Interview with professor of archaeology Géza Alföldy
MúzeumCafé 25.
His theory about the construction of the Coliseum published in 1995 is accepted across the world. His book Römische Sozialgeschichte, originally published in 1975, appeared in a new edition this year. The work is on the compulsory reading list of universities and can be read in several languages. His fields of research include Roman society, administration, religion and military history, Roman historiography, the history of the provinces, epigraphy and the research of proper names, not to mention the 1956 revolution, which he has also written about. Géza Alföldy was born in 1935. He graduated in archaeology at the Faculty of Humanities of Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE). He worked at the Budapest History Museum from 1957 to 1960, then became assistant lecturer at ELTE’s History of Antiquity department. After emigrating to West Germany in 1965 he worked for the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn until 1968, later teaching at the universities of Bonn, Bochum and Heidelberg, being the director of the latter’s Institute of History of Antiquities between 1975 to 2002. Professor Alföldy headed the team of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum published by the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften from 1991 to 2006. He is the honorary doctor of several universities in Europe and this year the University of Vienna conferred an honorary doctorship on him. At the 2003 International Congress of Roman Frontier Studies organised by Zsolt Visy and held in Pécs, Géza Alföldy made a proposal for a new Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum to be published about epigraphs in Pannonia. “After everyone is ready with their manuscripts, just like me with mine, all of them are sent to Berlin where the team of Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum does the final editorial work. We have already edited seven volumes.”