Louis Robert (historian)

Robert was the son of a tax collector and the grandson of a country doctor from the region of Limousin in historical Occitania.[4] His father died prematurely in 1905 and his mother took her two sons first to Limoges, where Robert attended the Lycée Gay-Lussac and then to Paris, where he completed his pre-university education at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.[5][4]

Robert studied at the École Normale Supérieure from 1924 to 1927, and joined the École française d'Athènes after his graduation.[6] His research in Athens was cut short by tuberculosis, which forced him to spend two years in a sanatorium in Leysin.[7] He used this time to study the early modern antiquarian travel accounts of the Aegean and the Levant, which proved influential for his own work[8] – he would later be called “the last of the great Anatolian travelers”.[9] On his recovery in 1932 he accepted the offer to join the American Society for Archaeological Research in Asia Minor for a mission of exploration in Turkey, at which point his interests shifted permanently from Greece to Asia Minor.[10]

In 1932, Robert received a teaching position in Historical Geography of the Hellenic World at the École pratique des hautes études (IVth section) in Paris.[10][11] He taught there until his retirement in 1974.[4] In 1939, he was also made full professor at the Collège de France, where he took up the chair in Greek Antiquity and Epigraphy vacated at the death of his mentor Maurice Holleaux in 1932.[10][12]

He was elected a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1948 at the recommendation of the hellenist Paul Mazon.[13] He served as its president twice.[14] He was also a corresponding fellow of the British Academy (1946),[15] a member of the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin (corresponding member 1950, foreign member 1969),[16] an associate member of the Royal Academy of Belgium (1955),[5] a foreign member of the Accademia dei Lincei (1959),[17] an international honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1961),[18], a foreign member of the Academy of Athens (1966),[19] and a member of the Austrian and Polish Academies of Sciences. He received a honorary doctorate from the University of Louvain and the National Order of the Legion of Honour.[20]

Robert conducted excavations in Turkey at Amyzon in Caria (1949–50) and at Claros in Ionia (1950–61). He was the director of the Institut français d'archéologie d'Istanbul in 1956–64 and assisted as an epigrapher with the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis launched in 1958.[21][20][22]

The hallmark of Robert's approach is the combination of philology with geography in an effort to produce a vivid account of historical environment.[23][24] While his work emphasised regional divergences and local human agency, it also tended – due to Robert's romanticised approach to geographical exploration – to underestimate the historical mutability of landscape. Robert's key interests included the ancient economy and religion, Hellenisation and Romanisation, and the transformations of Late Antiquity, but his impact within the discipline of Classics has been limited by his excessive focus on detail and has endured most clearly in the fields of epigraphy and historical geography.[25] Notably, his treatment of Anatolian history and material culture extended beyond classical antiquity to the Byzantine and Ottoman periods.

The Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres preserves his archive of notes, photographs, correspondence, estampages, and numismatic material as Fonds Louis Robert.[26]

Robert married Jeanne Vanseveren in 1938. Fluent in Greek and Turkish, she was his research and travel companion and the co-author of many of his publications until his death in 1985.[11][27]