John Noël Dillon

John Noël Dillon is a classical philologist and Roman historian; he received his PhD in Classics here at Yale in 2008. Although he has worked most extensively on the administration of the Later Roman Empire and Roman law, his special interests also include textual criticism, Roman Republican religion, Roman numismatics, Greek literature of the Imperial period, and medieval and early modern Latin literature and culture. He also has extensive pragmatic experience in translation.

After Dillon graduated, he taught classics and ancient history at the University of Heidelberg (in German!), the University of Exeter, and Peking University. He then took a hiatus of several years with his family in Berkeley, California. During this time, Dillon worked mainly as a scholarly translator, translating hundreds of articles, reference articles, and several scholarly monographs into English—primarily manuscripts in German, but also French and Italian and (typically cited as sources) Ancient Greek and Latin. 

In 2017, Dillon joined the faculty of the Yale Divinity School as Lecturer in Latin, where he taught and continues to teach Medieval Latin. In addition to joining the Classics faculty as senior lector in 2023, he is now also officially core faculty of Medieval Studies. He teaches primarily advanced language courses in Ancient Greek and Classical Latin for the Classics Department and introductory to intermediate courses in Medieval Latin for the Divinity School and Medieval Studies program.

His publications include The Justice of Constantine: Law, Communication, and Control (2012), “Book I” of The Code of Justinian: A New Annotated Translation, with Parallel Latin and Greek (2016), and “The Emperor’s New Prose: The Style of Diocletian’s Legislation,” in Diocleziano: la frontiera giuridica dell’imperio (2018).

His most recent major translation projects are Markus Friedrich’s The Jesuits: A History (Princeton University Press, 2022), Hans-Ulrich Wiemer’s Theodoric the Great: King of Goths, Ruler of Romans (Yale University Press, 2023), and Lisa Regazzoni, The Episteme of the Gallic Past: French Historical Research in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century (Routledge, forthcoming).

Currently, he is producing a new English translation of the Theodosian Code for Cambridge University Press.

Books

1. Trans. and ed. The Theodosian Code. Forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

2. Trans. and ed. “Introductory Constitutions” and “First Book.” In The Code of Justinian: A New Annotated Translation, with Parallel Latin and Greek, vol. 1, ed. Bruce W. Frier, 1–405. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

3. The Justice of Constantine: Law, Communication, and Control. University of Michigan Press, 2012.