Christian Habicht

Christian Habicht, a celebrated historian of the Hellenistic period and a leading authority on Greek epigraphy, served on the Institute Faculty from 1973 until he retired in 1998. His remarkable contributions to ancient history have shed light on Athenian society in the centuries between the fall of the Athenian Empire and the establishment of the Roman Empire. He is the author of books on Hellenistic ruler cults, on the Maccabees, on Cicero, and on Pausanias, the editor of hundreds of previously unpublished inscriptions from the most important places in Greece and Asia Minor, and the author of more than two hundred articles on topics from the fifth century B.C.E. to the fourth century C.E. To a new bilingual edition of Polybius's The Histories, Habicht contributed the introduction and explanatory notes; the six volumes were published in 2010–12. An updated English edition of his doctoral dissertation, submitted in German in 1951, was published as Divine Honors for Mortal Men in Greek Cities: The Early Cases by Michigan Classical Press in 2017.