Volume 27, Number 3 · March 6, 1980
The Emperor of Roman History
By G.W. Bowersock
Selected Books by Ronald Syme Currently in Print
Roman Papers
by Ronald Syme, edited by E. Badian
Oxford University Press, two volumes, 862 pp., $95.00
Ammianus and the Historia Augusta
by Ronald Syme
Oxford University Press
Emperors and Biography: Studies in the Historia Augusta
by Ronald Syme
Oxford University Press
The Historia Augusta: A Call for Clarity
by Ronald Syme
International Publications Service
History in Ovid
by Ronald Syme
Oxford University Press
The Roman Revolution
by Ronald Syme
Oxford University Press
Sallust
by Ronald Syme
University of California Press
In a large volume that appeared in the late summer of 1939 a thirty-six-year-old Oxford don from New Zealand undertook to reassess the whole tumultuous transition of the Roman state from republic to empire. The focus of the work was Caesar Augustus, whom Mussolini's Italy had lavishly celebrated just two years earlier on the occasion of the two-thousandth anniversary of Augustus's birth. The book bore the title The Roman Revolution, and its author described its tone as 'pessimistic and truculent.' Its aim was nothing less than the demolition of the Augustan Age which generations of modern scholars had carefully fabricated from a largely favorable ancient tradition. Instead of the Augustus who rescued Rome from anarchy and designed a beneficent Augustan peace, there emerged a cruel and duplicitous politician who deliberately destroyed the Roman republic while announcing that he was restoring it.
Review, 4482 words
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