Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

Copyright © Arnaldo Momigliano, 1947, 1955, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1963, 1965, 1966, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975

Originally published 1977 by Basil Blackwell Oxford in Great

Britain and by Wesleyan University Press in the United States

Foreword to the 1977 edition copyright © 1977 by Arnaldo Momigliano

Foreword copyright © 2012 by Anthony Grafton

All rights reserved.

University of Chicago Press edition 2012

Printed in the United States of America

21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-53385-8 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-53386-5 (e-book)

ISBN-10: 0-226-53385-9 (paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-53386-7 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Momigliano, Arnaldo.

     Essays in ancient and modern historiography / Arnaldo

          Momigliano ; with a new foreword by Anthony Grafton.

          pages. cm.

          Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-53385-8 (paperback : alkaline paper) — ISBN

     978-0-226-53386-5 (e-book) — ISBN 0-226-53385-9 (paperback : alkaline paper) — ISBN 0-226-53386-7 (e-book)

     1. Greece—Historiography. 2. Rome—Historiography. 3. History,

     Ancient. 4. Historiography. I. Grafton, Anthony. II. Title.

DE8.M655 2012

937.0072—dc23

2011050840

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO

z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Essays in Ancient

and Modern

Historiography

ARNALDO MOMIGLIANO

With a New Foreword by Anthony Grafton

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

ALLA MEMORIA

DEI MIEI MAESTRI

NELL’UNIVERSITÀ DI TORINO

1925–9

Contents

Arnaldo Momigliano: The Historian of History by Anthony Grafton

Foreword

List of Abbreviations

1. A Piedmontese View of the History of Ideas

2. The Fault of the Greeks

3. Eastern Elements in Post-Exilic Jewish, and Greek, Historiography

4. Athens in the Third Century B.C. and the Discovery of Rome in the Histories of Timaeus of Tauromenium

5. The Historian’s Skin

6. Polybius’ Reappearance in Western Europe

7. Did Fabius Pictor Lie?

8. Pagan and Christian Historiography in the Fourth Century A.D.

9. The Lonely Historian Ammianus Marcellinus

10. Popular Religious Beliefs and the Late Roman Historians

11. Tradition and the Classical Historian

12. Time in Ancient Historiography

13. The First Political Commentary on Tacitus

14. Perizonius, Niebuhr and the Character of Early Roman Tradition

15. Vico’s Scienza Nuova : Roman ‘Bestioni’ and Roman ‘Eroi’

16. Mabillon’s Italian Disciples

17. Introduction to the Griechische Kulturgeschichte by Jacob Burckhardt

18. J. G. Droysen between Greeks and Jews

19. The Ancient City of Fustel de Coulanges

20. Reconisdering B. Croce (1866–1952)

21. Historicism Revisited

Notes

Index

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 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 on La 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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.

Foreword

The present volume is a new selection from the essays (partly in Italian, partly in English) collected in Contributo alla storia degli studi classici (e del mondo antico), of which five instalments in seven volumes have so far appeared (I, 1955; II, 1960; III, 1–2, 1966; IV, 1969; V, 1–2, 1975) and a sixth is being prepared for publication (Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome). A previous, entirely different, selection was published under the title Studies in Historiography by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1966. The present selection replaces the one which was due to be published by Penguin Books in 1974. Four of the essays here included (3, 4, 17, 19) were originally written and published in Italian; they were translated for this collection by Mrs Judith Landry. The translations were revised by Dr T. J. Cornell who also helped me in other ways. Each essay must be read with its original date of publication in mind. As a rule, no attempt is made to bring bibliography up to date.

I owe much gratitude to Blackwell for having undertaken the publication of this volume in difficult circumstances, and to my friend Dr O. Murray for having suggested and watched over it. I hope that the first and the last essays speak with sufficient clarity about my presuppositions and interests.

A.M.

