Horst Callies

Horst Callies was born in Berlin on 1 September 1934, the only child of Albert Callies, a land surveying official, and his wife Margarete. His childhood was marked by the strict upbringing of the time and by the Second World War. While his father served in the war he experienced the air raids on Berlin, and he was evacuated with his mother to East Prussia. The family later moved to Wolfenbüttel, where he spent much of his time at grammar school, and he took his school leaving exam at the Ratsgymnasium in Hannover in 1953.

He went on to study ancient, medieval and modern history, classical philology and German at the universities of Göttingen, Berlin and Munich. In 1963 he received his doctorate in Göttingen under the ancient historian Alfred Heuss with a dissertation on foreign troops in the Roman army of the Principate and the so called numeri.

After his doctorate Callies stayed in Göttingen as a research assistant and later as an academic councillor at the seminar for ancient history. In 1970 he was appointed professor of ancient history at the history department of the Technical University of Hannover, then still being built up. Alongside the historian Joachim Leuschner he helped give the department its own profile in the 1970s. He held the chair until his retirement in 2001. His best known doctoral student is the ancient historian Holger Sonnabend.

His research covered relations between Romans and Germans, the social history of the Greek and Roman world, the Roman image of foreigners, the reception of antiquity, environmental questions in the ancient world and church and politics in the fourth century. He wrote on Augustan and Tiberian policy towards Germania, the Varus battle, Arminius as a German hero, water supply in the Roman Empire and the politics of the ancient Olympic Games.

He took on many leadership roles. He was dean of his faculty, a member of the senate and, from 1983 to 1989, one of the two vice presidents of the University of Hannover, working with president Hinrich Seidel. Nationally he sat on the German Rectors' Conference working group on teaching quality and its standing commission on teaching and study, and on its joint commission with the education ministers on examination regulations. He was the lead liaison lecturer for the German Academic Scholarship Foundation in Hannover and chaired the Commission for Ancient History of Lower Saxony and Bremen.

In 1963 Callies married Isolde Bachmann, a secondary school teacher, in Munich. They had two daughters and a son. In 1972 the family moved to Völksen, now part of the town of Springe south west of Hannover. There he sat on the village and town councils from 1973, chaired the local adult education centre, contributed to a large history of Völksen and to the district's 1985 anniversary, and led the Springe museum society from 1991 to 2008. He also led study tours to Italy, Greece and many countries of the Middle East.

Horst Callies died on 1 November 2026 at the age of 92. The history department and the Faculty of Humanities of Leibniz University Hannover announced his death in an obituary published on 12 November 2026, signed by the historians Carl-Hans Hauptmeyer and Gunnar Seelentag and the dean Katja Mackowiak.

Colleagues remembered Callies as a scholar who saw Greek and Roman antiquity as a foundation of European culture and a key to understanding the present. Former students recalled his standards with the phrase that they had learned it from Callies. He is credited with opening the university to new groups, including founding its senior citizens' study programme. In 2010 colleagues honoured him with the Festschrift Der Ort und die Welt for his 75th birthday.