Géza Alföldy (Budapest, 7 June 1935), a German historian and Hispanist of Hungarian origin and the foremost expert on Latin epigraphy today, died on 6 November. He was a lecturer at the University of Heidelberg, but was closely linked to Spain and specifically to Tarragona. Among other mentions, and sticking only to Spanish institutions, he was Doctor honoris causa by the Universities of Barcelona and Rovira i Virgili of Tarragona, corresponding member for Germany of the Real Academia de la Historia de Madrid, of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans (Barcelona), of the Real Sociedad Arqueológica (Tarragona) and of the Asociación Interdisciplinar de Estudios Romanos (Madrid).
Among his more than 40 monographs and nearly 500 articles, we can highlight his studies on Roman epigraphy from Hispania and Tarraco (initiated with his must-see work Die römischen inschriften von Tarraco,Berlin, 1975), his Social history of Rome (the first edition of which dates from 1975 -Römische SozialgeschichteWiesbaden - but known to the Spanish public from its Spanish version of 1987, with subsequent reprints) and the updating and reprinting of the Corpus inscriptionum latinarum, a work that compiles all the Latin inscriptions of antiquity.
As far as Alicante is concerned, his most notable work dates from 2003 and is his work "Administración, urbanización, instituciones, vida pública y orden social", in which he refers to the administrative framework in which the municipalities and colonies of the current province of Alicante were founded in Roman times, as well as their internal organisation and functioning. This work was published in the journal Canelobre 48, dedicated monographically to the cities and countryside of Alicante in Roman times and edited by J. M. Abascal and L. Abad, professors at the University of Alicante, and in which he analyses with his characteristic rigour the epigraphic documentation of Lucentum e Ilici among others.
The staff of the MARQ expresses with this remembrance its sorrow for the death of such a distinguished researcher and conveys its condolences to his family and to the entire scientific community.