All Souls College

Oxford, June 1976

List of Abbreviations

AJPh   American Journal of Philology

An. Bol.   Analecta Bollandiana

BiblH & R   Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance

CAH   The Cambridge Ancient History

CQ   Classical Quarterly

CR   Classical Review

CRAcad. Inscr.   Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres

CSHByz   Corpus scriptorum historiae Byzantinae

DOP   Dumbarton Oaks Papers

GCFI   Giornale critico della filosofia italiana

GCS   Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten Jahrhunderte

Giorn. St. Lett. It.   Giornale storico della letteratura italiana

GRBS   Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies

H & T   History and Theory

JHI   Journal of the History of Ideas

JHS   Journal of Hellenic Studies

JRS   Journal of Roman Studies

JWCI   Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes

ODCC   Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church

PG   J. P. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus, series Graeca

PL   J. P. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus, series Latina

PW or RE   Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft

RAL   Rendiconti della classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche dell’ Accademia dei Lincei

RPh   Revue de Philologie

RSI   Rivista Storica Italiana

TAPhA   Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association

I

A Piedmontese View of the History of Ideas

*

WHEN I arrived in Oxford in 1939, it was enough to mention the word ‘idea’ to be given the address of the Warburg Institute. R. G. Collingwood, who still lectured on the history of the idea of history, was ill, isolated and discredited, and soon disappeared. Who had persuaded the English that the history of ideas was an unBritish activity? I suspect it was Lewis Namier. In the 1920s, when I was a student in the University of Turin, the history of ideas was the speciality for which English historians were most famous. This reputation went back to the days of Grote and Lecky, Freeman, Bryce and Flint. There were few books in other languages which could compete with Leslie Stephen’s History of English Thought in the 18th Century or with J. B. Bury’s A History of Freedom of Thought and The Idea of Progress. Lord Acton managed to become famous for a book on liberty he did not write. For medieval political ideas one went of course to the work in progress by the brothers Carlyle, and we were told (perhaps not quite fairly) that no Italian study of a medieval jurist could compare with C. N. S. Woolf’s Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1913). The most significant history of an idea published in Italy in the 1920s, G. de Ruggiero’s Storia del Liberalismo Europeo, was in method and point of view a derivation from English models. De Ruggiero was a close friend of Collingwood who translated his book into English. In the specific field of history of philosophy there was little to match Bosanquet’s History of Aesthetic (as Croce reluctantly admitted) or Burnet’s much-admired Early Greek Philosophy.

The situation was clearly one of change. To remain in the provincial but very alert society of the University of Turin, a distinction was becoming apparent between the Law Faculty and the Faculty of Arts. There were historians, indeed eminent historians on both sides. Though the study of law in Italy had a strong Germanic imprint, students of political and social ideas in the Law Faculty were in sympathy with the English tradition and with whatever American research on the history of ideas happened to be known (not very much at that time). The English translation of the book on religious liberty by Francesco Ruffini had shown that this interest was reciprocated. The masters of the Law Faculty set their pupils and, literally, their sons to work on themes of English origin and sent them to English-speaking universities. The result constitutes a little-noticed chapter of Piedmontese-Anglo-Saxon cultural relations: Mario Einaudi, the son of the future President of the Italian Republic, studied Burke and is now a professor at Cornell (and Director of the Luigi Einaudi Foundation in Turin); Edoardo Ruffini, the son of Francesco, studied parliamentary ideas of the Middle Ages and became the first cultural attaché in England after the Second World War; Alessandro Passerin d’Entrèves studied Hooker and medieval political thought under C. C. J. Webb and A. J. Carlyle in Oxford and later returned there as the Serena Professor of Italian Studies.

In the Faculty of Arts, by contrast, German Ideengeschichte was held in higher esteem than the English history of ideas. Federico Chabod, who had written his dissertation on Machiavelli in Turin (1924), went to Berlin to study under Meinecke; he returned to become the most influential Italian historian of his generation. Meinecke, who was recommended by Croce (the sympathy was rather one-sided), represented in many ways the most obvious alternative to the English approach to ideas. Though generalizations are precluded by the very list of names I have given above, the English approach tended to take the form of the history of the rise (and eventually of the fall) of a single specific idea, comprising its theoretical formulations and its embodiment in institutions. Even Bury’s Idea of Progress, perhaps the most purely intellectual of all these books, deals specifically with the adoption of the idea of progress in historiography and sees connections with the social environment. Meinecke was a historian of conflicting principles: national state versus cosmopolitanism, raison d’état against natural rights. More and more he liked to leave these conflicts unresolved and to create an atmosphere of pathos round his books with which English prose could hardly compete.

