Arnaldo Momigliano
and the human sources of history
by Donald Kagan

Arnaldo Momigliano, who died in 1987, was the world’s leading student of the writing of history in the ancient world. He examined the historiography not only of the Greeks and Romans but also of the Hebrews, Persians, Babylonians, and Assyrians, among others, and the breadth of his curiosity and learning was unmatched. Born and educated in Italy, he was appointed to the chair of Roman history at the University of Turin at the age of twenty-eight, but as a Jew he was removed from the position by Mussolini’s racial laws. Most of his subsequent work was done in England, first at Oxford and then at University College, London, where he held the professorship of ancient history from 1951 to 1975. From then until his death he was a regular visiting professor at the University of Chicago. He wrote several books: biographies of Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, and of the Roman Emperor Claudius, and works on The Development of Greek Biography, on Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization, and on The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the First Century. Each is written with grace and is full of learning, careful scholarship, and wisdom, but each is a slim volume that tends to read more like a collection of separate essays about a common subject than like a fully integrated account that sets a problem and proposes a solution. In fact, Momigliano’s favorite form was the learned essay, and he fortunately left us eleven volumes of them in his Contributi alla Storia degli Studi Classici e del Mondo Antico.

The title of his last, posthumous, volume, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, could raise the reader’s hopes for a final summation of a great life’s work. [1] But such was not Momigliano’s genre. Like several of his earlier books, this is the publication of a series of lectures, namely the Sather Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley. They were given in 1962, revised over the next fifteen years, but even then withheld for an annotation that was never completed. The publication is without notes from the text as the author left it. Revision of so brief a book cannot have taken very long nor should the search for notes have been arduous. Why should Momigliano have delayed publication for almost three decades and until his death? Was he dissatisfied? Did he hope to return to the full treatment of the subject for which this volume seems a bare sketch?

We shall probably never know, but there is much to appreciate in what we have. There are essays on the influence of Persian historiography on that of the Greeks and the Hebrews, on the historical tradition of Herodotus and Thucydides, on the rise of antiquarian research, on the Roman historian Fabius Pictor as the founder of national history, on Tacitus and the tradition he established, and on the origins of ecclesiastical history. The first essay compares Persian historiography, chiefly known to us from inscriptions, with the character of the history we find in the Old Testament and in the Greek historians. Both Jews and Greeks had contact and were familiar with the Persians and their society, but their historiography represents a reaction against its tradition of royal chronicles:

Both the Jewish and the Greek type of political history broke with the Persian or more generally Oriental type of history centred on the performances of individual kings or heroes: it expressed the life of societies deliberating and acting with clear purposes under the leadership of far-seeing men.

The Hebrew Bible tells a single continuous story from the beginning of the world. Although its writers were concerned with the truth, it was God’s Truth; each generation has the responsibility of preserving “a truthful record of the events in which God showed his presence,” and passing it on to the next was a religious duty. For the Jews reliability depended on the truthfulness of the transmitters and on the ultimate truth of God. There came to be only one tradition; the biblical historians took no note of different versions of the same event. Yet that single account was sacred and vital for the Hebrews. “To the biblical Hebrew, history and religion were one.” Once the canon of biblical history was set, moreover, the Jews largely lost interest in the study of history. They focused their attention on the Torah, the eternal law. “History had nothing to explain and little to reveal to the man who meditated the law day and night.”

History among the Greeks was very different. For them, the sources of history were human, not divine, and they were many and varied. To discover historical truth it was necessary to compare them and decide among them by means of painstaking research (historia) and unaided human reason. Historians wrote of limited, although sometimes grand, topics, treated in such a way as to illuminate the causes and consequences of events. History was meant to explain, “to provide an example, constitute a warning, point to likely developments in human affairs.”

Momigliano makes it clear that the Greek tradition is the inspiring source of modern historical writing. At its heart is the critical attitude that distinguished “between facts and fancies.” This is the most important contribution, and “no historiography earlier than the Greek or independent of it developed critical methods, and we have inherited the Greek methods.” For Momigliano, as for most historians, this was the essential and necessary starting point for anything properly called the writing of history. In our own day we see the very distinction between “facts and fancies” undermined by literary critics and even professional historians. This kind of skepticism, of course, is nothing new. As part of the political and religious controversies of the seventeenth century skeptical critics called Pyrrhonists (named after Pyrrho, the ancient Greek father of skepticism) declared all historical writings to be mere partisan tracts. Like their modern descendants, they thereby freed themselves to treat the past in any way they liked, or to ignore it altogether. Momigliano saw the Pyrrhonist movement as having “an adverse effect” on historical studies. For all his extraordinary breadth and tolerance for new approaches, he would also have judged the modern Pyrrhonists as terribly retrogressive.

Momigliano attributes the invention of Greek, and therefore of modern, historiography to the sixth century B.C. and emphasizes two developments. At some point between Hesiod (c. 700 B.C.) and Hecataeus of Miletus (c. 500 B.C.) “a revolution happened.” The political part of that revolution was the discovery of law and its importance in distinguishing between different societies. Unlike the Hebrew law, which was “beyond history,” Greek law, in spite of early claims for its divine origin, emerged from human history.

