Interest in the Roman Empire as a model for other empires goes a long way towards explaining traditional concern with the governing class. In the past century, the most substantial contributions in this area came from the pen of Ronald Syme. His brilliantly erudite studies both of the members of this class, and of the ways in which they described their interests, set a standard against which other work was measured. In 1939 Syme shattered prevailing modes of thought about Roman history that were based upon the constitutional theories of Theodor Mommsen, which had been dominant for the previous half century. In Mommsen’s view the Romans had elaborate constitutional rules, and the crisis of the late republic stemmed from efforts of democratic reformers to overthrow a corrupt aristocracy. This was the theme of his Nobel Prize-winning ROmische Geschichte. When it came to the imperial period, as John Matthews shows in his chapter in this volume, Mommsen’s great contribution was his ROmisches Staatsrecht, which traced the evolution of public law and administration from the republic to the empire.
It was to the structures that Mommsen created in the Staatsrecht that Syme reacted. Syme felt that rules mattered little, that the constitution was no more than a ‘‘screen and sham’’; reformers and their enemies were cut from the same cloth, for ‘‘whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the facade’’ (Syme 1939: 15, 7). Because his Augustus was a thug who seized power in a civil war, and held on to it through the careful manipulation of factional politics, he was comprehensible in a world where the naked exercise of power was coming ever more to be the norm, where meaningful historical study needed to cut through layers of propaganda to get at hidden truths. The painstaking study of the people who controlled land and offices, and of how they passed power among themselves replaced analyses of legal questions, because legality seemed to matter little to a generation that had seen Stalin promulgate a constitution for the Soviet Union, Mussolini proclaim a new vision of the Italian future that drew on the reconstructed physical remains of Rome’s past, and Hitler’s democratically elected government come to power in Germany.
Influential though his work would become, Syme would always remain something of an outsider to the Oxford establishment. He had come from New Zealand, and he remained deeply conscious of his origins. Before he wrote the Roman Revolution, he drafted a book on provincials at Rome, and would later produce an eloquent series of essays comparing the experiences of provincials under Roman rule with those of
Spanish and British colonists in America (Syme 1958b, 1999). But that was still to come. When he arrived at Oxford in the early twenties, he rapidly attracted the hostility of Hugh Last, then the dominant figure in Oxford Roman history and devoted to Mommsen’s mode of analysis (Bowersock 1993: 548, 552); consequently, he derived inspiration more from the work of continental scholars than from his colleagues.
When Syme began his career, a number of scholars were making the transition from traditional constitutional history to the study of dynamic interactions between members of the governing class, and, in what is a remarkable fact of intellectual history, there was no identifiable connection between the leaders of this movement. The reason for this is that all were reacting in their own way to the same perceived crisis in the historical profession, which
Stemmed from the near exhaustion of the great tradition of Western historical scholarship established in the nineteenth century. Based on a very close study of the archives of the state, its glories had been institutional, administrative, constitutional, and diplomatic history. But the great advances in these areas had been made... (L. Stone 1972: 113)
The new movement began to take shape in 1913 when Charles Beard antagonized the American historical community by producing his brilliant An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, in which he argued that responses to federalism in the United States were closely linked to the economic interests of those participating in the debate (Novick 1988: 96-7). Although Beard’s book created a stir in the United States, none of the major players in Europe seem to have read it. His concerns were not those of Friedrich Munzer, another, albeit wealthy, outsider to the establishment - he would end his life in a concentration camp - who was even then transforming the study of ancient prosopography from an antiquarian to an historical enterprise. His work was an imaginative development emerging from countless articles on members of the Roman aristocracy for the Real Encyclopaedie der Klas-sischen Alterumswissenschaft, as well as the masterful work of Paul de Rhoden and Hermann Dessau on the first edition of the Prosopographia Imperii Romani, which was completed in 1898. Munzer sought patterns linking different groups within the aristocracy, for ways that aristocratic groups could dominate the political scene across generations through extra-constitutional means. He knew, perhaps better than anyone, that certain families could control the highest offices of the Roman state for generation after generation. They did not do so from deep-seated attachment to the principles of law, but rather through their ability to create factions that enabled them to exert control. The result of Mtinzer’s analysis, Romische Adelsparteien und Adels-familien, was published in 1920, and remained unknown to Lewis Namier, who developed his own style of prosopographical analysis to study the parliaments of the mid-eighteenth century. Syme had not read Namier’s fundamental The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III when it appeared in 1929, and would not read it until after he had finished The Roman Revolution (Bowersock 1993: 548-9). Even the most casual reader of the two books will see that they are very different in scope. Namier does not attempt a narrative; rather, he studies the diverse reasons that men entered parliament, the different sorts of people to be found there, and the interests that drove each group. In so doing, he undermined the notion that parliament was divided strictly between Whigs and Tories - but no master narrative emerges from his study. In a sense Namier’s book is closer in style to yet another book that Namier had not read (though MUnzer and Syme did), Matthias Gelzer’s Die Nobilitat des rOmischen Republik of 1912, a masterful study of the structures of family power and aristocratic interaction in both the public and private spheres. It was Syme’s genius that enabled him to join contemporary German scholarship with English traditions of narrative historiography, and it was his profound interest in the literary quality of narrative that set his work apart from that of Munzer, and, indeed, of Gelzer, whose later books on major figures of the late republic seem rarely to unite the conclusions of Die NobilitcOt with his own narratives. The extraordinary ability to combine social analysis with narrative that is characteristic of Syme’s early work is equally evident in his masterful Tacitus (1958a), a book that remains fundamental to all studies of Roman historiography (Bowersock 1993: 556).
World History
