Erich S. Gruen

Erich S. Gruen is the Gladys Rehard Wood Professor of History and Classics Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His research deals broadly with Greek and Roman history and the history of the Jews in the Greco-Roman world. He has published books and articles on the politics of the Roman Republic, on the expansion of Rome into the world of Greece and the Near East, on the mutual interactions between Roman and Hellenic cultures, and on the rewriting of biblical traditions and Jewish history by Hellenized Jews of the Second Temple period. Gruen's earlier work focused on the later Roman Republic, and culminated in The Last Generation of the Roman Republic, a work often cited as a response to Sir Ronald Syme's The Roman Revolution. Gruen's argument is that the Republic was not in decay, and so not necessarily in need of "rescue" by Caesar Augustus and the institutions of the Empire. He later worked on the Hellenistic period and on Judaism in the classical world. In 1992 he served as President of the American Philological Association. He received the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art in 1998. His current research project explored the experience of diaspora Jews and the reshaping of their cultural identity in the circumstances of the Greco-Roman cities of the Mediterranean.