9 Foreword. Anthony R. Birley Prefacio. José A. Delgado Delgado
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ÍNDICE GENERAL Foreword. Anthony R. Birley 11 Prefacio. José A. Delgado Delgado 15 Introducción 17 I. Ronald Syme. Apuntes biográficos 23 1. Los primeros años 23 2. Un “provincial” en Oxford 26 3. Los años en Trinity College 30 4. La guerra mundial 34 5. Los años de postguerra 37 6. La madurez científica y los reconocimientos 39 7. Los últimos años 43 8. Conclusiones 46 II. Los inicios. El milieu de Oxford: 1928-1929 47 1. El inicio de la carrera investigadora. Los primeros viajes 47 2. Su elección como fellow de Trinity y sus estancias en la British School de 51 Roma 3. La publicación del primer artículo 56 4. La producción de Syme en 1929 60 5. Conclusiones 66 III. El historiador consagrado de temas militares: 1930-1933 69 1. La actividad de Syme durante 1930 69 2. Los trabajos publicados a lo largo de 1931 74 3. La producción symeana en 1932 85 4. La actividad de Syme en el Oxford Magazine. Un artículo de marzo de 1932 87 5. El año 1933 87 6. Conclusiones 97 IV. El punto de inflexión: 1934 99 1. El artículo sobre las guerras cántabras 99 2. Las aportaciones de Syme a la CAH y los artículos relacionados 103 3. The Provincial at Rome. Génesis y análisis 112 4. Ronald Syme y el Ottaviano Capoparte 115 5. Otras reseñas publicadas en 1934 118 6. Cartas a Syme de diversos investigadores fechadas en 1934 120 7. Conclusiones 124 9 V. La confirmación del giro symeano: el bienio 1935-1936 125 1. Los trabajos publicados en 1935 125 2. Las publicaciones de 1936 132 3. Los intereses investigadores de Syme reflejados en sus reseñas publicadas 136 a lo largo de 1936 4. Una carta de Ernst Fabricius a Syme de enero de 1936 143 5. Conclusiones 144 VI. El camino hacia el The Roman Revolution: el bienio 1937-1938 147 1. Los Vorarbeiten de RR publicados en 1937 147 2. Dos trabajos más fechados en 1937 150 3. Las reseñas publicadas por Syme en 1937 151 4. Una carta de Friedrich Münzer de agosto de 1937 154 5. Los Vorarbeiten de RR publicados en 1938 156 6. Las reseñas de Syme sobre diversas monografías publicadas en 1938 160 7. Las cartas escritas a Ronald Syme por diversos investigadores en 1938 163 8. Conclusiones 165 VII. El final del recorrido: 1939 167 1. Las reseñas aparecidas en 1939 167 2. Un artículo sobre la provincia de Cilicia 169 3. El final del viaje:The Roman Revolution 170 4. Las cartas de diversos investigadores a Syme fechadas en 1939 182 5. Conclusiones 185 VIII. Conclusiones 187 IX. Apéndice documental 197 Bibliografía de Sir Ronald Syme 249 Bibliografía 255 Índice onomástico 269 Índice de instituciones 274 Índice de ilustraciones 277 10 FOREWORD. It is a pleasure to write some preliminary words to this pioneering study by Dr Gustavo García Vivas, which offers valuable insights into the emergence of a very great scholar. Ronald Syme died on 4th September 1989, three days before the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Roman Revolution, his best-known book. It had already been translated into several languages and was still in print, as is the case today, another twenty-seven years later. In other words, it is now a classic. At the time when it first appeared, the massive work, over five hundred pages long, by a young man only thirty-six years old, evidently came as a surprise to many in the scholarly world, especially because of its heterodox views. One of Syme’s correspondents, the classical archaeologist Eugénie Strong (1860- 1943), then living in retirement in Rome, wrote to him in July 1939: “I see that you have written a new book about Rome to upset everyone else’s ideas.” Of course, the outbreak of the world war a few days before the publication meant that reactions in many countries were delayed for some years. Syme himself was out of academic life and on government service from the start of the war, and overseas from 1940 to 1946, as were not a few of his colleagues and friends. It was ten years after the great book had been published that a contemporary, the American ancient historian James H. Oliver (1905-1981), who had come across him in the early 1930s, wrote to him that “When I read ‘The Roman Revolution’ I remembered that there was a man named something like Ronald Syme at the British School in Rome in my time, but it seemed unlikely that the young man whom I remembered as a professed admirer of the works of a Renaissance master named Fra Poco could be the author of the most important political and social history of Rome since Mommsen.”1 Colleagues who knew Syme well or who had received offprints of his articles during the previous decade had less reason for surprise. Syme had been elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford in 1929, and from then onwards had to teach both Greek and Roman History to individual tutorial pupils, as well as offering lectures 1 Letter from Baltimore, 12th February 1949. Oliver’s reference to this professed admiration for an invented ‘Fra Poco’, reminds us that Syme always had a great sense of humour. 