The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, Vol 1: AD 260-395

by A.H.M. Jones, J. R. Martindale, J. Morris

The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire provides a complete secular biographical dictionary of the period AD 527 (the beginning of the reign of Justinian) to 641 (the death of Heraclius). The information has been gathered from a wide variety of sources in Latin, Greek, Arabic, Syriac and other languages. The project makes available for the first time in one work mass of information relating to the personnel of the Roman Empire and the western kingdoms that were its heirs, and of other nations with which Rome had dealings.

Genres: History

1176 pages, Hardcover

First published March 12, 1971

About the author

Arnold Hugh Martin Jones (9 March 1904 – 9 April 1970) — known as A.H.M. Jones — was a prominent 20th century British historian of classical antiquity, particularly of the later Roman Empire.

Jones's best-known work, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602 (1964), is considered the definitive narrative history of late Rome and early Byzantium, beginning with the reign of the Roman tetrarch Diocletian and ending with that of the Byzantine emperor Maurice. One of the most common modern criticisms of this work is its almost total reliance on literary and epigraphic primary sources, a methodology which mirrored Jones's own historiographical training. Archaeological study of the period was in its infancy when Jones wrote, which limited the amount of material culture he could include in his research.

He published his first book, The Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces, in 1937. In 1946, he was appointed to the chair of the Ancient History department at University College, London. In 1951, he moved to Cambridge University and assumed the same post there. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1947.

Jones was reportedly an extremely fast reader with an encyclopedic memory. His disdain for "small talk" sometimes made him seem remote and cold to those who did not know him well, but he was warmly regarded by his students. He was sometimes criticized for not fully acknowledging the work of earlier scholars in his own footnotes, a habit he was aware of and apologized for in the preface to his first book.

Jones died of a heart attack in 1970 while traveling via boat to Thessaloniki to give a series of lectures.

Since Jones's death, popular awareness of his work has often been overshadowed by the work of scholars of Late Antiquity, a period which did not exist as a separate field of study during his lifetime. Late Antiquity scholars frequently refer to him, however, and his enormous contributions to the study of the period are widely acknowledged.

Reviews

[Gordon Goodwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is like the Sims 2 for me

[Michael Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prosopography is a methodology in historical research by which the collection and examination of data -- the external, objective characteristics -- of the lives of a large number of relatively ordinary individuals in a carefully defined group can lead to a perceptive analysis of the nature of the group as a whole. This is the opposite, in fact, of the “great men” approach to history and it has found increasing favor with scholars over the past couple of decades -- although its roots go all the way back to Theodor Mommsen. In doing my Master’s thesis in the 1970s -- an investigation of the population of northeast Texas through coding and analysis of data from public records, including several successive censuses -- I was following a prosopographical method before I had even heard the word. Which is to say that while prosopography seems to be applied mostly to the ancient and medieval worlds, especially in the projects undertaken by the Modern History Research Unit under Katherine Keats-Rohan at Oxford, it certainly isn’t limited to that. This huge set, however, is solidly classical. It attempts to present in compressed form (and largely succeeds) everything can be ascertained, from all surviving sources, about virtually every recorded individual in Roman Europe from roughly the end of the reign of Valerian (which is simply where the previous project of nearly a century ago left off) to the middle of the Heraclian dynasty in the Eastern Empire. (The main exception is full-time religious figures.) Since my own particular interest in this part of history is in Late Antiquity and Early Medieval, this scope suits me perfectly. Each entry, some of only a few lines and others of up to three dozen pages, lays out what is known about each individual in formulaic fashion. There are many cross-references. Most of the text is in English, but there are a considerable number of brief excerpts in Latin and Greek. In the later volumes a great deal of information is brought together about the Romanized “barbarians” (though reliable information is much harder to come by in the later period), so “Roman Empire” is not entirely descriptive. This is a remarkable piece of work, the result of many thousands of man-hours by scores of researchers.

Methodologically, a printed work of this kind is unlikely ever to be produced again, however, since the advent of inexpensive personal computers and user-friendly databases and statistical software make organization of data much more flexible and open-ended these days -- especially with online access by students and researchers.