Meinecke was only one of the facets of German Ideengeschichte as it emerged before Italian eyes in the 1920s. Histories of political myths, of words charged with ideological content, of class-conditioned social ideas, multiplied both from the right and the left. Among those which made an impression on me at the time of their appearance I remember F. Schneider, Rom und Romgedanke im Mittelalter (1926); P. E. Schramm, Kaiser, Rom und Renovatio (1929); A. Dempf, Sacrum Imperium (1929); F. Gundolf, Caesar, Geschichte seines Ruhms (1925); B. Groethuysen, Die Entstehung der bürgerlichen Welt- und Lebensanschauung (1927).

It is no accident that books on the Middle Ages played such a large part even in the formation of an ancient historian like myself. These were the ‘model’ books about which one spoke. K. Burdach’s Vom Mittelalter zur Reformation (1891 ff.) seemed to be one of the supreme achievements of modern historiography. Discussions imported from Germany on the essence and chronological limits of certain periods (Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment) bordered on casuistry. Chabod wasted too much time on them. But perhaps they contributed indirectly to the notion of intellectual climate and thus rejoined the Burckhardtian Kulturgeschichte.

The publications of the Warburg Institute of Hamburg were of course noticed for their approach to iconography and, generally speaking, as a rallying-point for the new German currents of thought. The variety of the contributions, which included big names such as R. Reitzenstein and E. Norden among the classicists, made it difficult to separate those works by Warburg himself, F. Saxl, Edgar Wind, Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Cassirer, which represented the really original nucleus of the Institute. The wide influence of the Warburg Institute in Italy as well as in England developed only after the Second World War.

In the study of Greece and Rome, Germany made fashionable the history of ‘political’ words. The model analysis of the word fides by E. Fraenkel (1916) is often given as the starting-point of the new vogue. But this type of research prospered among scholars who were far more interested in and committed to political ideology than Fraenkel ever was. R. Heinze in his postwar Von den Ursachen der Grösse Roms (1921) set the tone for the new inquiry which affected Rome more than Greece and progressed from one Roman virtue to the next until it ended in implicit or explicit Nazi-Fascist propaganda. Even the study of theological words–incorporated in the monumental Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament (1933 ff.)–was marred by racial prejudice, not to mention the methodological inadequacies which J. Barr was later to expose so convincingly (1961). The total result was, however, a new archive of ancient ideas as expressed in the Greek and Roman vocabulary which has since made much difference to research into the Classics and early Christianity.

It is difficult now to account for the poor circulation of French histoire des idées in Italy during the period between 1920 and 1939. Neither Croce, who disliked both French rationalism and French irrationalism, nor Mussolini, who feared French democracy, can really be made responsible for this. All the research into représentations collectives which characterized the Durkheim–Mauss–Halbwachs tradition was (so far as I know) practically ignored in Italy. Marc Bloch was noticed in the 1930s as a pioneer student of agricultural systems, but not as the author of Les Rois thaumaturges.

This ignorance of course had its limits. A masterpiece such as Il Giansenismo in Italia by A. C. Jemolo (1928) would hardly have been possible without the French analysis of Port-Royal. Some years later Paul Hazard’s La Crise de la conscience européenne (1935) made an impression and Henri Bremond’s Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France (1916 ff.), though more slowly, also left its mark. More significantly, A. Omodeo, who helped Croce in editing the Critica, rediscovered the French liberal historians of civilization from Guizot to Tocqueville in his effort to escape from German historicism and Italian attualismo.

But Italian historians of ideas remained indebted to the German tradition of Ideengeschichte and had to settle their accounts with it. The little-known Storia d’una mente by E. Grasselli (1932) tells in autobiographical terms how deep this commitment went. La lotta contro la ragione by Carlo Antoni (1942) and some of the earliest essays by Delio Cantimori (now in Studi di storia) are the first signs of the disentanglement which meant the end of the Crocean era.

It seems to me that the price English historians paid in the 1930s for remaining independent of German Ideengeschichte was to jettison their own tradition of the history of ideas. The main exception was at Cambridge, where Herbert Butterfield manfully battled against Namier and where E. M. Butler produced that singular criticism of German humanism, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (1935). But the English mood of the late 1930s was expressed–at least for the ancient historians–by Ronald Syme when, in his Roman Revolution, he treated the Roman political vocabulary as ‘political catchwords’, ‘a subject of partisan interpretation, of debate and of fraud’.

It is not for me to recount the story of the increasing impact of refugee German thought on English intellectual life and its convergence with old and new native trends during the 1940s and 1950s. Today, after fifty years, English and Italian historians find themselves again at the same level–which is one of lively interest in the history of ideas in both countries. There is nothing very surprising in this. The popularity of the history of ideas is a universal phenomenon. If there is something more specifically common both to Italian and English historians, it is that they are increasingly dependent on France and on the United States for their inspiration and their methods.

