The work on which Sir Ronald Syme made his name, The Roman Revolution (1939), is history written as a literary work. In my Syme lecture, I will speak first about the reflection of The Roman Revolution in the writing of George Orwell, and then more broadly about what it means to write history as literature, drawing on the work of Yiyun Li and Kazuo Ishiguro and speaking about the life of Cicero and about Rome in the 50s bce.
Writing literature means writing with feeling, and I will speak about our feelings towards the human beings who lived in the past—feelings which I find by, among other things, remembering the weather. In the opening words of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “It was a bright cold day in April… .” We can always remember the weather.
(Some members of the audience may wish to know in advance that Yiyun Li writes about suicide. Suicide is not the topic of my talk but, drawing on her writing, an awareness of suicide is in its texture.)
