Ernst Badian

Based on Wikipedia: Ernst Badian

The Ghost Hunter

In 1958, a young scholar declared war on a phantom. The ghost in question was Alexander the Great—or rather, a sanitized version of him that had haunted academic halls for a quarter century. Ernst Badian, then in his early thirties, opened his attack with a striking admission: he knew he would probably fail. "It is the aim of this article," he wrote, "to lay the ghost." The phantom, he added, was "clearly threatening to pass into our tradition as a thing of flesh and blood."

He didn't fail. Within a few years, Badian had ignited what fellow historian Eugene Borza called "a revolution in Alexander studies."

But who was this ghost hunter, and why did an Austrian refugee teaching at British universities care so much about dismantling a romantic portrait of an ancient Macedonian king?

From Vienna to the Antipodes

Ernst Badian was born in Vienna on August 8, 1925, into a world that would soon turn violently against him. When he was thirteen years old, Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the event known as the Anschluss. The Badian family fled, not to neighboring countries—which would soon fall under Nazi occupation anyway—but to the far side of the planet: New Zealand.

It's worth pausing on that distance. In 1938, traveling from Vienna to New Zealand meant weeks of ocean voyage. The family wasn't just leaving their home; they were removing themselves to about as far from European fascism as geography allowed. The Southern Hemisphere. The opposite season. A different night sky entirely.

In Christchurch, at Canterbury College (now the University of Canterbury), Badian began his scholarly life. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree at twenty and his Master's the following year. He also met Nathlie Ann Wimsett, who would become his wife. But New Zealand, however safe, was not where ancient history happened. The manuscripts were elsewhere. The scholarly conversations were elsewhere. The great libraries were elsewhere.

Oxford and the Making of a Classicist

After a brief teaching stint at Victoria University of Wellington, Badian made his way to University College, Oxford. There he studied under George Cawkwell, himself a distinguished ancient historian who specialized in Greek history. Oxford's system of classical education, known as Literae Humaniores—literally "more humane letters," usually shortened to "Litt Hum" or simply "Greats"—was and remains one of the most demanding courses of study in the humanities.

What does it mean to study Greats at Oxford? Students read ancient texts in their original Greek and Latin, study ancient philosophy alongside ancient history, and emerge with a peculiar skill set: the ability to think carefully about evidence, argument, and interpretation while maintaining intimate familiarity with source materials written two millennia ago.

Badian achieved a first-class degree in 1950. First-class honors at Oxford are relatively rare—typically around twenty percent of students achieve them in any given year, though this varies by subject. He followed this with a Master's in 1954 and his Doctor of Philosophy in 1956. His doctoral dissertation would become his first book: Foreign Clientelae 264–70 B.C., a study of how Rome maintained informal relationships with foreign communities and individuals—relationships that weren't quite alliances, weren't quite rule, but served Roman interests nonetheless.

The Tarn Problem

To understand Badian's scholarly mission, you need to understand William Woodthorpe Tarn.

Tarn was a Scottish historian who lived from 1869 to 1957. He wrote extensively about the Hellenistic world—the period following Alexander's conquests when Greek culture spread across the eastern Mediterranean and into Asia. His biography of Alexander the Great, published in 1948, painted a remarkable portrait: Alexander as a visionary philosopher-king, a man who dreamed of uniting humanity, spreading Greek civilization as a gift to the world.

In Tarn's telling, Alexander was essentially a Victorian gentleman in a breastplate. Yes, he conquered, but he conquered for ideas. He wanted to bring people together. He was, as Badian acidly put it, "Alexander the Dreamer."

This interpretation had problems. Significant problems. For one thing, it required ignoring or explaining away substantial portions of what ancient sources actually said about Alexander. The ancient accounts described a man who drank heavily—so heavily that his death may have been alcohol-related. They described someone capable of extraordinary cruelty, who burned the great Persian palace at Persepolis, who massacred the inhabitants of cities that resisted him. They described his intimate relationship with a Persian eunuch named Bagoas.

Tarn dealt with the inconvenient material through selective reading and creative interpretation. Bagoas? Probably invented by later sources. The drinking? Exaggerated. The cruelty? Justified by circumstances or misreported.

The academic world, broadly speaking, went along with this. By the late 1950s, Tarn's romanticized Alexander had, in Badian's words, "begun to succumb to the spell" of general acceptance. Textbooks repeated it. Philosophy surveys cited it. The phantom threatened to become permanent.

Laying the Ghost

Badian's method was meticulous and relentless. He didn't simply assert that Tarn was wrong; he demonstrated it, paper by paper, point by point, over decades of scholarship.

In 1958, he published not one but two significant attacks. The first, "Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind," went after Tarn's central thesis about Alexander's supposedly enlightened vision for human brotherhood. The second addressed Bagoas directly, arguing that the evidence for Alexander's relationship with the Persian eunuch was actually quite strong—that Tarn had dismissed it for reasons having more to do with Victorian propriety than ancient evidence.

Badian's Alexander looked very different from Tarn's. In Badian's telling, Alexander was brilliant, certainly. Charismatic, absolutely. Also ruthless, vindictive, increasingly unstable, and willing to murder friends and subordinates who displeased him. Not a visionary philosopher but a "ruthless dictator."

The criticism could be withering. In a 1967 article about Agis III—a Spartan king who led a revolt against Macedonian power while Alexander was off conquering Persia—Badian wrote that Tarn had been "blinded by even more than his usual prejudice towards opponents of Alexander, and distort[ed] the actual facts in an all but irresponsible fashion."