Again there are exceptions. Historians of ideas like E. H. Gombrich and Isaiah Berlin have no peers elsewhere in their command of the theoretical presuppositions of their work. On the other hand there is in Italy at least one historian of ideas, Franco Venturi, who, perhaps because of his French formation, dominates his own chosen fields of work–the European Enlightenment and Russian nineteenth-century reform movements–without any concession to fashionable currents. But in neither country is there anything that can be compared with the Annales or with structuralism as major movements of historical research. Nor is there anything like the less sophisticated but massive and effective American exploration of ideas from sociological points of view. Young historians both in England and in Italy are more and more thinking in terms of the circulation of ideas, cultures of the lower classes, collective representations, utopias and modern myths, acculturation, position of intellectuals and of holy men, structure of scientific revolutions, and so on–all of which seem to have either a French father or an American mother (possibly with a German grandfather).

In this enthusiasm for ideas, the most difficult thing is to know what one still means by an idea; attitudes, propaganda, dreams, subconscious needs, symbolic figures are included. The traditional oppositions between ideas and institutions, between ideology and society or, quite simply, between beliefs and facts have become far too crude to define the new levels of exploration. Even the dualism between consciousness and society ably exploited by H. Stuart Hughes (1959) is inadequate. This is certainly the point which the astute Michel Foucault has grasped in trying to put across his new ‘archéologie du savoir’ to replace ‘l’histoire des idées’ (‘affranchir l’histoire de la pensée de sa sujétion transcendentale’).

It explains too why pure history of ideas, in the form elaborated in America by A. O. Lovejoy’s group with its organ, the Journal of History of Ideas (1940), seems to be unable to indicate a clear direction in the present situation. With Lovejoy–notwithstanding the extraordinary merits of the research he did or inspired–one always had the feeling of a quasi-Platonic world where ideas could be counted. The Oxford professor D. S. Margoliouth had the reputation of believing in the existence of thirty Indo-European Ur-jokes from which all the others derived. Lovejoy did not believe that the number of Ur-ideas was much greater.

It was already very difficult to decide whether one could separate the ideological from the institutional element in the old notions of liberty, peace, federalism, chivalry, and so on. When we come to the collective representations of belief in witches, to the parson’s wife or to the English nanny–not to mention the two classical examples of French origin: the idea of childhood and the idea of madness–the distinction becomes meaningless. It is indeed the impossibility of regulating a priori the traditional conflict of precedence between institutions and principles or between society and ideology that gives sense and zest to the new confusion. The period of experiment is bound to last for some time, and so is the confusion of languages. We hear less and less of orthodox Marxism; notice the transition from Marxism to structuralism of the most original and internationally influential French student of Greek thought, J.-P. Vernant. Russian Marxists do not help either, at least in the field of classical studies. The latest article on Freedom in Rome by E. M. Štaerman in the Vestnik Drevnej Istorii 1972, No. 2, is a warning.

I hope it is not simply an ancient historian’s prejudice to say that the new exploration in the field of ideas seems up to now more rewarding when remote cultures are its primary object. The mere task of finding linguistic and conceptual equivalents to our ways of thinking in other cultures– or alternatively the necessity of acknowledging that these equivalences do not exist–throws light on ourselves and on the others. I recollect the pleasure of recognizing that the ancient Egyptian attitudes to speech and silence could be a thread to guide me in my inexperience through the various stages of Egyptian civilization. And I have no doubt that the appearance of the notion of heresy in early Christianity and late Judaism means a caesura in patterns of thought and social organization.

But when we come to our own society we need to know what we can believe rather than what is believed. There is an inescapable question of truth, if the historian is to be a responsible actor in his own society and not a manipulator of opinions. This need, incidentally, seems to be taken too lightly by the various sociologies of knowledge, including the novel one of Foucault. The resulting paradox I may perhaps put in personal terms. When I became a professor at University College London more than twenty years ago, it did not take me long to realize that the best historians of ideas in the place were two practising scientists, J. Z. Young and Peter Medawar. But the fact that they talked about sciences I did not know not only paralysed me in regard to them (which is easy to understand), but also paralysed them in regard to me or anybody else in my position. That is, they lacked the potential public necessary for developing their scientific ideas in an historical context.

