Teaching Thursday: Roman History and Syme’s The Roman Revolution

Readers of this blog know that I have a mild obsession with Ronald Syme’s 1939 masterpiece, The Roman Revolution. My interest is as much as his extraordinary style as his intriguing analysis. 

There is, of course, also the chilling resonance of his volume in the contemporary world. 

Some of this might account for the continued interest in The Roman Revolution and Ronald Syme himself over the past 20 years. Of particular note are Christopher Pelling’s landmark article “Rhetoric of the Roman Revolution” Syllecta Classica 26.1 (2015) and just this year Federico Santangelo and Eugenia Vitello’s “The Politics of Syme’s Revolution” Revista de Historiografía 40 (2025). It would be worth adding Anthony Birley’s Select Correspondence of Ronald Syme, 1927–1939 (2020). It would be interesting to read Syme against the work of Arnaldo Momigliano especially through the lens of Oswyn Murray’s The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present(2024).

This would be a lot for a 300 level course at my institution. Moreover, my current model for teaching Roman History is an expansive one that stretched from the beginning of the Late Republic to the Seventh Century. There simply isn’t room to give this book its due.

This nudged me to consider another possibility. What if I created a one-credit reading course focused on The Roman Revolution. The book has 33 chapter so that would mean we’d have to read and discuss 2 per week. Since the class would only be one credit, we wouldn’t need to meet more than a hour a per week and the students could use the book as the basis for their book review in Roman History (allowing them to kill two birds with one stone).

The two questions are, of course, would any student be interested in doing this and would it fit into their schedule? Unfortunately, I teach a class immediately after my Roman History course (and it’s on the other side of campus!), so the easy offer to stay around for another hour isn’t there. I could, of course, run the class from 5-6 pm which is pretty unappealing for most students (and, cough, me) or hold it between 7-8 am on Thursday morning (this was when we read Latin last year).

The second question is whether the students would take it seriously enough to get something out of a class like this. My point isn’t just would they understand Syme, but would they see how Syme has relevance in our contemporary situation.