Background

Michael Rostovtzeff was born on November 10, 1870, in Kiev, where he went through the university, earning master and doctorate degrees in classical philology.

Education

He completed his studies at the universities of Kiev and St. Petersburg, earning master and doctorate degrees in classical philology.

Career

From 1895 to 1898 he traveled throughout the classical lands. He then became professor of Latin at the University of St. Petersburg, a post he occupied until 1918. Rostovtzeff and his wife left their country in 1918 because of the Russian Revolution and went to England. His Proletarian Culture (1919), published under the auspices of the Russian Liberation Committee, showed his revulsion against the principles of the Russian Revolution.

In 1920 he became professor of ancient history at the University of Wisconsin, a position he held until 1925, when he went to Yale as Sterling professor of ancient history and archeology.

His Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (1926) is considered one of the principal modern contributions to Roman historiography. In his popular text A History of the Ancient World (2 vols. , 1926 - 1927) Rostovtzeff devoted considerable space to art and literature, and he extended this interest to Chinese art in his next book, Inlaid Bronzes of the Han Dynasty in the Collection of C. T. Loo (1927).

He continued to write on topics such as Italy, Seleucid Babylonia, the animal style in Russia and China, and the art of Dura-Europos. The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World (3 vols. , 1941) is his most famous work.

He died in New Haven on October 20, 1952.

Achievements

• He was a member of the Russian Academy of Science. In 1928 he directed Yale's archeological expedition to Dura-Europos on the Euphrates River in Syria. He continued as director and remained as editor of the excavation reports after he retired from teaching in 1944. At the same time, Rostovtzeff was writing monographs and more general books. Two of his studies, A Large Estate in Egypt in the Third Century B. C. and The Iranians and Greeks in South Russia (both 1922), showed his interest in economic and cultural development. He is believed to have coined the term "caravan city". Rostovtzeff was notable for his theories of the cause of the collapse of the Roman Empire which he expounded in detail in his magisterial The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (1926).

Works

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  • A Large Estate in Egypt in the Third Century (Classic Reprint)

    (The most important is to express my conviction that the p...)

  • The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World (Oxford University Press academic monograph reprints) (Vols 1-3)

    (Widely regarded as a landmark study of the Hellenistic pe...)

  • Iranians & Greeks in south Russia

    (High Quality Facsimile Reporduction: Rostovtsev, Mikhail ...)

  • Urban land economics

    (This book was digitized and reprinted from the collection...)

  • Rome (A Galaxy book)

    (First published in 1927 this monumental book has long bee...)

  • A History of Russia

    (History of Russia - From the Earliest Times to 1882 - Vol...)

  • The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire

    (Book by Rostovtzeff, Michael Ivanovitch)

  • A Large Estate in Egypt in the Third Century B.C.: A Study in Economic History 1922

    (Originally published in 1922. This volume from the Cornel...)

  • Iranians & Greeks in South Russia (Classic Reprint)

    (Hon. D.L itt. (Typographical errors above are due to OCR ...)

  • DIE HELLENISTISCHE WELT 3 VOLUME SET Gesellschaft Und Wirtschaft. Band I-III
  • A history of Russia, by George Vernadsky ... with a preface by Michael Ivanovich Rostovtzeff.
  • Urban land economics
  • Urban land economics (Volume 2)
  • Tesserarum urbis Romae et suburbi plumbearum sylloge (Latin Edition)
  • The social & economic history of the Hellenistic world,
  • Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft im Römischen Kaiserreich. 2-vol. set (Complete)
  • OUT OF THE PAST OF GREECE AND ROME.
  • Dura-Europos and its art
  • Tesserarum urbis Romae et suburbi plumbearum sylloge (Volume 2) (Latin Edition)

Views

Rostovtzeff believed that the past had meaning for the present. He favored the open Greek economic system in contrast to the closed Egyptian one and the urban middle class over a rural aristocracy. He attacked the notions that the ancient world was a stage from which modern economic development evolved and that economic factors were the sole cause of cultural change.

He thought the ancient world displayed features similar to the modern and argued that the economic development of the ancient world roughly approximated that of the present, although it did not reach the full stage of industrial capitalism.

Scarred by his experience of fleeing from the Russian Revolution, he attributed the collapse of the Roman Empire to an alliance between the rural proletariat and the military in the third century A. D. Despite not being a Marxist himself, Rostovtzeff used terms such as proletariat, bourgeoisie and capitalism freely in his work and the importation of those terms into a description of the ancient world, where they did not necessarily apply, caused criticism

Personality

In later life, he suffered from depression.

References

• Writing History in Time of War: Michael Rostovtzeff, Elias Bickerman and the Hellenization of Asia (2015-03-31)
• Writing History in Time of War: Michael Rostovtzeff, Elias Bickerman and the "Hellenization of Asia"
• Writing History in Time of War: Michael Rostovtzeff, Elias Bickerman and the Hellenization of Asia (2015-03-31)
• Michael Rostovtzeff, Historian in Exile: Russian Roots in an American Context (Historia - Einzelschriften) (German Edition)