Arnaldo Momigliano was one of the great historians of the twentieth century. His contribution to the study of the ancient world has been enormous. His command of Roman, Greek, and Jewish history was legendary. But he was also a historian who cared deeply about the history of historical study. And from 1950 onwards, in a career that began in the early 1930s, he devoted the lion’s share of his intellectual energies to exploring the history of historiography. These essays, beginning with ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian’ (1950), brought Momigliano to the wider attention of modern historians, but also to historians...

In compliance with Momigliano’s will and intentions, and with the consent of his family and of the late Anne Marie Meyer, the literary executor of Momigliano’s work, I have gradually constituted and organized an archive of his papers in Pisa, the city of his happy homecoming. I am using this archive as a base for the publication of his unpublished texts, mainly within the series of theContributi, and of the principal documents relating to him. These latter are being made available to the general public in a series of studies of the Italian scholar entitled ‘Materiali per una biografia...

On 22 July 1955, theTimes Literary Supplementwelcomed the appearance of a new scholarly book with an enthusiasm rarely matched in its grey, closely printed pages. Pride of place, in those days, went not to the cover but to the so-called ‘long middle’ – a substantial review, which normally faced the correspondence columns. On this summer Friday, Peter Green wrote with phosphorescent enthusiasm of ‘a trilingual collection of essays remarkable alike for their classical and humanistic erudition, their historiographical judgment, and a style equally graceful in Italian, German, or English’: Arnaldo Momigliano’sContributo alla storia degli studi classici.This work,...

To dedicate a critical review to an article that appeared more than half a century ago might seem paradoxical. What scholarly contribution would not be out of date at that age? Momigliano’s ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian,’ however, presents a rather unique case in point.¹ First published in 1950, and reprinted several times thereafter, it still enjoys the splendid reputation not only of having made a ground-breaking contribution in its day, but of remaining fundamental for the study of antiquarianism up to the present. Apart from the expression of some minor doubts, a general review of its considerations on antiquarianism...

Dans les livres qui font autorité, on apprend que la Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, cette dispute qui a vivement ému la République des Lettres à partir de 1687, a pris fin en 1700. On lui accorde un bref ressac, la Querelle d’Homère, terminée net en 1716. Deux assauts entre gens de lettres et érudits qui ne doivent pas divertir l’attention de la grande ‘crise de la conscience européenne,’ où combattirent les géants Bossuet et Spinoza, Malebranche et Locke. Dans le français courant, l’expression ‘Querelle des anciens et des modernes’ a perdu son ancrage historique, elle désigne l’éternel retour...

Textbooks by definition are far from revolutionary. Neither was Michael Denis’sIntroduction to the Study of Booksin 1777. A conventional textbook for a conventional course required of all first-year students in German universities, Denis’s two volumes laid out the development of all human knowledge from earliest antiquity to the present day. Moving easily from German to Latin and adding a smattering of Greek, Denis began with the invention of writing in the ancient Near East and the codification of oral traditions in the poetic age of Homer and the Old Testament. He described the golden ages of Greece and...

Obviously, the title of my paper echoes Momigliano’sNew Paths of Classicism in the Nineteenth Century.¹ In these 1982 lectures Momigliano dealt at large with the nineteenth-century discussion on the origins and development of landed property in ancient Rome from Niebuhr through Mommsen to Weber. He pointed out that Weber’s work represented a virtually new approach to this subject but was nevertheless indebted to Mommsen.² In an aside in a 1958 review, Momigliano had already made the more general point that Max Weber could be seen as a pupil of Mommsen. ‘Pupil’ here implies not only a personal relationship but...

The aim of this chapter is to discuss some of the continuities, or at least the intellectual relations, between the antiquarianism of the Renaissance and the later practices of social or cultural anthropology. It is inspired by the work of Arnaldo Momigliano and reflects some of his many interests, ranging from Herodotus to Durkheim, with ample space in between them for thoughts on early modern scholars such as Justus Lipsius, Isaac Casaubon, and a host of lesser figures.

Histories of anthropology tend to begin with the formal establishment of the discipline in the nineteenth century or, at earliest, with the...

One striking feature of Arnaldo Momigliano’s fascinating Sather Lecture ‘The Rise of Antiquarian Research’ is that by and large he collapses a distinction cherished by many of his nineteenth-century classicist forebears, namely, that between antiquarian and archaeologist. For Momigliano, both types were defined by an attachment to ‘systematic descriptions of ancient institutions, religion, law, finances,’ a usually a- or anti-political rejection of grand narratives, and a wonderfully strange attraction to unconventional bits of data.¹ Although this interchangeable use of the terms surely reflected early modern practice, scholars working in Winckelmann’s wake would have found Momigliano’s failure to list among archaeology’s...

It took Arnaldo Momigliano a lifetime of passionate and constant effort to fully explore and express what he had discovered as a young man. At the core of history one finds the contacts between civilizations, and at the core of these contacts, one finds religion. Hence, the study of religions and of their transformations is the ultimate goal of the historian. As a young man, Momigliano had realized that this truth had been more often than not belittled, ignored, or occulted by most historians since antiquity. He also knew, however, that it had already been discovered and explored, during the...

No one is capable of choosing his progenitors; all of us are, however, able – if we wish – to decide whom to select and adopt as our predecessors. The search for illustrious predecessors is, to be sure, not only the patrimony of some epigones; giants of Jewish thought did so, too. Franz Rosenzweig believed he was the transmigration of the famous twelfthcentury medieval poet and thinker Rabbi Yehudah ben Shmuel ha-Levi, whose Hebrew poems he translated into German,¹ just as Gershom Scholem chose the sixteenth-century German humanist and Kabbalist Johann Reuchlin² as his imaginary forebear. I assume that the two Jewish...

Momigliano’s short essay on Walter Benjamin, published in 1980, is not a contribution to his history of classical studies. It belongs, instead, to the late Momigliano’s autobiographical commentary on the Germandominated intellectual world of his youth, and to his grapplings with Scholem in particular. Less an essay in the ‘problem of understanding Benjamin’ – whom he seems neither to have much liked, nor understood – than a commentary on the way in which the friendship between Scholem and Benjamin informs the latter’s work, Momigliano actually reverses the balance of influence between the two, seeing Scholem as the greater thinker, an opinion that...