Erich S. Gruen

Erich Stephen Gruen ( , ; born May 7, 1935) is an American classicist and ancient historian. He was the Gladys Rehard Wood Professor of History and Classics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught full-time from 1966 until 2008. He served as president of the American Philological Association in 1992.

Early life and education Gruen was born May 7, 1935, in Vienna, to a Jewish family. He received BAs from Columbia University and Oxford University and a PhD from Harvard University in 1964. Gruen was a varsity lightweight rower at Columbia and valedictorian of his 550-man graduating class. From 1957 to 1960, he was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford.

Career His early work focused on the late Roman Republic and culminated in The Last Generation of the Roman Republic, a work often cited as a response to 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.

Gruen taught what was purportedly his final undergraduate lecture course, "The Hellenistic World", in the fall of 2006. Despite his retirement from full-time teaching, he continued to oversee doctoral dissertations and was widely sought for visiting professorships. In addition to U.C. Berkeley, Gruen has taught at Harvard University, the University of Colorado Boulder, and Cornell University. He said that his most inspirational teaching experience, however, was a brief stint instructing prisoners at San Quentin State Prison in the late 2000s. At Berkeley, his students included Kenneth Sacks.

Gruen received two Guggenheim Fellowships, 1969–70 and 1989–90. He received the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art in 1998.

On September 26–27, 2024, the University of California at Berkeley held a two-day conference "to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1974 publication of Erich Gruen's landmark study, The Last Generation of the Roman Republic".

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