| 1 | Name: | Dr. Thomas Noel Mitchell | |
| Institution: | Trinity College, Dublin | ||
| Year Elected: | 1996 | ||
| Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | ||
| Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | ||
| Residency: | International | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1939 | ||
The 2002 recipient of the Society's Henry Allen Moe Prize in the Humanities is Thomas Noel Mitchell, Provost Emeritus of Trinity College, Dublin, in recognition of his paper "Roman Republicanism: The Underrated Legacy," delivered at the symposium "Rome: The Tide of Influence" on April 28, 2000, and published in our Proceedings in June 2001. Proceeding from a study of Cicero's De Republica and De Legibus, Dr. Mitchell shows that when Cicero seeks the specific principles of justice about which rightminded people could be expected to agree, he no longer looks to Greek philosophy to point the way, but focuses firmly on Roman experience. The departure from Plato and Aristotle and the dependence on Roman statutory law and custom are clearly demonstrated, as are the many ways in which the Roman system and Cicero's exposition of its theoretical foundations identified all the key ideas that later formed the heart of liberal theory from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth and helped to shape the views of the framers of the American Constitution. Dr. Mitchell received a B.A. and M.A. at University College, Galway, with First Class Honors, and a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1966. He was a professor of Classics at Swarthmore College until 1979 when he moved back to Ireland as professor of Latin at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1991 he was appointed Provost of Trinity College, a post he held until his retirement last year. He is the author of three major books: Cicero, the Ascending Years (1979), a study of Cicero's early life and analysis of the workings of personal relations and of factionalism in Roman politics; Cicero: Verrines II.1 (1986), a text and translation of one of Cicero's greatest speeches and an extended commentary analyzing Ciceronian prose and the rhetorical precepts and techniques that shaped his oratory; and Cicero, the Senior Statesman (1990), a study of Cicero's later life and the events that led to the dramatic collapse of the Roman Republic. Professor Mitchell is author of more than two dozen articles in international journals on various aspects of Roman political and social history and Roman constitutional law. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1996. | |||