Erich S. Gruen (born 1935) is a notable American classicist and ancient historian. He is the Gladys Rehard Wood Professor of History and Classics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1966. He served as president of the American Philological Society in 1992.

Born in Vienna, he received BAs from Columbia University and Oxford University, and the PhD from Harvard University, in 1964.

His earlier work focussed on the later 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 thesis 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.

Books

• Roman Politics and the Criminal Courts, 149-78 BC (Cambridge MA, 1968)
• The Image of Rome (ed.) (Englewood Cliffs NJ, 1969)
• Imperialism in the Roman Republic (ed.) (NY, 1970)
• The Roman Republic (Washington DC, 1972)
• The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (Berkeley, 1974; pb edition 1995)
• The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1984; pb 1986)
• Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy (Leiden, 1990; pb 1996))
• Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (Ithaca, 1992; pb 1994)
• Images and Ideologies: Self-Definition in the Hellenistic World (co-ed.) (Berkeley, 1993)
• Hellenistic Constructs: Essays in Culture, History, and Historiography (co-ed.) (Berkeley, 1997)
• Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (Berkeley, 1998)
• Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge MA, 2002)

External links

• Gruen's Home page (http://history.berkeley.edu/faculty/Gruen/) at the UCB History Department web site
• Short biography (http://www.urel.berkeley.edu/faculty/gruen.html) at UCB's Faculty Research Lectures web site
• Gruen CV (http://ls.berkeley.edu/dept/classics/facCVs/esg.html)