Arnaldo Momigliano: The Historian of History

Anthony Grafton

On February 19, 1952, Arnaldo Momigliano gave his inaugural lecture as professor of ancient history at University College London. “It was about twenty-five years ago,” he told his listeners, “that the name of Gower Street first impressed itself on my mind.” He had been reading Harriet Lewin Grote’s biography of her husband, George Grote, the banker, liberal politician, and historian of Greece who was one of the college’s founders. She described George returning home, tired out, by “a shilling fare of hackney coach” from meetings of the College Council at Gower Street. “Thus,” Momigliano explained, “in my admittedly rather imperfect map of a mythical London, the Gower Street of George Grote had its place beside the Baker Street of Sherlock Holmes and the George Street of Giuseppe Mazzini, near the Euston Road. The transition from myth to reality is always complicated. Yet for once the reality was not inferior to the myth.” Readers of the essays collected in this volume will soon see that this passage is typical of Momigliano’s writing, in its elegance of style, in its breadth of reference, and in its easy, confident transition from an opening anecdote to, in this case, a compliment to his new colleagues. They will come to know Momigliano as a scholar who could discuss the origins of Jewish and Greek historical writing in the first millennium BCE and the interpretive social sciences of the late twentieth century with equal insight and authority. They will depart with a new appreciation for the scholarly adventures and discoveries of Greeks and Romans, Dutch Calvinists and French Benedictines, Italian jurists and German professors—as well as a new understanding of the scholarly misadventures of those who have tried, across the centuries, to winch the original sources into their tough, corset-like theories. In the end, they will see—as Momigliano’s readers have seen for generations—that he offered a model, the first one ever created, for studying the traditions of historical research ix a n t h o n y g r a f t o n and writing with the sophistication that scholars have long attained when studying the traditions of science. The ease with which the medicine goes down—with which Momigliano takes the reader into the labyrinths of forgotten debates about the Hebrew tense system and Roman ballads about the past and shows why they matter—was not won quickly, but over the course of his life, and with immense difficulty and effort. True, Momigliano was a prodigy, in the special Italian sense. (“In comparison with the majority of Italian intellectuals,” he wrote, “Croce grew up slowly. He published his first general considerations onLa storia ridotta sotto il concetto generale dell’arte when he was twenty-seven.”). Momigliano, by contrast, mastered Greek, Latin, and Hebrew at home in the Piedmontese town of Caraglio, where he was born in 1908, and scored a dazzling success, except in mathematics, on the matriculation exams. He became one of the star students of the University of Turin at a time when the northern city nurtured many brilliant intellectuals, including Norberto Bobbio, Cesare Pavese, Carlo Dionisotti, Leone and Natalia Ginzburg, and, a few years later, Primo Levi. Momigliano established himself as a scholar with breathtaking speed. He read omnivorously in many languages, everything from Greek and Roman, Sumerian and Jewish texts to the philosophy of Kant. And he seemed to forget nothing. When he recalled reading the life of George Grote twenty-five years before he became professor in London—in 1926, when he was eighteen—he was no doubt telling the exact truth, as well as exhibiting his proverbial powers of recollection. Soon he began to write: three books, each on a different aspect of ancient history, and more than a hundred articles appeared while he was still in his early twenties. Momigliano followed his teacher of ancient history, Gaetano de Sanctis, to Rome. He wrote many articles for the Enciclopedia Italiana, a Fascist enterprise— but one for which Federico Chabod, an anti-Fascist and a skillful judge of academic talent, coordinated the historical entries. In 1936 he became professor of ancient history at Turin. By now his work was internationally known. His book on Claudius, exceptionally, was translated into English in 1934, only two years after its first appearance. Momigliano’s interests in this period ranged widely, from the history of the Roman Empire and that of the Jews in the Hellenistic period to the development of ancient political theory. But the x f o r e w o r d development of historical thought and method already played a central part in his thinking and research. Ancient historiography, from Thucydides to Josephus, had fascinated him from the beginning of his studies, and he had read widely in the polyglot secondary literature of classical scholarship. As a young professor, he began to make the development of scholarship an object of study in its own right and to set it against its larger historical context. This was, he argued, the best way to restore movement in fields that had bogged down. To work effectively on the Hellenistic world, he had to return to the work of those who had created the concept of Hellenism, above all the nineteenth-century historian Johann Gustav Droysen. And to rethink the history of the later Roman Empire, he had to retrace the long process by which the history of the state and that of the Christian church had become separate scholarly enterprises. His articles on these topics became classics, which both opened up the history of historical scholarship and used it to offer new ways forward to his colleagues. The proud Italian Jewish family to which Momigliano belonged looked with gratitude to the national state, which had broken the old ghettos and offered Jews—including many of his relatives—full rights to serve it. Momigliano took the Fascist oath, as employees of the state were required to do. Both his teacher de Sanctis and his friend Leone Ginzburg refused to do so. But his position became more and more difficult, and in 1938 the racial laws deprived him of his professorship. He