all his work style, vision and understanding of human nature were matched by a fantastic control of historical detail, which derived from acute observation of a flawless memory.
  • S. Mitchell, 'Sir Ronald Syme', Anatolian Studies, Vol. 39 (1989), p. 17

• Mr. Ronald Syme has long been known as one of the most genuine historians in a field where good philologists are many but historians few. Now we understand that his Tacitean style is not only a formal habit. Concetto Marchesi's contention that among ancient historians Tacitus is eminently modern becomes every day more true, I am afraid, and not perhaps from choice. The characterisation of Tacitus which the writer gives may be applied to himself: "the suspicious Tacitus ever alert for the contrast of name and substance" (p. 324); and he is, like Tacitus (at least in his conclusion), a "monarchist from perspicacious despair of human nature" (p. 516). But Tacitus's austerity is corrected by Gibbon's irony.
  • Arnaldo Momigliano, review of The Roman Revolution in The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 30, Part 1 (1940), p. 75

• That characteristic irony of thought and expression, what a German admirer called ‘das Debunking’, went with a rejection of theory and doctrine, which he regarded as the great enemies of truth, in scholarship as in politics. He did not wish to be ‘a thinker’. Social history, not sociology; politics, not political science; the study of life and letters, not intellectual history, were what he claimed to practise: similarly he studied not ‘religion’, but ceremony and ritual, not ‘ideology’ but propaganda and apologia. The lawyer's son knew the details of Roman public law and despised ignorance of them in others, but he sympathized with the ‘Roman distrust of theory’ and shared the preference for facts over words, for reality over appearance, of those Latin writers whom he took as models for his own work: Pollio, Sallust and Tacitus—not Velleius or Livy. It is not surprising that the one Greek historian he treated in print was Thucydides.
  • M.T.G., 'Sir Ronald Syme, 1903–1989', The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 80 (1990), p. xi

• It suited his own dislike of dogmatism to believe that history itself was flexible and open, ultimately governed, as the ancient historians themselves thought, by chance or accident combined with human decisions and mistakes. Delighting in the notion that ‘anything can happen’, he avoided oversystematization in prosopography and the search for grand explanations and parallels. Indeed he became increasingly intrigued by the role of disease and death, natural disasters and unpremeditated behaviour, in determining events.
  • M.T.G., 'Sir Ronald Syme, 1903–1989', The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 80 (1990), p. xii

• In the service of historical knowledge Syme deployed a unique combination of skills, embracing epigraphy, geography, military strategy, textual emendation, poetic exegesis and literary criticism, but he was also a gifted writer who believed that a work of history, while making no compromise with truth, must have style and structure. He did not so much study his favoured authors as digest and assimilate them. Just as Tacitus was, in his view, not only an exponent of change in the governing order, but a personal document of that change, so Syme himself exemplified the techniques of the writers he understood so well. By way of paraphrase, allusion, even parody, his works took on the resonance of the Latin, as Tacitus echoes Sallust. He expounded ancient attitudes with an empathy that sometimes leaves his readers in doubt as to his personal views. And on occasion he deliberately and recognizably enriched his narrative with allusions to personal experience, a practice that he perhaps too readily ascribed to his Roman forerunners.
  • M.T.G., 'Sir Ronald Syme, 1903–1989', The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 80 (1990), p. xii

• The greatest of Roman historians.
  • Christopher Stray, '‘Patriots and Professors’: A Century of Roman Studies, 1910–2010', The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 100 (2010), p. 10