That's strong language for academic writing. Scholars typically prefer more diplomatic phrasing: "This interpretation presents certain difficulties," or "One might question whether the evidence fully supports this conclusion." Badian's directness was unusual. It was also effective.

Building Institutions

While waging his campaign against romantic Alexandrianism, Badian was also building the infrastructure of American ancient history. He taught at Sheffield, Durham, and Leeds in England before crossing the Atlantic to the State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1971, Harvard appointed him to their Department of History; two years later, he received a joint appointment in Classics as well. He would remain at Harvard until his retirement as John Moors Cabot Professor of History Emeritus in 1998.

The institutional work matters as much as the scholarship. In 1974, Badian helped found the Association of Ancient Historians, a professional organization that still exists today and holds annual meetings where scholars present their research. Two years later, in 1976, he helped establish The American Journal of Ancient History, providing another venue for serious scholarship. He also helped create the New England Ancient History Colloquium.

Why does this matter? Because scholarly fields are not just collections of ideas—they're communities of people with places to meet, journals to publish in, and organizations to sustain the conversation across generations. Badian wasn't just writing about the ancient world; he was creating conditions for other people to do so as well.

The Refugee Question

Badian was part of a remarkable generation: scholars who fled Nazi persecution and transformed the humanities in their adopted countries. The experience of exile shaped many of them in ways both obvious and subtle.

Consider what it might mean to have been thirteen years old in Vienna in 1938, old enough to understand what was happening, and then to spend the rest of your life studying power, empire, and the stories people tell about conquerors. Badian never wrote a personal memoir about any connection between his biography and his scholarship, but the question hovers over his work.

Tarn's Alexander was a noble civilizer bringing enlightenment to lesser peoples. Badian's Alexander was a conqueror whose violence served his ambition, whose "unity of mankind" rhetoric masked the reality of domination. Is it coincidental that the scholar who fled fascism was the one who insisted on stripping away the heroic veneer?

A book published in 2016, The Second Generation: Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians, includes discussion of Badian and other refugee scholars. The editors explore how displacement shaped historical thinking—how the experience of having your world destroyed might make you especially skeptical of stories that glorify destroyers.

Roman Interests

Although Alexander was his most visible subject, Badian's expertise extended well beyond Macedonian history. His first book, as mentioned, dealt with Roman foreign relations in the middle and late Republic—the period from roughly 264 B.C.E. to 70 B.C.E. when Rome transformed from a regional Italian power into the dominant force in the Mediterranean world.

His work on publicani—Roman tax collectors and contractors—became a standard reference. The title Publicans and Sinners, published in 1972, deliberately echoed the biblical phrase. In the New Testament, "publicans and sinners" appears repeatedly as shorthand for disreputable people; the tax collectors who worked for Rome were despised in Jewish society. Badian's book examined who these people actually were, how the tax collection system worked, and what role they played in Roman expansion.

The book Roman Imperialism in the Late Republic, first published in 1968, asked how we should understand Rome's expansion. Was it defensive, responding to threats? Aggressive, seeking conquest? Accidental, stumbling into empire through individual decisions without a master plan? Badian argued for complexity: Roman expansion couldn't be reduced to a single motive but emerged from the interaction of political competition, economic interests, and strategic calculation.

Recognition and Legacy

Honors accumulated over the decades. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected him a Fellow in 1974—the same year he helped found the Association of Ancient Historians. In 1999, Austria awarded him the Cross of Honor for Science and Art, a recognition from the country that had forced his family into exile sixty-one years earlier. The University of Canterbury, where he had started his academic journey, gave him an honorary degree that same year.

Badian died on February 1, 2011, at his home in Quincy, Massachusetts, after a fall. He was eighty-five years old. His wife Nathlie survived him, along with their children Hugh and Rosemary, several grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

The physical remnant of his scholarly life that ended up at Rutgers University wasn't books or papers but coins: the Ernst Badian Collection of Roman Republican Coins, now housed in the Special Collections and University Archives. Ancient coins are historical evidence too—they tell us about propaganda, economics, and how rulers wanted to be seen. A scholar who spent his career questioning official narratives would have appreciated their testimonial value.

The year after his death, at the 2012 meeting of the Association of Ancient Historians—the organization he had helped create—historians T. Corey Brennan and Jerzy Linderski presented papers examining Badian's historical methods. In 2013, a volume appeared titled The Legacy of Ernst Badian, edited by Carol G. Thomas. The conversation continues.

What Remains

Badian never wrote a comprehensive biography of Alexander. Despite decades of articles, reviews, and contributions to scholarly debates, he never produced the big book that might seem like the obvious culmination of his work. A collected volume of his Alexander papers appeared in 2012, the year after his death, finally gathering his scattered contributions into one place.

Perhaps the absence of a monograph was intentional. Badian's project was fundamentally critical—taking apart someone else's construction rather than building his own. Tarn had created Alexander the Dreamer; Badian exposed the scaffolding and the illusions. To write his own Alexander biography would have meant offering another coherent narrative, another unified portrait, another potential phantom.

Or perhaps life simply didn't arrange itself that way. Scholars have finite time and energy. Badian wrote books on Roman subjects, edited volumes for other scholars, helped run journals and organizations, taught generations of students at Harvard. The Alexander book that might have been never was.

What remains is the method: careful attention to sources, skepticism toward romanticization, willingness to say clearly when established authorities had distorted the evidence. "It is the aim of this article to lay the ghost." Sometimes that's enough. Sometimes destroying a false story is as important as building a true one.

The next time you encounter a historical figure presented as a noble visionary, you might think of Ernst Badian—the refugee who spent his career insisting that conquerors be judged by what they actually did, not by the stories their admirers tell about them.