Gustavo García Vivas’ book is a revised version of his PhD thesis. The author dissects the first years of Syme's intellectual biography, from 1928, when he published his first article in the Journal of Roman Studies, to 1939, when his widely acclaimed book The Roman Revolution was published. Today, the status of The Roman Revolution as a classic in the field is beyond question, as the titles of the two books here reviewed demonstrate. Other biographical essays on Syme have been written, but none of them deal in detail with these first years of his academic career, and herein lies the chief originality of G.V.’s book. The author thoroughly analyses the papers and reviews that Syme wrote during this early period, as well as a selection of letters sent and received, and finally collects information about Syme's travels (France, Germany and, in particular, Italy).
By the early 1930s, Syme was a Fellow of Trinity College in Oxford, and had begun to be widely recognised as a specialist on military history, with particular attention to the placement of Roman legions on the frontiers of the Empire. Syme changed the subject of his research after 1934, when he began work on what he intended to be his first monograph, The Provincial at Rome — perhaps a sort of mirror of his own career, as a ‘provincial’ born in New Zealand, now living in the centre of global knowledge. Syme worked on this book for the following two years; when it was on the brink of completion, he abruptly abandoned it in order to start writing The Roman Revolution, the project that would, in effect, change his life. (The Provincial at Rome was eventually prepared for publication by Anthony Birley in 1999, ten years after Syme's death.)
G.V. devotes a part of his book to trying to explain why Syme made this sudden change of direction in his academic trajectory, and this is the most original and interesting section of his work. His conclusion is that the turning point was the short review — two pages — that Syme wrote in 1934 in the Classical Review concerning Mario Attilio Levi's Ottaviano capoparte: storia politica di Roma durante le ultime lotte di supremazia (1933). As the subtitle indicates, this book offered a reconstruction of the final years of the Republic and the beginning of the Principate, in which Levi stressed the ability of Octavian to build a powerful faction around him. The similarity of Levi's argument to The Roman Revolution is evident, and, according to G.V., the influence exerted on Syme was extraordinary (see also G. García Vivas, ‘El Ottaviano Capoparte de Mario Attilio Levi y su influencia en The Roman Revolution de Ronald Syme’, Gerión 35/1 (2017), 279–97). His reading of Levi's work seems to have instilled in Syme a sense of urgent necessity to write a book on exactly the same period and with the same protagonists. As the book's original manuscript, preserved in the Bodleian Library (Bodleian MS Eng. d. 2099), reveals and as Christopher Pelling has emphasised in a recent Syme Memorial Lecture (‘The rhetoric of The Roman Revolution’, Syllecta Classica 26 (2015), 207–47), The Roman Revolution originally had the title Augustus: Leader and Party, which offers a close remembrance to the title of Levi's book. The new and definitive title was apparently suggested to him by OUP. At any rate, Syme's copy of Levi's Ottaviano capoparte, today in the library of Wolfson College, shows how conscientiously he read the book, which is full of underlined texts, question marks and even corrections of spelling errors in some French and German titles.
In the last part of his monograph, G.V. studies all articles and reviews published by Syme between 1935 and 1939, as well as his exchanges of letters with prestigious scholars such as Fabricius, Strasburger, Alföldi and Münzer. The book finishes with an appendix in which a selection of letters addressed to Syme between 1927 and 1939 are collected.
G.V.’s well-written book is an essential source for the young Syme's trajectory in the years before he became a renowned scholar, and it gives interesting clues to help us understand how he approached his Roman revolution. The book is therefore an indispensable contribution both to Syme's biography, and to the wider historiography of Roman history.
Syme lived the last years of his life in Wolfson College in Oxford. When he died in 1989, he left behind a great amount of personal documentation, the so-called Syme Archive, which is now stored in the Special Collections of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. From this archive Federico Santangelo has extracted twenty-six hitherto unpublished papers. In order to appreciate what this collection of papers can add to Syme's work, it must be borne in mind that the author did not see them through to publication during his lifetime; in many cases he simply laid them aside in a more or less unfinished state. The studies are therefore at different stages of completion, allowing us to envisage the way in which Syme worked and how he composed his papers. The publication of these papers has consequently required careful editorial work by S., who has provided selected bibliographical addenda for each paper, which also give information on later scholarly developments.