11 open to all undergraduates. Some Oxford ancient historians, such as Isobel Henderson and Michael Holroyd, were typical of the College Fellows in that they devoted themselves mainly or almost exclusively to teaching and published very little. That was not the case with Syme. From the start he set out to meet or make contact with well-established scholars in other European countries. As soon as he had begun to publish he sent out offprints of his articles. In those days it was still usual to write in acknowledgment, which explains not a few of the letters, which he carefully preserved, that he received from older colleagues. Of course, the outstanding quality of his articles made a big difference to the way he was regarded. Max Cary (1881-1958, Professor of Ancient History at Bedford College and University College, London), ended a letter thanking Syme for sending him offprints in June 1939 with the comment: “Your output of first-class work is enormous, not to say alarming”. As well as articles and other contributions, Syme wrote numerous reviews. It is striking how Gustavo García has underlined the significance of Syme’s review, which appeared in 1934, of Ottaviano Capoparte by Mario Attilio Levi, published the previous year. Christopher Pelling, in his recent Syme Memorial Lecture revealed that the manuscript of The Roman Revolution, completed in summer 1938, gave it the original title “Augustus: Leader and Party”, which underlines the influence of Levi’s concept. Syme himself, shortly before his death, chose this review, ‘From Octavian to Augustus’, as the first item in hisRoman Papers VI (1991), which indicates that he himself attached considerable importance to it. Dr García has however also detected in a number of Syme’s reviews his belief in a ‘Roman revolution’ in the late Republic and Triumvirate leading to the rise of the future Augustus, which helps to explain why the final title emerged. Dr García’s systematic analysis of everything that Syme wrote in the years leading up to the appearance of The Roman Revolution, as well as a careful collection of information about Syme’s travels, together with a selection of letters to Syme, has made possible the composition of this fascinating intellectual biography. It was a fortunate chance that I received a letter from Gustavo García in June 2012 (his earlier attempt to contact me by email the previous October had not succeeded), informing me that he had embarked on this study of Ronald Syme, and had been advised in Oxford to get in touch with me. It happened that at this very time I had returned, after a gap of over a dozen years, to my previous engagement with Ronald Syme’s work. Dr Federico Santangelo of Newcastle University had invited me to a conference in August 2011 at Lampeter in Wales on “Andreas Alföldi in the Twenty-First Century”. Alföldi was one of the continental scholars whom Syme had come to know well as a highly regarded friend in the 1930s––more of Alföldi’s work than anyone else’s is in the ‘List of Works Referred To’ at the end of The Roman Revolution. Many of his letters are preserved in Syme’s archives, and in my Lampeter paper on ‘Andreas Alföldi and the Historia Augusta’ I quoted several that I had transcribed in the 1990s. A little later I mentioned to Dr Santangelo that I had also copied a considerable number of unpublished articles by Syme. These I had offered to the Oxford University Press as a possible eighth volume of Roman Papers, but the Delegates of the Press had then felt unable to publish them. I had put this material away and not looked at it again until Dr Santangelo expressed an interest in it. To cut a long story short, his enthusiastic reaction has led to him taking over the editing of these papers, with the warm support of Sir Fergus Millar, Syme’s Literary Executor, and the result is a substantial volume, published last November by the Oxford University Press: F. Santangelo, ed., Approaching the Roman Revolution. Papers on Republican History. This will undoubtedly lead to a renewed interest in Syme’s work as a whole,2 a propitious circumstance for the publication of 2 It must be added that as ‘as a companion resource’ to the book Federico Santangelo has prepared ‘INDEXES TO THE WORKS OF RONALD SYME.