Iranians & Greeks in South Russia

2006 REPRINT. Quarto. xv, [1], 260 p. front., illus. (incl. plans), plates, fold. map. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1922. As a dissenter from Bolshevism after the Russian Revolution, he fled to England. After teaching at Oxford for only two years, he moved to Madison, Wisconsin, in the United States in 1920, were he taught at the University of Wisconsin. While at Wisconsin, he wrote one of the most important works of intercultural history of antiquity, Iranians and Greeks in South Russia, 1922. The work examines the Scythians and their interchange with the Greeks. His courses ranged as far afield as Russian architectural history and his mid-western undergraduates, unable to pronounce his named, referred to him as "Rough Stuff" a reference to his high standards as much as his ethnicity. In 1925 he was appointed Sterling Professor of Ancient History and Archaeology at Yale University. His best-known work, The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire appeared in 1926. Rostovtzeff's histories derive from his wide ranging sources, epigraphic, stylistic, literary and cultural. The Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology termed him "one of the most original and profound classical scholars of the first half of the twentieth century." J. Rufus Fears compares him to Mommsen and (Eduard) Meyer in his innovative methodology and breadth of knowledge. His scholarship, as C. Bradford Welles writes, was exacting as well as bold.