Geoffrey De Ste. Croix, 89, Marxist Historian of Ancient World Dies (NY Times Obit)

[James Farmelant <farmelantj@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

February 12, 2000


Geoffrey De Ste. Croix, 89, Marxist Historian of Ancient World
By PAUL LEWIS

Geoffrey Ernest Maurice de Ste. Croix, a Marxist historian of ancient
Greece and Rome whose erudition and sweeping, passionate style won the
admiration of colleagues even when they disagreed with his conclusions,
died Feb. 5 at a hospital in Oxford, England. He was three days short of
his 90th birthday.

De Ste. Croix, whose name reflected his family's French Huguenot origins,

taught at Oxford from 1953 until his retirement in 1977. He came late to
ancient scholarship after practicing law and serving during World War II
in the Royal Air Force. His two most praised books did not appear until
he was in his 60s and 70s.

In 1972 de Ste. Croix published "The Origins of the Peloponnesian War,"
which challenged the view that the war was provoked by Athens. Instead,
he lauded Athenian democracy for offering the poor some respite from
oppression by the rich and pinned responsibility for the long conflict
firmly on the Spartans.

"He revived the pro-Athenian, pro-democratic stance of earlier scholars
like George Grote," said Victor Bers, a professor of classics at Yale,
referring to the noted 19th-century British historian of ancient Greece.

Nine years later de Ste. Croix published his best-known work, "The Class
Struggle in the Ancient World, From the Archaic Age to the Arab
Conquests,"
an enormous book that swept over the entire course of ancient Greek and
Roman civilization, identifying slavery and oppression as central
weaknesses.

De Ste. Croix wrote that the history of antiquity could be seen as a
class
struggle between workers, primarily slaves, and property owners. He
maintained that reliance on slave labor prevented the ancient world from
modernizing and in the end undermined the Roman Empire as the supply of
new slaves diminished and the exploited lower orders had little reason to

resist the advancing barbarians.

"Those who have been chastised with scorpions may hope for something
better
if they think they will be chastised only with whips," he wrote in the
book's
concluding sentence.

John Matthews, chairman of the Yale classics department, said, "For de
Ste.
Croix, the empire was weakened as the supply of new slaves dried up and
Romans lost their liberty."

"This was not the moral change blamed by Gibbon," he said of the
18th-century
British historian Edward Gibbon, who theorized that Christianity had
accelerated the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

Reviewing "The Class Struggle in the Ancient World" in 1982,
Robin Lane Fox, another noted Oxford classicist, wrote, "This remarkable
book has a passion, a personal style and a breadth of interest, based on
exact detail, which have not surfaced in British history writing on such
a scale for very many years." Fox went on to disagree with almost
everything de Ste. Croix had said.

This was typical of the mixture of awe and dissent with which many
historians greeted his work.

"Very few living scholars can rival his range, and none who is competent
to judge can challenge the exactitude of his scholarship," wrote P.A.
Brunt,
a former Camden professor of ancient history at Oxford, in a book of
essays
presented to de Ste. Croix on his 75th birthday. Still, Brunt called his
conclusions "highly controversial."

Glen Bowersock, a professor of ancient history at the Institute for
Advanced
Study in Princeton, said: "He was a controversialist who brought a breath

of fresh air to ancient scholarship. Almost everything he said was
interesting."

De Ste. Croix was born in the Portuguese colony of Macau on Feb. 8, 1910.

His father worked for the Chinese customs office there and his mother was

a missionary's daughter, a member of an obscure fundamentalist Christian
sect called the British Israelites. The sect believed that the date of
Armageddon could be calculated from the dimensions of the great pyramid.
One of his aunts had known the Chinese Christian Gen. Feng Yu-hsiang, who

baptized whole regiments with a hose-pipe.

Geoffrey's father died when he was 4, and the family returned to England.

Geoffrey was introduced to the classics at Clifton College, a private
boys'
school near Bristol. But he became a lawyer and practiced in Worthing and

London.

His political views became increasingly radical during the 1930s, when he

embraced Marxism, but he broke with the British Communist Party in 1939.
His interest in the ancient world was aroused during the war when he
served as an Royal Air Force officer in the Middle East converting radar
tracks into intelligible aircraft flight paths.

Entering London University at the age of 37 in 1947 to study classics, he

fell under the influence of A.H.M. Jones, one of the greatest ancient
historians of his generation. Master and pupil inspired each other, but
as Lane Fox wrote, de Ste. Croix's writing came to exhibit "a fire and
an explicitness which Jones' books had somehow lacked."

After teaching at the London School of Economics, de Ste. Croix was
elected a fellow of New College in 1953, at 43, becoming only the
second member of the ancient history faculty at Oxford to have been
educated at another university. He was elected a fellow of the British
Academy in 1972 and awarded a doctorate by Oxford. He became an emeritus
fellow of New College in 1977 and an honorary fellow in 1985.

A large man, de Ste. Croix had been a distinguished tennis player in
his youth, good enough to play the center court at Wimbledon in 1929.

His first marriage ended in divorce, and in 1959 he married Margaret
Knight.
She survives him, along with two sons.

De Ste. Croix also wrote about aspects of the ancient world almost
totally
neglected by other historians, including accounting standards and
attitudes
toward debt and credit.

He disliked Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church, which he felt had

been a source of intolerance and cruelty since the days of Constantine,
the first Roman emperor to convert.

This led him to explore various aspects of the early Christian church
from a critical point of view, especially its attitudes toward women.
It also led to his refusal to enter New College Chapel and to his
scandalizing believing students by denouncing God, whom he usually
referred
to by the Hebrew name Yahweh.












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