left Italy in 1939 and found refuge in England, where the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning soon provided a small fellowship. Briefly interned as an enemy alien, but soon freed, Momigliano spent the war years in Oxford. Unlike many of the German émigré scholars, he had not mastered English as a child. In fact, he had never left his native country. He learned with great difficulty to speak English—he never lost his heavy accent. More remarkably, he learned to write it with Tacitean elegance and concision. New friends—notably Isobel Henderson and Beryl Smalley—helped him. So did Fritz Saxl and other members of the circle of the Warburg Institute, which had escaped the Nazis in the early 1930s, moving from Hamburg to London. He began to publish massive articles in British journals and played a major part in creating the first edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary. England’s liberal culture and strong support for classical xi a n t h o n y g r a f t o n scholarship mattered deeply to Momigliano. He decided not to return to Italy after the war, even when Croce offered him the directorship of his institute in Naples. After a few years at Bristol he moved to the chair of ancient history at University College London. It was here that Momigliano became a legendary figure, the fearsome leader of wide-ranging seminars, who seemed to sleep through much of each visitor’s paper and then woke to pose the most penetrating question, and the habitué of libraries, especially the British Library, the Warburg Institute, and the Bodleian, where he digested enormous piles of books on the little slips of paper, each with its carbon copy, on which he took notes. Expulsion from Italy, and the loss of his parents, who died in a Nazi extermination camp, transformed Momigliano’s approach to the historical tradition. He continued to study the ancient historians, though he had lost the confidence with which he had, as a young scholar, traced the development of their work conjecturally, stage by stage. In one case he explicitly confessed, and in many more he found, that songs of experience had replaced songs of innocence, as he abandoned the theories of his own youth without adopting those of more recent writers. But he continued to approach the texts, both those preserved in full and those represented only by fragments, with open eyes and an open mind. The extraordinary article reprinted here on “Eastern Elements in Post-Exilic Jewish, and Greek, Historiography” is exemplary. In it he conjured up from scraps in the Bible and the brilliantly suggestive work of a respected colleague, Elias Bickerman, lost forms of Persian and Near Eastern historical writing. Even more remarkable—and even more innovative—was the work that Momigliano now devoted to modern historiography. A passionate student of German thought in the 1930s, he had generally accepted the traditional view that critical scholarship began in the German universities in the late eighteenth century. When Momigliano chose to introduce himself to his new colleagues at University College London by discussing George Grote, he was making a serious point—however light-heartedly he introduced it. Grote had written a liberal history of ancient Greece. Evading the spell of Socrates and Plato, he had identified the Sophists, whom they despised, as the first teachers of the liberal arts of public speech and citizenship. In Momigliano’s words: “He loved Athens without any romantic nostalgia as a state which was formed for the good life. xii f o r e w o r d He saw a parallel between the education imparted by the Sophists and Socrates and that imparted in a modern university.” And by writing this liberal history—something he could have accomplished nowhere but in liberal England—Grote, rather than the Germans, transformed the study of politics and thought in ancient Greece. The German professors, Momigliano noted, “could hardly believe their ears when they heard that Grote was a banker.” But they recognized the power of his arguments and the depth of his respect for the evidence. For the next fifty years, in the great age of German scholarship, Grote inspired all historians of Greece, whether they were for him or against him. The banker showed the philologists how to practice their craft, and they admitted as much. The whole story made one thing clear: “The natives of Europe used to be civilized in the nineteenth century.” National rivalries had not prevented the Germans from seeing the value of work done by foreigners—as they would, a century later. The German revolution in the methods of history was, in large part, a response not to internal German developments but to the cosmopolitanism of a better age than the present. Returning to the past did more than shed light on the present: it offered a way to combat the provincialism of intellectuals separated by new political and ideological borders. As a young man, Momigliano directed most—though not quite all—of his early inquiries into the historical tradition to the eighteenth century and after. In England, however, the history of history looked different. Momigliano came to see the richness of premodern historical scholarship with new clarity. The experience of having lived in a totalitarian state inspired him to study Tacitus and the early modern scholars—above all Justus Lipsius—who had used the Roman historian to understand their own condition as the subjects of tyrants. Collaboration with the members of the Warburg Institute, who located the beginnings of modern scholarship in the Renaissance effort to revive antiquity, helped to interest him in early modern antiquaries. These men, he now argued, had actually devised most of the technical tools that went into modern historical method. The Warburg Institute offered a wealth of primary sources on its open shelves, and the Bodleian had begun as a Renaissance library, which early modern scholars had designed, inhabited, and filled with their letters and working materials. Soon Momigliano was deeply engaged with the work of early modern scholars, from the historical theories of Vico to the paleographical treatises of Mabillon xiii