Arnaldo Momigliano and the History of Historiography

Abstract

his humorous but at the same time quite serious after-dinner speech at Brandeis University, Arnaldo Momigliano looked back on his own intellectual development: In a sense, in my scholarly life I have done nothing else but to try to understand what I owe both to the Jewish house in which I was brought up and to the Christian-Roman-Celtic village in which I was born.' a certain sense, this sentence contains the key not only to Momigliano's intellectual impetus, but also to the core of his scholarly work: the studies in the field of the history of historiography. Unlike so many present-day historians, Momigliano did not proceed according to the absolute dogmas of a new program of historical scholarship, method, or perspective. Rather, his scholarly work grew organically from the connection between personal initiatives and existential forces. The Jewish, Italian, and of course the continental traditions of his discipline he assimilated first; from the period of his exile in England, those of the English and American worlds followed with no less intensity. Through his personal appropriation and reflection, they were transformed into modes of critical evaluation, mediation, and contemporaneity with an unparalleled breadth of range -both in time and in space. It is, therefore, significant that for Momigliano the dimension of the history of historiography was from the beginning not an isolated concern, but rather one closely connected with concrete historical problems, with the investigation of individual sources or specific phenomena in political and intellectual history. The originality of this approach, its priorities and its results, becomes evident if we look at the milestones in Momigliano's researches and activities. The historiographical elements of the tradition are already significant in the 1934 monograph on Philip of Macedonia.2 The book opens with an acknowledg-