The Provincial at Rome

This volume offers a new insight into the development of a great historian, as well as giving an exciting and immensely readable new approach to late Republican and early Imperial Roman history. Drafted in 1934-35, but laid aside in favour of 'The Roman Revolution' (1939), 'The Provincial at Rome' was to have been Ronald Syme's first book. It is a brilliantly written study of the enlargement of the Roman élite in the early empire, an analysis, in thirteen chapters, of the Emperor Claudius' enrolment of 'Gallic chieftains' into the Senate in AD 48. The edition also includes five unpublished papers dealing with Rome's conquest of the Balkans, a region Syme knew intimately.