To take another less personal example, it is perhaps characteristic of our time that we have so many discussions of the religious ideas of underdeveloped countries, but so little analysis of our own religious beliefs with the simple purpose of ascertaining their credibility. During recent years in Italy more scholarly books have appeared on heretical sects than on modern Catholicism. The men who would be able to illuminate the contemporary scene by talking about truth in its historical context have not yet found their public. Therefore we are left with the English nanny and the cargo cult for the expression of our nostalgias and dissatisfactions.

* This essay was published in the Times Literary Supplement, 24 November 1972 with the title ‘National Versions of an International Phenomenon’.

2

The Fault of the Greeks

*

1

CONFUCIUS, Buddha, Zoroaster, Isaiah, Heraclitus– or Aeschylus.

The list would probably have puzzled my grandfather and his generation. It makes sense now; it symbolizes the change in our historical perspective. We can face, more or less from the same angle, cultures which seemed wide apart; and we can find something in common among them. On a synchronous line the names stand for a more ‘spiritual’ life, for a better order, for a reinterpretation of the relation between gods and men, for a criticism of the traditional values in each respective society. These men did not know one another. No obvious external link connects the emergence of such commanding figures in different cultures between, say, the eighth and the fifth centuries B.C. Yet we feel that we have now discovered a common denominator that makes all of them–to repeat the fashionable expression–‘relevant to us’. All of them were men who by proclaiming and expounding their personal religious beliefs gave a new meaning to human life and brought about profound changes in the societies to which they belonged.

We are thus led to ask the historical questions that will interpret this relevance more precisely and consequently make it more perceptible. What conditioned the appearance of so many ‘wise men’ in so many different cultures within relatively narrow chronological limits? Why indeed did the cultural changes have to be brought about by ‘wise men’? What is the relation between the religious stance they took and the social message they conveyed? The very nature of the questions that come spontaneously to our minds indicates that the essence of our new position towards these men is that instead of seeing each of them as the codifier of a new religion we now see all of them as reformers of the existing order. Our instinctive sympathy is for the human beings who by meditation and spiritual search freed themselves from the conventions within which they were born and reoriented the activities of other men. Though questions of ‘truth’ can never be avoided entirely, we feel that it is almost indecent (and in any case too embarrassing) to ask whether what Zoroaster or Isaiah or Aeschylus had to say was true or false. Each of them spoke his own individual language. It takes a very great effort to translate it into our own language. But if we succeed, we shall have established a bridge to minds worth knowing. These men can explain themselves directly to us by their own words; and we do our part by commenting on their words. Given the necessary knowledge of languages and texts, we may presume that at some future date we shall understand the Gathas in the same way in which we now understand the Eumenides.

Conversely we are put off by those civilizations that at the same period and apparently under the same technological conditions failed to produce questioners and reformers. Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia rightly or wrongly appear spiritually stagnant and almost reactionary in the first millennium. Not without repressing some impatience we wonder why they went on accepting the traditional terms of the relationship between the society of men and the society of gods. Many years ago Henri Frankfort gave expression to the impatience we now feel: ‘The Hebrew prophets rejected both the Egyptian and the Babylonian views. They insisted on the uniqueness and transcendence of God. For them all values were ultimately attributes of God; man and nature were devaluated, and every attempt to establish a harmony with nature was a futile dissipation of effort.’ ¹ It was, however, easier for Frankfort than it is for us to utter these words in good conscience. For he was simply reiterating the Prophets’ repudiation of the idols of silver and of gold. Like the first Isaiah, he was concerned with Egypt and Assyria, but he never had to consider, with the second Isaiah, the rôle of Cyrus, the anointed of God. We have to add the Indians and the Chinese. We have certainly given ourselves the pleasure of feeling that if only we knew the languages we could talk to Buddha and to Confucius and to the other wise men of the archaic age. But this mental position remains unproblematic only until we come to ask ourselves what we really expect from it. The experience of Louis Dumont who went to India to recover the full meaning of homo hierarchicus in history–and gave a new dimension to our conception of individualism–may be exemplary, but is by no means common. The case of Henri Frankfort is indicative of the far more common situation, in which even the most original and profound research remains conditioned by our own civilization. I am saying this not to belittle the results, but on the contrary to point out the strength of our tradition. There is an old triangular culture–composed of Jewish, Greek and Latin intellectual products–which has an immediate impact on most of us that is of a quite different order from our professional or dilettante pleasure in the amenities of more distant civilizations. This collegium trilingue, in academic terms, still dominates our minds. Latin culture, one of the constituent members of the collegium trilingue, is conspicuously absent from the set of ‘wise-men civilizations’ that were our starting point. If we have to add something to the essential ingredients of our civilization as a result of medieval developments, it must come from Celts, Germans and Arabs–none of whom belong to the privileged list of the original ‘wise-men civilizations’. The Arabs in fact add to our difficulties. Being themselves the carriers of a prophetic civilization–if ever there was one–and therefore uniquely close to Jews and Christians, they were a menace to the Christians, if not to the Jews. Serious contacts between Christian and Arab thought mainly occurred in those areas in which Arab thinkers worked with Greek concepts. We have indeed managed to forget our precise debt to Celts, Germans and Arabs, so much so that neither Old Irish nor Mittelhochdeutsch nor Arabic has ever become a regular requirement in our educational establishments. But we are never allowed to forget our debt to Greece, Latium and Judea. There are powerful pressure groups (whether classicists, theologians or rabbis) to keep us, quite properly, ashamed of our failure to read the right texts in the right language.

