Ronald Syme - Major Works

Major Works

The work for which he is chiefly remembered, The Roman Revolution (1939), is a masterly and controversial analysis of Roman political life in the period following the assassination of Julius Caesar. Inspired by the rise of fascist regimes in Germany and Italy, and following Tacitus in both literary style and pessimistic insight, the work challenged prevailing attitudes concerning the last years of the Roman Republic. Syme's main conclusion was that the structure of the Republic and its Senate were inadequate for the needs of Roman rule; Augustus was merely doing what was necessary to restore order in public life, but was a dictatorial figure whose true nature was cloaked by the panegyrics written to honor him in his last years and after his death. "The Roman constitution", he wrote, "was a screen and a sham"; Octavian's supposed restoration of the Republic was a pretence on which he had built a monarchy based on personal relationships and the ambition of Rome's political families. In The Roman Revolution, Syme first used, with dazzling effect, the historical method of prosopography -- tracing the linkages of kinship, marriage, and shared interest among the various leading families of republican and imperial Rome. By stressing prosopographical analysis, Syme rejected the force of ideas in politics, dismissing most such invocations of constitutional and political principle as nothing more than "political catchwords." In this bleak cynicism about political ideas and political life, The Roman Revolution strongly resembled another controversial historical masterwork, The Structure of English Politics at the Accession of George III, published in 1930 by the specialist in eighteenth-century British political history, Sir Lewis B. Namier.

Syme's next great work was his definitive two-volume biography of Tacitus (1958), his favorite among the ancient historians. The work's forty-five chapters and ninety-five appendices make up the most complete study of Tacitus yet produced, backed by an exhaustive treatment of the historical and political background—the Empire's first century—of his life. Syme blended biographical investigation, historical narrative and interpretation, and literary analysis to produce what may be the single most thorough study of a major historian ever published.

In 1958, Oxford University Press published Colonial Élites. Rome, Spain and the Americas, which presents the three lectures that he offered at McMaster University in January 1958 as part of the Whidden Lectures. Syme compares the three empires that have endured for the longest periods of time in Western History: Rome, Spain, and Britain. Syme considers that the duration of an Empire is directly linked to the character of the men who are in charge of the imperial administration, in particular that of the colonies. In his own words, the "strength and vitality of an empire is frequently due to the new aristocracy from the periphery." This book is currently out of print.

Syme's biography of Sallust (1964), based on his Sather Lectures at the University of California, is also regarded as authoritative. His four books and numerous essays on the Historia Augusta firmly established the fraudulent nature of that work; he famously dubbed the anonymous author "a rogue grammarian".

His History in Ovid (1978) places the great Roman poet Ovid firmly in his social context.

Intervening between his studies of Tacitus and Sallust was his 1958 set of lectures, Colonial Elites, which compared the processes and results of colonisation by Romans in Spain, by Spaniards in Latin America, and by English settlers in New England; on various grounds, Syme distinguished English colonisation of North America from its Roman and Spanish counterparts.

Syme's The Augustan Aristocracy (1986) traces the prominent families under Augustus as a sequel to The Roman Revolution. Syme examined how and why Augustus promoted bankrupt patrician families and new politicians simultaneously to forge a coalition in government that would back his agenda for a new Rome.

A posthumous work (edited for publication by A. Birley), Anatolica (1995), is devoted to Strabo and deals with the geography of southern Armenia and mainly eastern parts of Asia Minor. His shorter works are collected in the seven volumes of Roman Papers (1979–1991), the first two volumes of which are edited by E. Badian, and the remainder by Anthony Birley.