The papers deal with different aspects of Roman Republican history, showing that although Syme progressively dedicated more effort to imperial and late antique subjects in the second part of his career, he never completely abandoned Republican history. All of them were composed after the publication of The Roman Revolution, and none are later than the first half of the 1960s. The papers, which have been thematically organised, deal with a broad range of issues, most of them easily recognisable as belonging to Syme's intellectual universe. We have studies of distinguished Roman families, perhaps sections of a larger prosopographical investigation of leading families and their role in Republican politics; essays on the period after Sulla's dictatorship, immediately preceding the ‘Roman revolution’ as defined by Syme; some short studies clearly linked to Syme's monograph on Sallust; and a group of essays focused on the period covered in The Roman Revolution, on Cicero, Virgil and Nicolaus of Damascus. Rather unexpected, if we take into account Syme's usual lack of interest in constitutional and ceremonial problems, is the article ‘How many fasces?’, in which the author explores the development of the notion of imperium between the late Republic and the early Principate. Likewise surprising is the substantial portion of a monograph on Rome and Umbria, covering the whole age from the conquest of the region to the Augustan period, that closes the volume.
In short, this well-edited volume provides the scholarly community with an interesting collection of Syme's unpublished papers, and it is always stimulating to read Syme. They were written between sixty and eighty years ago, and this needs to be kept in mind when evaluating their contribution to our knowledge of the Roman Republic, given the huge and ever-increasing volume of subsequent bibliography on the period. The book has, at any rate, evident historiographical value, and helps us to better understand Syme's intellectual itinerary.
Syme ‘was, by anyone's standards, a man of genius’, S. asserts in the introduction to Approaching the Roman Revolution (14). I myself remember the tremor of excitement I felt when I entered for the first time the section of Wolfson College Library where Syme's own personal library is preserved, open to be used by any scholar. The excitement became emotion the moment I had in my hands some of Syme's books, in which one can still read notes written by him. Nobody can doubt Syme's meticulous methodology and brilliant literary gifts. His books and articles are masterpieces, not least for the penetrating scrutiny to which the ancient sources are subjected. No other modern scholar, with the sole probable exception of Friedrich Münzer, had so profound a knowledge of the aristocratic Roman families of the Republican period, in particular during the first century b.c.e., as Syme's published works showed long ago, and the new papers reinforce. When one reads Syme's The Roman Revolution, The Augustan Aristocracy and many of his articles, one's mind is immediately struck by the impression that he really knew all these people, was present in their dining-rooms and in their reunions, and ultimately that he was one of them, so vividly does he describe their alliances, marriages, friendships and enmities, in short, their lives.
Syme was certainly unique as a scholar, and, in a sense, this uniqueness can in the long term be applied to his methodology and to the way in which he conceived history. The prosopography that German scholarship had previously developed, reached with Syme the highest possible level, and the prosopographical method is obviously still necessary to reconstruct a historical period, at least when the sources allow us to use it (see now the project Digital Prosopography of the Roman Republic, directed by Henrik Mouritsen: http://romanrepublic.ac.uk/). Such a method, however, can only be applied to those members of the social elite who left a trace of their activity; consequently, the vast majority of the population remains excluded. The lower classes, women, slaves and soldiers were perhaps minor actors, but they were not mere spectators, and at times their actions were decisive. This fact was no obstacle for Syme, who famously declared in The Roman Revolution: ‘Roman history, Republican or Imperial, is the history of the governing class’ (7). As Arnaldo Momigliano, in his review in JRS in 1940, just a few months after the publication of Syme's book, has already pointed out: ‘we shall reaffirm that prosopographical research cannot give a sufficient interpretation of this period (and, we would add, of any historical period)’ (77). Moreover: ‘In our special case, given the nature of the documents available for Roman history in the first century B.C., prosopographical research is bound to be restricted to the leading men, and they may be less significant than the masses. S.'s book is lacking in background’ (78). Momigliano concluded his criticism with this methodological observation: ‘History is the history of problems, not of individuals or of groups’ (77).
