By David Bruce

In the ivory-towered world of academia a series of lectures are an honour and celebration that recognise the achievements of the most learned of scholars.

Beneath the dreaming spires of Oxford University earlier this year, six lectures delivered by scholars with international reputations of their own celebrated the centenary of one of Oxford's most illustrious scholars, an academic still hailed as one of the greatest historians of Rome.

Sir Ronald Syme, one-time Taranaki schoolboy, lately Camden professor of ancient history at Oxford, the holder of honorary degrees in 11 countries on five continents, died 14 years ago, a scholar who was arguably one of Taranaki's greatest sons.

And possibly one of our least remembered.

The most tangible local memorial to the Eltham boy, who was born on 11 March 1903 to David and Florence Syme, is Syme House at New Plymouth Boys' High School, the young scholar's jumping-off point to a distinguished career.

Ronald Syme, younger cousin to well-known Taranaki mountaineer and horticulturalist Rod Syme, attended primary school at Eltham and then Stratford District High School before moving to NPBHS as a boarder in 1918.

Immediately entered in the senior school, he gained fourth place in the Junior University Scholarship that year but was unable to take up his scholarship because he was under the qualifying age of 16.

Forced to mark time for another two years, he was dux for both of them and in 1919 topped the University Scholarship list with a score of 2222 marks from a possible 2700, more than 200 marks clear of his nearest rival. His versatility was obvious, his 93% in Latin exceeded by his 96% in chemistry.

The school's yearbook records that the whole school had a holiday to celebrate his achievement.

With undergraduate degrees from both Victoria and Auckland Universities under his mortar board and the world at his academic feet, Ronald Syme moved on to Oriel College in Oxford, gaining first class honours in Greek and Latin.

Working as a military historian his first major publication was an account of the campaigns on the northern borders of the Roman Empire. His interests were fostered by travel and participation in archaeological expeditions in the Danube and Rhine frontier regions. A fellow and tutor at Trinity College Oxford from 1929, he became Dean of the college in 1938.

"It has not been composed in tranquility and it ought to have been held back and rewritten but the theme, I firmly believe, is of some importance," he wrote.

Roman history in the 1920s and 30s was well established, a sometimes romantic history based on 60 generations of myth and legend often inspired by the writings of Virgil and Horace. Constitutional niceties, institutions and generalities abounded and the collapse of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire was portrayed as a struggle between conservative Optimates and reforming Populares resolved by the "statesman" Augustus.

Hero worship of Augustus was often the basis for apparently scholarly works that portrayed him as a great leader and master designer, albeit something of a cold fish.

Watching the rise of the European dictators in the 1930s, Syme had developed his own theories, paralleling history with the present. His argument was that the change was not a change of parliamentary nature but a revolution driven by greed for power, wealth and glory. Ancient Rome, like Fascist Germany, Italy and Spain, was not governed so much by a constitution as by gangsters, connections, money-men, corruption and mortal fear.

For the next five years Syme and his academic peers were distracted by the war. Brief notices in Taranaki newspapers, especially his home-town Eltham Argus, kept tabs on his appointments as a press attache to British legations in Belgrade and Ankara; and later as Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Istanbul.

After the war, recognition came for Syme. Now regarded as one of the great works of history, The Roman Revolution was praised not only as a work of detailed scholarship and perception, but was also acclaimed as compulsive reading. Syme's writing style - clipped, passionate, heavy with allusion and often with irony - moved his work from being the sole domain of the scholar to become pleasurable reading for the interested amateur as well.

In May 1948 he was appointed to the 300-year-old Camden Chair as professor of ancient history at Brasenose College, Oxford. With a burgeoning international reputation he became secretary general of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies in 1952, a role he filled until 1971 when he became president. He retired as president in 1975.

Brasenose College: In 1948, Ronald Syme took over the 300-year-old Camden Chair as professor of ancient history at Brasenose College, Oxford. 

Image: © 2004 Jonathan Bowen

In 1958 Syme's second masterpiece, Tacitus, was published. Another window into a moment of time, Tacitus focuses on Roman society at the end of the first century, reactions to the regime of Domitian and the motives of Tacitus in the writing of it. Tacitus is a work of analysis that concerns itself with the person, his environment and his social status, the context of his family and other social groups, the places in which he was active and the function he performed within his society.

In 1959 Ronald Syme was knighted.

Continuing to reassess the gilded and majestic figures of history as ruffians and ratbags, Sir Ronald's other books include Colonial Elites (1958), in which he deals with Spain and the Americas. With Sallust (1964) he became the first historian of the 20th century to place Sallust - whom Tacitus called the most brilliant Roman historian - in his social, political and literary context (scholars previously had considered Sallust to be a mere political hack or pamphleteer). Other works include Ammianus and the Historia Augusta (1968) and History in Ovid (1978).

In 1976, Sir Ronald joined the Order of Merit, perhaps Britain's most prestigious order, which is limited to no more than 24 living persons. He shared his moment of investiture with former English Prime Minister Harold McMillan, art historian Lord Kenneth Clarke, who received international acclaim for his Civilisation television series, and Lord Hinton, who pioneered British atomic power stations. In New Zealand his award was celebrated by an eight-paragraph news item.

Described by his colleagues as a private, rather secretive man, he was not known to have any real interests outside Roman history and French literature. Yet he could address conferences throughout Europe not only in Latin but also in the native language of the country he was visiting. Legend has it that when prompted by German wines, of which he was a connoisseur, he might be persuaded to sing Serbo-Croat folk songs.

On a visit home to Eltham in 1971 he urged the writing of a novel to record the pioneering days of the town he had grown up in and advised that he "did not think that Maori and Japanese, if introduced to New Zealand schools, would be of any great utility".

A lifelong bachelor, Sir Ronald Syme died at Oxford in 1989. He was 86.