In so far as our inheritance goes back to antiquity, it is essentially Greek–Latin–Jewish because it is essentially Hellenistic. The notion of Hellenistic civilization defines both the time (323–30 B.C.) and the space (Mediterranean zone) in which these three cultures converged and began to react on one another. It follows that it is not superfluous to investigate the circumstances in which a new special relationship was established between Jews, Greeks and Romans in the Hellenistic age. We have many important investigations of the re-introduction of Persian, Indian and Chinese civilizations into the mental horizon of the Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the inverse inquiry about the exclusion of Persians and Indians, not to speak of Egyptians and Babylonians, from active participation in the civilization of Europe does not seem to have made much progress. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to such an investigation. It is hoped that by implication it can also throw some light on the nature of the ‘wise-men phenomenon’ that we found in the earlier part of the first millennium B.C. and on the relative isolation in which each ‘wise-men civilization’ operated.

II

Here again we must start from a paradox. Greek was the language that dominated the Hellenistic world after Alexander the Great. Greek was the language Jews and Latins had to acquire in order to get out of their isolation and to be acceptable in the higher society of the Hellenistic kingdoms. But there was no corresponding effort by the Greeks to understand and absorb Latin or Jewish culture. The foundation of the collegium trilingue is primarily a Roman and Jewish affair. No doubt Greeks had the training for geographical and historical discovery that enabled them to notice the peculiarities of Latins and Jews at the beginning of the Hellenistic Age. Before Alexander there is no sign that they knew about the Jews, and their knowledge of the Romans was confined to a few legends and even fewer historical data. About 300 B.C. Hecataeus of Abdera and Theophrastus made serious attempts to investigate the religion of the Jews. About 280–270 B.C. the Roman victory over Pyrrhus impressed the Greeks and induced Timaeus–a Sicilian exile who lived in Athens–to write extensively on the history and institutions of the Latins. But when their surprise was exhausted, the Greeks did not go further. There was no detailed study of Jewish or of Roman history by Greek scholars in the third century B.C.

When the Romans effectively destroyed the power of Carthage at the end of the third century B.C. and became the greatest power of the Western Mediterranean no independent Greek historian, so far as we know, thought it necessary to analyse their victory. What was added to Timaeus was produced either by Greek historians in the service of Hannibal or by Roman historians who had mastered the Greek language and presented the Roman case to a Hellenistic audience. As for the Jews, we know (or suspect) that there were some Hellenized Egyptians who concocted a hostile version of the Exodus–a reflection of the friction between Jews and Egyptians in Alexandria, where the Jewish community was rapidly expanding. But we do not know of any ethnographical research to add to that of Hecataeus and Theophrastus. Hermippus of Smyrna, Agatharchides of Cnidus and Menander of Ephesus, who lived in the second century, alluded to the Jews in various contexts, but did not deliberately inquire into their history. The works written in Greek about Jews and Romans between 260 and 160 B.C. seem to have been mainly polemical: the most informative was by Fabius Pictor, a Roman aristocrat (about 215–200 B.C.).

The Greeks remained proudly monolingual as, with rare exceptions, they had been for centuries. It was not for