a n t h o n y g r a f t o n and Montfaucon. Gradually Momigliano developed a comprehensive vision of the history of history in the West. It consisted, he now believed, of multiple traditions, most of them created in antiquity but continuously updated and applied in later millennia. He identified an ethnographic tradition of historians interested in foreign customs and rituals, inspired by Herodotus; a political tradition of historians fascinated by statesmen’s decision making and military successes and failures, inspired by Thucydides; a critical tradition of historians of tyranny, inspired by Tacitus; a national tradition of historians struggling to understand the process of building a coherent state, inspired by Polybius and Livy; an antiquarian strand of writers on laws, rituals, and customs, inspired by Dicearchus and Varro; and a massive body of ecclesiastical history, inspired by Eusebius. Each of these traditions had its special contours and its particular uses, and they often collided with one another. Herodotus, for example, was despised by political historians from Thucydides on as a mere entertainer and a liar. But the discovery of the New World brought him back into credit, and his ethnographies of Egypt and Scythia provided a powerful model for describing its marvels. Momigliano presented these findings, in a provisional form, as the Sather Classical Lectures at Berkeley in 1961–62. Though he never managed to revise them for publication to his own satisfaction, influential sketches appeared in article form, and the lectures themselves had a powerful impact on such influential Berkeley scholars as Carl Schorske and J. H. Rowe. Momigliano’s new engagement with more distant periods did not mean that he turned away from recent and contemporary scholarship. He never stopped ransacking the new book shelves at the Warburg Institute and, in later years, the front table at the Seminary Co- Operative Bookstore in Chicago. More important, he now made the scholarship of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries the object of much of his work. His lecture on Grote exemplifies what gradually became a flood of formally similar articles: profiles, in which Momigliano set the work of past scholars from every country and tradition into a larger context. Founded on deep learning— sometimes including excursions into unpublished materials—but written with great elegance, the biographical essay became one of Momigliano’s characteristic forms. He used it with great flexibility, examining the founders of modern scholarship in the eighteenth xiv f o r e w o r d and nineteenth centuries and his own contemporaries with equal penetration and passion, and focusing less on their biographies than on their methods and practices. When the first volume of his collected essays, titled with ironic modesty Contributo alla storia degli studi classici (A Contribution to the History of Classical Scholarship) appeared in 1955, the extent of his achievement suddenly became clear. The young ancient historian Peter Green hailed in the Times Literary Supplement what he described as “a trilingual collection of essays remarkable alike for their classical and humanistic erudition, their historiographical judgement, and a style equally graceful in Italian, German, or English.” Momigliano even ventured into a minefield around which most his colleagues in Italy and elsewhere had tiptoed: the ways in which racial theories, both before the Nazis and under them, had corrupted the study of the ancient world, and of the Jews in particular. The article on time and ancient historiography reprinted here takes off from a debunking of the mythology of Aryans and Semites created in the nineteenth century to clarify, in fundamental ways, the nature of biblical and classical histories. In other work, not reprinted here, Momigliano showed that one function of the history of modern scholarship was to expose the degradation to which historiography had been subject in the twentieth century’s totalitarian states. It is a shame that Momigliano never reflected in public on his own time in the Fascist party and his gradual realization that he could not live and work in a totalitarian society. Still, he inspired younger scholars like Volker Lösemann and Suzanne Marchand, who have reconstructed in detail what the Nazis did to classical scholarship. From the 1950s until his death in 1987, Momigliano continued to work in this distinctive vein. He wrote no big books, though he did produce some suggestive short ones. As when he was young, he continued to insist that he wrote not as an expert on the modern world or on modern scholarship but as an ancient historian, looking for help in solving problems posed by classical sources. It made sense to return to the eighteenth-century Dutchman Jacob Perizonius because he could shed light on the actual nature of Roman ballads, and to the nineteenth-century German Jew Jacob Bernays because he provided a model of how to connect the histories of Greeks, Romans, and Jews. Momigliano, in other words, always insisted that he made no claim to be a historian of modern times. What strikes the reader of Momigliano’s articles and his learned xv a n t h o n y g r a f t o n and penetrating reviews, however, is less their limitations than their sheer range across time, space, and subject matter. Momigliano created something extraordinary: a panorama of the historical tradition from antiquity to modernity, as executed by a brilliant pointillist, La Grande Jatte rather than The School of Athens. The massed volumes of Momigliano’s Contributi are one of the most distinctive and original accomplishments of historical writing in the twentieth century. For all his disclaimers, he has emerged as a profound and original student not only of antiquity but also of the modern world’s approaches to ancient Israel, Greece, and Rome. Momigliano himself selected the essays collected here. Readers will find in them the best possible introduction to the work of a master humanist: a profoundly humane and erudite man who devoted his life to the creative rethinking of tradition.

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