Pierre Willems

Who was Pierre Willems?

Pierre Willems was a Dutch philologist and historian of Ancient Rome.

Following the custom of Belgian students he did not confine himself to the courses at Catholic University of Leuven but went to Paris to hear Julius Oppert, Émile Egger, and Henri Patin, and to Berlin, Utrecht, and Leyden, where he followed the courses of Cobet. On his return in 1865 he was appointed professor of Latin philology at the Catholic University of Leuven; here he spent the remainder of his life, the only events being his lectures and his works.

His two chief works are Le droit public romain, first issued under the title, Les antiquités romains envisagées au point de vue des institutions politiques, and Le sénat de la republique romaine. The first work is a handbook which stops at Constantine I in the first three editions and now goes as far as Justinian I. The author combined systematic and historical order by dividing the history of Roman institutions into "epochs" and "periods", viz., epoch of royalty, epoch of the republic, epoch of the empire, subdivided into the period of the Principate and that of monarchy. In each of these sections Willems studies the conditions of persons, government, and administration.