All Scholars

Michael Ivanovich Rostovtzeff was, in the opinion of those competent to judge, the greatest and most influential ancient historian between Eduard Meyer and Sir Ronald Syme. He belonged to the greatest of his day and one can compare him with the greatest of the dead. In this context I am concerned with his American phase (1920-52). There had earlier been distinguished European visitors. One recalls E. A. Freeman, Wilhelm Dörpfeld, and S. H. Butcher, not to speak of Eduard Meyer. They came from curiosity or to earn dollars. Dörpfeld wanted to install central heating in his Ithaca home. Rostovtzeff was the first top European classical scholar, a refugee, aged 50, from brutal political repression, denied a post by the insular English—Hugh Last deplored his accent—who gratefully found a new home in the United States and, if not the stimulating milieu of the society he left, at least peace for work, supportive funds, and adoring students ready to learn. He became the example that some 15 years later could be cited to justify the welcoming of Hitler's victims and thus anticipated the greatest single renaissance in modern American classics.His origin was educated bourgeois. His father began as a prep-school instructor in Greek and Latin and rose to local prominence in the educational bureaucracy at Kiev. To his father the scholar attributed his proficiency in Greek and Latin. He began study at the University of St. Petersburg in 1892. Among his teachers there were the Hellenist Victor Jernstedt and the Pole Thaddeus Zielinski. N. P. Kandakov first turned him to the archaeological artifacts and the inscriptions of South Russia. He early mastered philological and archaeological sources and the Totalitätsideal became attainable. His M.A. dissertation (1898) concerned the history of tax-farming. For an earlier degree he had written on Pompeii (1892). He traveled widely in Europe studying archaeology and epigraphy at Vienna in 1900 under Otto Benndorf and Eugen Bormann. Later under A. Mau he learned firsthand of Pompeii. Ulrich Wilcken at Leipzig turned him toward Roman administration and papyrology. He met Wilamowitz at Rome in spring 1903. Already in 1901 the Berlin Hellenist had written to Althoff of "a young Russian whom I hold to be a scholar of the first rank." His doctoral dissertation (1905) showed that important conclusions can be derived from modest evidence. He sought to write social and economic history from Roman lead tesserae. Wilamowitz recommended him to Wissowa. Seven years later the article "Frumentum," in RE 7 (1912) 126-87, appeared and began the modern economic history of the ancient world. He had become Ordinarius at St. Petersburg on 10 Nov. 1908. In Spring 1914 he became a corresponding member of the Berlin Academy.Wes has shown how the fall of the Romanov Empire, the triumph of Lenin and Trotsky, and the exodus of millions of refugees from Russia during the civil war of 1918-20 determined Rostovtzeff s view of the Roman Empire. The world he knew disintegrated. Probably in May 1918, with his wife, and allegedly a cow, he crossed the frontier to Finland. He abandoned his library and the manuscript of Scythia and the Bosporus. Two years at Queen's College, Oxford, followed, presumably owed to the intervention of Sir Ellis Minns.  He never ceased to struggle against the Bolsheviks. His political writings were influential, and he attended the Versailles Peace Conference where he met the intelligence operative and friend of Woodrow Wilson, W. L. Westermann. On 3 Jan. 1920, after evidence had been provided that he was neither a Jew nor a Communist, he was offered Westermann's chair at the University of Wisconsin, for a year as visitor, then permanently. His five years at Madison he later called the happiest of his life, as von Fritz did his years at Reed. A Large Estate in Egypt in the Third Century appeared in 1922. His undergraduate survey course resulted in A History of the Ancient World, until recently standard in many American colleges. At this time he wrote some seven chapters in the Cambridge Ancient History, possibly his most widely read contributions.In 1925 he became Sterling Professor of Ancient History and Classical Archaeology at Yale. The next two decades may have been the most productive of his career. The better library facilities and an established graduate program could not be refused. His Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (1926) and Economic History of the Hellenistic World (1941) were the last great histories done by one man, in the tradition of Gibbon, Grote, Eduard Meyer, Beloch, and Busolt. The erudition, the breadth of coverage, and the lucid exposition won universal praise from those most competent to bestow it. In 1944 a frontal lobotomy was performed on his brain and effectively ended original work. At Yale he undertook in 1927 direction of one of the most successful excavations of this century. Dura-Europos was a caravan center on the Syrian Euphrates founded by Macedonians about 300 B.C. The climate allowed the preservation of wall paintings, cloth, wood, and papyri. Rostovtzeff cooperated with the French Academy, especially Franz Cumont, found funding in the midst of the Depression, and much to his credit edited ten volumes of the preliminary report and six volumes of the final report. The discovery of an early painted Christian chapel and a synagogue with paintings illustrating the Old Testament made the site required for both art historians and historians of religion. Men like Clark Hopkins and Frank E. Brown, and one of the first women field archaeologists, Margaret Crosby, began their careers there.The Dura dig determined appointments at Yale for 25 years amd put literary studies aside as unworthy. Rostovtzeff had the intelligence and energy to win the respect and allegiance of a generation of outstanding students. He assigned dissertations to become excavation reports and cooperated in publication. One recalls Alfred R. Bellinger, R. O. Fink, J. F. Gilliam, Clark Hopkins, C. H. Kraeling, and his successor, C. Bradford Welles. He formed one of the few schools in the American history of the discipline. Economic history had seen its day. His books are often used as collections of source material with their theses impugned. One recalls A. B. Cook's Zeus. Though himself a victim of the October Revolution and very much a supporter of the Czarist regime, Rostovtzeff s whole approach to ancient history was Marxistic. The class struggle, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, each plays a decisive role. And like a Marxist he underestimates the role of religion and the inexorable progress of the ancient world to Christianity. Marx is much out of fashion now. He was followed by Freud and Nietzsche. On the other hand, after Rostovtzeff one cannot deny the central importance of economy in determining history. Eduard Meyer's attribution of history to coincidence and the great man could no longer hold the field. Marxistic terminology prevailed. Moses Finley and G. de Sainte-Croix, influential and discredited, are unthinkable without him. He taught the value of humble evidence earlier neglected and the need to base hypotheses on sources. He showed Americans how to get things done. He frightened most of them. He never became Sather lecturer, president of the APA, or even chairman at Yale. But he was epoch-machend in the sense that nothing will be the same after him. And there are few of whom that may be said.