Keith Hopkins

Keith Hopkins, a professor at the University of Cambridge who was one of the first historians to use sociological methods to study the ancient Roman world, died March 8 at a hospice in Cambridge, England. He was 69.

The cause was cancer, said his literary executor, Christopher Kelly.

Mr. Hopkins brought unconventional techniques to the highly traditional field of ancient history, and he was known for the lucid and accessible way he wrote about his findings in articles and the influential books " Conquerors and Slaves " and " Death and Renewal. "

Ancient history had mainly been studied by starting with available physical evidence, like tombstones, and forming theories based on that evidence.

Mr. Hopkins, who spent more of his academic life as a sociologist than as a historian, preferred the deductive method, forming a hypothesis based on demographic tables, economic patterns and comparative historical studies, and then seeing how the evidence fit the hypothesis.

In his 1983 book, " Death and Renewal, " Mr. Hopkins used demographic models to show that the membership of the Roman Senate was far more fluid than was originally thought. The Senate was not, he argued, a closed, homogenous clique, but an ever-shifting assembly that was constantly being replenished by young, politically active citizens.

In addition to drawing on sociology and economics, he attracted controversy by bringing fiction into the study of ancient history.

In a 1993 essay titled " Novel Evidence for Roman Slavery " in the journal Past and Present, he argued that an accurate historical account could be revealed by fictional narratives like Aesop ' s Fables and " The Golden Ass " of Apuleius, just as much as by strictly factual texts.

These ideas culminated in his 1999 book " A World Full of Gods: The Strange Triumph of Christianity " (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), which combined fiction with scholarship in the story of a pair of time travelers who visit the ancient Mediterranean to study early Christianity. Robert A. Oden Jr. wrote in The New York Times Book Review that the book was " a compelling production of religious antiquity, a drama as varied and contradictory and upsetting of conventions as was the world it portrays. "

Morris Keith Hopkins was born in London. He studied classics at King ' s College, Cambridge, where he earned bachelor ' s and master ' s degrees, but left before completing his doctorate for a lectureship in sociology at the University of Leicester in 1961. He later held sociology teaching posts at the London School of Economics, the University of Hong Kong and Brunel University in England.

Partly because of the success of his first two books, Mr. Hopkins returned to King ' s College, and to classics, as a professor of ancient history in 1985. Though he retired from his professorship in 2000, he became vice provost of King ' s College in 2001, an office he held until his death. He had been working on a book about the Colosseum.

Mr. Hopkins ' survivors include his wife, Jennifer; two sons, Edmund and Benjamin; and three daughters, Rachel, Sarah and Charlotte.