The weakness most evident in the work of Syme, Rostovtzeff, and Finley is in the history of ideas. This is most striking in Syme’s work as, unlike the others, he wrote so often about the practice of history, but only in relation to the study of politics. Less convincing, from a literary point of view, were his comments on Augustan poetry in The Roman Revolution, or his studies of Ovid’s exile poetry. While History in Ovid remains a vital study of the circumstances under which Ovid wrote, Syme demonstrated no interest in the actual interpretation of his poetry (Syme 1978). So too, while he often offered stimulating remarks on other writers of the imperial period, these were largely restricted to analysis of the circumstances of composition and literary influences. The history of ideas in antiquity was much more the province of Peter Brunt, and, above all, of yet another displaced person, Arnaldo Momigliano. Perhaps the greatest strength of Momigliano’s work was his ability to place ancient thought in the context of the overall history of ideas. In so doing he often directed attention away from the dominant classes, and towards those excluded from the discourse of power.
An early dalliance with fascism ended when Momigliano’s Jewish ancestry became known to the authorities (Bowersock 1991: 35). He was fired from his position at the University of Turin and sought refuge at Oxford in 1939, where he joined a remarkable community of exiles, and received assistance from, among others, Hugh Last, who appears to have seen Momigliano as a sort of antidote to Syme (Bowersock 1993: 548; Murray 1991: 52). Momigliano more than lived up to Last’s hopes, even though, for several decades, his seemed a lone voice crying in the wilderness. In the end, however, his efforts shaped a new area of inquiry for Roman historians. Momigliano’s interest in ideas for their own sake led him away from ‘‘mainstream’’ classics into the history of religion, especially Judaism and Christianity. He made the study of Christianity a subject that historians of antiquity could no longer ignore, and his influence sparked interest on the part of a new generation of historians in what had previously been labeled the later Roman Empire. Although the study of ‘‘Late Antiquity,’’ as the history of Rome after Constantine came to be called under the influence of Momigliano and Peter Brown, lies outside the scope of this volume, it is impossible to think about the subject as it now stands without considering the impact of this development on Roman history as a whole. The term itself derives from the realm of art historians, and that points perhaps to one of the most important aspects of its study - for in the hands of late-antique historians, the study of the visual assumed a vastly greater place in mainstream studies of social consciousness than it had in the past (Rives, this volume). This is not to say that some historians, especially Rostovtzeff, did not have an eye for ancient art, or a sense for the importance of iconography - Stephan Weinstock’s extraordinary Divus Julius is a case in point - but it tended to be relegated to the fringes, and Weinstock himself was a refugee from Nazi Germany (Weinstock 1971). A sense of how radical a step this was may be gleaned from the pages of Jones’ The Later Roman Empire, a two-volume work with no plates and no index entries for ‘‘art’’ or ‘‘iconography’’ (A. H. M. Jones 1964). Likewise Syme, although he did publish an article on the identification of young men on the Ara Pads, had only a minimal interest in the subject (Syme 1984). For scholars of their generation the study of the physical remains of antiquity was essentially a study of topography, as may be seen in Jones’ Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces, or Syme’s Anatolica, a work that he never finished (A. H. M. Jones 1971; Syme 1995). A consequence of this disinterest was that the study of iconography by English-speaking historians of the high empire lagged far behind that of the late empire, where it had come to the fore under the influence of Peter Brown, until Paul Zanker’s splendid Augustus und die Macht der Bilder, appeared as The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus in 1988.
The interdisciplinary approach to late antiquity that was pioneered by Momigliano and Brown resonated with the work that Finley inspired in Cambridge. Although
Finley’s own essays on Roman history were largely concerned with slavery and the economy (barring a very early piece on Roman law that he wrote while he was a student at Columbia), his broad interests inspired students to look beyond the ancient world. Like Momigliano, he invited scholars to think of ancient history as participating in a dialogue with other forms of pre-modern historiography. In yet another instance of the importance of disciplinary cross-fertilization for the development of Roman imperial history, the historiography of those whose voices have only indistinctly survived took on new immediacy for the study of the imperial period thanks largely to work in Greek and late antique history. Another crucial aspect of Momigliano's legacy was simply the fact that historians could no longer ignore either the history of religion, or of non-Roman peoples living in the empire. They had especially to become aware of the vast bulk of literature that survived within the Jewish tradition. In this volume Yaron Eliav offers a splendid analysis of the ways in which the historiography of Judaism in the Roman world developed and how the multiple Judaisms that flourished under Roman rule were shaped through dialogue with the imperial power. We have now to be aware of autonomous developments within the Jewish community, and of developments that were shaped by contact with classical culture. The same issue affects the history of Christianity. In the pages that follow we may see approaches to Christianity that stress its sociological and intellectual dimensions, offered by Paula Fredriksen and Mark Edwards. Even more strikingly, as Sara Ahbel-Rappe shows in her chapter on philosophy, the willingness to take religion seriously as a feature of the intellectual and social history of the empire enables us to understand how philosophy took on radically new dimensions in the course of the second and third centuries ce. Momigliano’s influence may likewise be felt in the way that scholars might now want to examine historiography and fiction, two topics that are far less distinct than generic distinctions would make them seen. As Rowland Smith reminds us, historiography is not simply the product of books, but of social consciousness formed by an intellectual and physical environment. As Maud Gleason and Joseph Rife remind us, Roman hegemony could actually foster a sense of Greekness, for instance, as being something to be proud of. Cultural traditions could help shape the imaginative world of the Greek novel, whose dichotomies mirror those of the social world in which they were composed every bit as much as do the attitudes that Smith describes.
World History