It is no chance that historiography developed in the fifth century in the full maturity of Ionian and Attic democracy. The victory of democracy was the victory for social mobility and reform: it was the victory for free and rational choice. It sharpened the interest in political theories and constitutional changes, it invited comparison between Greek and non-Greek institutions and between the various types of Greek institutions.

It is not Hecataeus, however, whom we call the father of history but Herodotus, and Momigliano explains why. Hecataeus appears to have confined himself to the comparison and reasoned criticism of what was thought to be known. In his effort to preserve valuable memories of great deeds of the past, Herodotus undertook inquiries, even traveling to foreign countries to gather new evidence. “The task of preserving traditions implied the aim of discovering new facts. Both together entailed a new methodical approach in which the reliability of evidence mattered more than rational evaluation of probabilities.” For all that, Herodotus did not enjoy a reputation for accuracy, truthfulness, and objectivity among ancient writers. They pointed to factual inaccuracies, many called him a liar outright, and Plutarch wrote an essay on his “malignity,” charging him with a lack of patriotism and a prejudice in favor of Athens.

The “Father of History,” in fact, with his meandering style full of discursive side trips into the customs and habits of various peoples, his serious consideration of the causal role of the gods in human affairs, did not become the model for what was thought to be the best historical writing in the ancient world. Polybius and the Roman’s Sallust, Livy, Tacitus, and Ammianus Marcellinus were the great historical writers of antiquity, and they wrote chiefly about their own times, their own nations, and, especially, about war and politics. [2] As a model Herodotus was eclipsed. The responsibility for this Momigliano places squarely on the shoulders of Thucydides, who “put himself between Herodotus and his readers.” Without directly naming the historian of the Persian Wars, Thucydides corrected some of his factual errors, dismissing him as one who wrote “a prize-essay to be heard for the moment,” compared to his own more serious effort, which was meant to be a “possession for all time.” Where Herodotus delved deeply into the distant past, painted on a broad canvas the picture of many nations and peoples, and was interested in their religious, social, and cultural practices, Thucydides focused his powerful critical eye on the present and on the recent past; he fixed his gaze intently on the Greeks, and especially on his own Athenians; finally he concentrated the reader’s attention on the war, its diplomacy and its politics. For him, as Lord Acton put it, “History is past politics.”

Polybius, whose history of Rome’s conquest of the Mediterranean world followed the Thucydidean model, and Tacitus, who focused on politics in Rome, were much esteemed during the Renaissance and the early modern period of European history. The writers of the eighteenth century, with their interest in the manners and civilization of earlier periods and of the entire world, rediscovered Herodotus, although as philosophical historians themselves they also admired Thucydides’ search for a useful history that sought the causes of events in the lasting elements in human nature and the human condition. The nineteenth century, however, especially in Germany, saw the triumph of political history and the eclipse of Herodotus by Thucydides.

Momigliano, with his broad and generous understanding of historiography, his sense that it must combine the story of politics, diplomacy, and war with that of society, culture, and civilization, deplored that development and approved the change that had come along in his own time. Writing in the early 1960s he said with satisfaction that “the need for a comprehensive, extrapolitical history is admitted by almost everyone,” and, in the same spirit, that “we must not concede to Thucydides that he really replaced Herodotus.” Thirty years later the world of historical writing has changed so much as to make these remarks seem dated. In much of the American academy “extrapolitical history” has all but pushed political history out the door. The most famous and influential of the social historians, Fernand Braudel, dismissed the elements of politics, diplomacy, and war as mere événements, transient and trivial in comparison with the greater and longer-lasting issues posed by geography, demography, and social and economic developments over long periods of time. In his best known work, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, the political decisions, events, and developments are of small moment compared to the inanimate and impersonal forces that shape societies over the very long run.

Now it is clear enough that such forces exist and that they have considerable impact on politics, war, and diplomacy, chiefly in establishing the limits of what is possible. Within those limits, however, individuals and groups of human beings make decisions that are of vital importance, and those decisions that are military, diplomatic, and political, moreover, influence ever larger groups of people in ways that can affect the very existence of peoples, nations, and the human race. It is important that we understand the underlying conditions and forces, geographic, demographic, anthropological, psychological, etc., that help to frame and influence the choices that people make in these decisive realms. But if it is to be helpful, this knowledge must be connected with the specific facts, decisions, and events made in the public arena, that is, in the world of politics. “Extrapolitical” historians have not made those connections, preferring to leave unasked the great political questions that have always been the spark that ignited interest in history altogether.

It is important to remember that Herodotus, for all his wanderings into geographical, sociological, and anthropological descriptions and analyses, tried to connect them, however remotely, with his major purposes as set forth at the beginning of his history of the Persian Wars:

This is the result of the inquiry (historia) of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, published so that time may not erase the memory of past events from the mind of mankind, so that the great and marvelous deeds of the Greeks and the barbarians should not be without fame, and especially to explain why they fought against one another.

Notes
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1. The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, by Arnaldo Momigliano, with a foreword by Riccardo Di Donato (University of California Press, 1991). Go back to the text.
2. Livy was exceptional in writing of a more distant past. Polybius, since his subject was the rise of the Roman Empire, wrote much about the Romans, and, necessarily, a bit about their enemies. His main subjects, however, were the Romans and the Greeks. Go back to the text.