If we consider the development of research on Roman history in general, and on the Roman Republic in particular, over the last few decades, we can only agree that Momigliano was surely right in indicating the future direction of research. Although our sources remain substantially unchanged, the formulation of new questions has allowed us to explore new problems and topics that were previously all but non-existent in the scholarship and to which Syme paid no attention. One thinks, among other things, of the political and social role of the plebs, as well as their participation in political mobilisations beyond mere personal links with the elite (clientelae); the importance of popular assemblies (contiones) as a means to shape public opinion and create influence in Roman politics; the central role played by slavery in the Roman economy and its social repercussions; the social, economic and even political role played by women, who certainly occupy a secondary place in our sources but are nonetheless fundamental to understanding Roman society; and so on (a detailed list of subjects and authors is beyond the scope of this review). Still more decisive is the fact that the prosopographical method emphasised the prominence of personal links among the elite as the driving force in historical development, while simultaneously limiting or even eliminating the importance of political ideas that clearly existed and were present within Roman society.
Syme did not show great interest in the ‘constitutional’ mechanisms of the Roman Republic. By contrast, over the last few decades a large amount of detailed work on institutions and political concepts (republican magistracies, the senate, assemblies, imperium, the provinces, etc.) has given us a clearer understanding of how Rome and her empire actually worked, while at the same time qualifying or openly challenging the excessively rigid, systematised and regulated vision of the Roman ‘constitution’ pictured by Mommsen in the nineteenth century, which in some ways continues to hold sway in the scholarship. Several articles published in JRS by Fergus Millar during the 1980s, as well as his book The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (1998), have given rise to a fertile debate about the democratic or oligarchic nature of the Roman Republic, in which scholars of different countries have made significant contributions. The discussion, one of the most inspiring scholarly debates for years, had as its point of departure a conception of Roman society and politics which had very little to do with Syme's perspective. Even this simple statement by Millar implied a radical break with Syme's understanding of Roman politics: ‘In essence I want to place in the centre of our conception the picture of an orator addressing a crowd in the Forum; a picture of someone using the arts of rhetoric to persuade an anonymous crowd about something’ (JRS 76 (1986), 1). As a result, we now have a better understanding of both Roman institutions and Roman politics, and new paths have been opened for future research.
Syme remained loyal throughout his life to the literary and epigraphic evidence as the only relevant sources for reconstructing Roman history. For instance, it is significant that he shows no interest in using archaeological evidence in the incomplete monograph on Rome and Umbria which now appears in Approaching the Roman Revolution (it is nonetheless true that the archaeological evidence in Umbria was not as abundant then as today). Written sources obviously remain our chief category of evidence, and an intelligent interpretation of these sources, such as Syme usually offers, is always essential. Nevertheless, in the increasingly interconnected world in which we live, Ancient History demands more open and interdisciplinary approaches, and consequently a collaboration with other disciplines such as (among others) Anthropology, Sociology and Political Science, not to mention Archaeology, a collaboration that already began decades ago.
Every historian is, at least partially, the result of his or her personal circumstances in the framework of a certain historical milieu. Our world today has little to do with Syme's world. Could a similar work to The Roman Revolution be written today? In our contemporary context, it might well look outdated; but in its methodology and contents, it was perfectly accommodated to the time in which it was published. At any rate, Syme's entire oeuvre was not only the work of a historian, but a body of literary art that survives the coming of new historical interpretations. These two books contribute splendidly to a better understanding of Syme's rich and complex personality, illuminating on the one hand the road which led to the writing of his unequalled The Roman Revolution, and on the other hand the way he worked, as well as some of the topics that interested him after the publication of his most famous work, but on which he eventually decided not to publish. From different perspectives, the two books help to shape the biography of Syme, which, as S. asserts, waits to be written. As a scholar, Syme was an undisputed master. He focused on individuals rather than on problems; in recent decades, scholarship has preferred to confront some of those social, economic, institutional and political problems that Syme, quite legitimately, ignored.
